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TV review
'Resistance: They Fought Back' sheds lights on the Jewish opposition to Nazi persecution
Paula Apsell knows the importance of capturing the stories of the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
The director worked for years on the documentary, “Resistance: They Fought Back.” The documentary will air at 9 p.m. Monday, Jan. 27, on New Mexico PBS, channel 5.1. It will also be available to stream on the PBS app.
Apsell’s documentary will be broadcast to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, according to PBS.
The United Nations General Assembly designated Jan. 27 — the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau — as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005.
The first observance was held in 2006 and is a time to remember the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the millions of other victims of Nazi persecution.
Told by survivors, their children and expert witnesses from the United States, Israel and Europe, the documentary is a revelation based on extensive research of how the Jews of Europe fought back against the Nazis.
The documentary uncovers evidence of nonviolent methods that served as crucial tools of resistance and evolved into Jewish armed revolts in ghettos, forests and death camps, even as the odds of success were vanishingly small, Apsell said.
“Today, almost 80 years after the Holocaust, this story remains largely unknown, with many believing that Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter,” Apsell said. “But this is where the real story begins. Jews did not go as sheep to the slaughter. They fought back.”
Apsell and her crew filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel and the U.S.
She says the film provides a much-needed corrective to the myth of Jewish passivity.
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“I was on location in Lithuania when an archaeological team led by the late professor Richard Freund discovered a tunnel in the Ponary killing site in Lithuania, where Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered 100,000 people, including 70,000 Jews,” she said. “The Germans, fearing their war crimes would be known, brought in 80 remaining Jews to exhume and burn the bodies of those they had murdered. Those Jews, knowing they would be the next victims, decided to try to escape by digging a tunnel. Of the 80 Jewish prisoners that dug the tunnel, 12 succeeded in making it into the forest where Jewish partisans were waiting.
“I had not previously known anything about this heroic tunnel escape or other examples of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, except for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, so I embarked on a quest to uncover what are, to most of us, lost chapters of history. This evolved into the feature documentary.”
