A wonderful gallery at Libcom. Here’s just a taste – go enjoy the real thing.
Today in 1939: Returning from Spain
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01 Jan 1939
Irish volunteers injured during the Spanish Civil War arrive back in Dublin. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
By: Keystone
Collection: Hulton Archive
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Today in 1943
From IISG: Antecedents of Ester Borras
Membership card FEDIP, 1945Arch José Ester Borrás 5
As an anarchist, José Ester Borras (1913-1980) fled from Spain to France. There he was active in the underground during the Second World War. Arrested by the Gestapo on 30 October 1943, he was deported to Mauthausen. He survived and established the Federación Española de Deportados e Internados Políticos (FEDIP) in Toulouse shortly after liberation. The FEDIP offered relief to Spaniards like Ester Borras, who were politicial refugees and had been interned in concentration camps. Borras was one of the first members of his own organization. The IISH has the archives of both Ester Borras and the FEDIP.
See also:
He’d turned 40 just days previously. Here’s his Daily Bleed page:
[October 26:] 1913 — José Ester Borrás (1913-1980) lives, Berga (province of Barcelona). Spanish anarchist, active in the resistance in France & in the Mauthausen concentration camp, & co-founder of the founder of the Federación Española de Deportados e Internados Políticos (Spanish Federation of Former Political prisoners & camp inmates [FEDIP]).
Ester fought in the famed Colonna Tierra y Libertad during the Spanish Revolution of 1936. He was arrested by the communists, fled to France, arrested & tortured by the Gestapo…
[Details / context]
Léandre Valero
I only just noticed that one of my favourite blogs has been back for a few weeks from an enviably long summer break. Thanks to him for this fascinating obituary.
A short biography of Léandre Valero an anarchist who “critically supported” the Algerian independence movement
The recent death of Léandre Valero on 21st August shines a light on the activities of the Fédération Communiste Libertaire in France in the 1950s and its attitudes towards the independence movement in Algeria.
The son of an anarchist from Andalucia,who had fought with the FAI during the Revolution and Civil War, Valero was born in Oran in Algeria on the 12th October 1923. This meant that he became fluent in Spanish, French and Arabic.
He joined the Forces Françaises Libres, the groups initiated by De Gaulle which refused to accept the capitulation of France, during the Second World War. He took part in several campaigns and was involved in the liberation of several concentration camps. Following this, and apparently against his will, he was then sent to fight in Indo-China in January 1946. Here he established contact with the Vietminh and supplied them with petrol from French bases. Reported as a “demoralising element”, he was sent back to France in August of the same year.
Here he went to Paris. He made the decision to join the Fédération Anarchiste. The first person he met from the FA was the full-timer at their offices, who was none other than Georges Brassens, later to become known as one of France’s greatest singer-songwriters. He then moved to Auxerre working as a toolmaker-fitter. At the Gardy factory – where he set up a large section of the CNT – Valero allied himself with Georges Fontenis within the FA, and stayed with the organisation when it was transformed into the Fédération Communiste Libertaire.
He accepted the decision of the FCL to send him to Algeria in 1954 to aid the Mouvement Libertaire Nord-Africain (MLNA) in close relation with the FCL. Its main activists were the docker Duteuil, Idir Amazit, Derbal Salah and the teachers Fernand Doukhan, Jean Decharriene and Guy Martin. He obtained employment in a factory at Alger.
The MNLA gave assistance to the independence movement of Messali Hadj (distinct from the FLN). The FCL gave critical support to the independentist groups and Valero was to say : “You suffer from double oppressions. We are going to help you to get rid of colonial oppression. After that, it’s up to you to get rid of the oppression of your own capitalists!”. After the 1954 insurrection the main activity of the MNLA was support for Hadj’s organisation. Valero served as a “letter box” and sometimes a driver for the independentist leaders. At the same time Valero carried out propaganda selling the FCL paper Le Libertaire in the streets. He always carried a revolver in his pocket on these occasions and had to fire off several shots during a street sale.
In August 1955 he got a job as a foreman on a farm in Constantine province. Here he made contact with the guerrilla groups of the FLN ( Front de Libération Nationale) and supplied them with arms. In summer 1956, to avoid a military call-up in Algeria, he decided to return to France and live underground. The MNLA , now more and more under threat, decided to dissolve itself and all its archives and arms were thrown in the Mediterranean.
Part of the FCL had decided to go underground in summer 1956. These included Fontenis, Pierre Morain, Paul Philippe and Valero himself. With the amnesty offered by de Gaulle in 1958 Valero returned to Auxerre where he again got work in a factory. He was active in the CGT and in 1960 served on the departmental union of the CGT in the Yonne department. The factory where he worked was the first to go out on strike in the Yonne in May 1968 and Valero was one of the chief activists in the movement in the department.
Valero retired in 1983. In 1991 he joined the libertarian organisation Alternative Libertaire at its foundation, remaining with it until 2000. He remained active in free thought agitation and a neighbourhood association until the end of his life.
Nick Heath
Sources: obituary in Alternative Libertaire no. 210, October 2011
Related articles
- 17 October 1961: Fifty years on (oup.com)
- France remembers Algerian massacre 50 years on (guardian.co.uk)
The friends of Durruti
New at Libcom:
Guillamòn’s in-depth study of the hugely important anarcho-syndicalist CNT militants who opposed their union’s collaboration with the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War. (more…)
The Iron Column
I’m really looking forward to reading this…
The Story of the Iron Column: Militant Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War
Paul Sharkey (Translator) and Abel Paz
Edition: pb
ISBN: 9781849350648
Publisher: AK Press
Release Date: 2011-07-13The members of the Iron Column were among the most notorious anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. They were intransigent in the face of the fascist revolt, but also in defence of the revolution’s gains.
We say to all workers, to all revolutionaries, to all anarchists: At the front or in the rearguard, wherever you may be, fight against the enemies of your liberty and demolish fascism. But also make sure that your exertions do not bring about the installation of a dictatorial regime that would represent the continuation, with all of its vices and defects, of the whole state of affairs that we are trying to obliterate. Now with weapons and later with the tools of labour, learn to live without tyrants and to develop for yourselves the only road to freedom. These are the feelings of the Iron Column, and they have been explained clearly and simply.
Comrades: Death to fascism! Long live the social revolution! Long live anarchy!
~ The Iron Column, 1 October 1936
Abel Paz (1921-2009) was a fifteen-year-old anarchist when the Spanish Revolution began. After the revolution’s defeat, he spent several years in exile, returning to Spain in 1942 as a guerrilla fighter against the Franco regime. He spent most of the subsequent eleven years in prison. Paz spent his later years authoring biographical and autobiographical works and delivering lectures celebrating the achievements of the Spanish anarchists. His book Durruti in the Spanish Revolution, was published by AK Press in 2006.
Paul Sharkey, an accomplished translator, has almost single-handedly made available a vast body of non-English language anarchist texts. His numerous translations include the works of Nestor Makhno, Osvaldo Bayer, Errico Malatesta, Daniel Guérin, José Peirats, and Antonio Téllez.
Iron Column Records is a distro and label spreading the anti-fascist message through no-nonsense music and merchandise. We are 100% non-profit – ALL proceeds from sales are given to antifa groups or anti-fascists in need.
We have a growing range of music from some of the finest anti-fascist bands and labels on the planet, and we plan to expand it as money allows. If you are in a band or involved with a label that is sympathetic to what we’re doing, please get in touch to see if we can work something out.
We’ve also produced a range of t-shirts with eye-catching anti-fascist designs and are planning to release our first album under our own imprint in the near future – watch this space!
We hope that you find something you like in our list and we look forwards to hearing from you.
Antifa always,
Iron Column Records.
Related articles (more…)
Today in 1957: fighting Franco
NOW AVAILABLE! FACERÍAS — Urban Guerrilla Warfare (1939-1957). The Libertarian Movement’s Struggle against Francoism in Spain and in Exile by Antonio Téllez Solà (ISBN 978-1-873976-49-4), 413pp (indexed with 16 pp of photographs) £15.95 (+£3.50 p+p UK) (PDF) (ISSUU)
Anarchist urban guerrilla and member of the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL) since 1936, José Lluis Facerías fought on the Aragón front during the Spanish Civil War, where he was taken prisoner and held until 1945. Following his release he rejoined the clandestine anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the CNT, and dedicated himself to the armed struggle against the Francoist dictatorship. From March 1946 until his death in a police ambush in 1957, Facerias was the driving force behind the anarchist defence groups operating in Barcelona.BARCELONA, Friday, 30 August 1957, 10:45 am. In the deserted Sant Andreu district of Barcelona, a burst of automatic gunfire crackles and, as if pushed by some mighty hand, a man on the corner of the Paseo Verdún and the Calle del Doctor Pi i Molist slumps against a low wall. A pistol appears in his hand. His eyes scan the tree-lined boulevard leading off to his right towards the Santa Cruz mental clinic, but he sees no sign of life. Suddenly, he realises he has been betrayed. Unseen assailants are shooting at him from windows overlooking the junction of the Paseo Urrutia and Calle del Doctor Pi i Molist. The first burst of gunfire shatters the man’s ankle. Further rifle shots ring out and bullets ricochet around him . . .
Related articles (more…)
An antidote to Tito nostalgia
Image via Wikipedia
Criticism etc writes on Raya Dunayevskaya, Tito nostalgia, Howard Fast and Spain. Extract:
[...] Dunayavskaya’s passing mention of Tito’s activities in Spainduring the revolution. Tito was a seasoned Comintern functionary long before he lead the partisan war against the Germans and it is an accepted part of his biography that in the 1930s he funneled volunteers from the Balkans to Spainto serve in the International Brigades. Proof that Tito was actually in Spainduring the revolution is scant, but the novelist and recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize, Howard Fast, author of Spartacus(which was made into the film starring Kirk Douglas), wrote a 1944 homage with the immortal title The Incredible Tito which places him in the country. If this is accurate, it is entirely possible that Tito participated in the Stalinist repression of the POUM and the Trotskyists (or the Bolshevik-Leninists, as they called themselves).
Fast claims in his memoir Being Red, that at the time in 1946 when he was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his work with the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee he learned that the Josip Broz in Spain he had heard about as an employee of the Office of War Information during WWII was not the one we know as Tito, but rather another person by that name (Fast was questioned about aid that may have helped Broz escape occupied France). Criticism &c. is inclined to belive the story as Fast recorded it in 1944. Regardless, Dunayevskaya may well have been informed from sources closer to the topic than Fast was privy to.
The irony in all of this is that in their frantic search for post-WW II perspectives, the Trotskyists went strongly pro-Tito for a time afterYugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform.
C etc is right in noting the Tito nostalgia that pervades the left, both neo-Pabloite Trots and fellow travelling social democrats like Tony Benn. It was one of the factors that led much of the left to find themselves on the wrong side of the Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s, when many associated the irredentist and ultimately genocidal Serbian nationalism with the partisan cause and the Croatian, Bosnian and other resistances to it with the Ustache.
Related articles
- Arabic translation of Marxism and Freedom available on pdf (dmitryev.wordpress.com)
- Kritik & theory (antigerman.wordpress.com)
- Iran – philosophy and organization (dmitryev.wordpress.com)
- Criticism etc: Marxist humanism (poumista.wordpress.com)
On this day in 1943: Treblinka uprising
Image via Wikipedia
“Resistance to tyranny is a man’s highest ideal,” wrote Emma Goldman. But when humanity has been stripped of everything until the very concept of ‘ideals’ is but a bourgeois luxury – as in the case of the Jewish prisoners who planned and executed the Treblinka Revolt sixty-seven years ago on 2nd August 1943 – it is impossible to measure the superhuman fortitude required to resist the most inhuman of tyrants.
Those who were spared instantaneous extermination at Treblinka II were transferred to the forced labour camp at Treblinka I where between 700 and 1000 prisoner at any time, nearly all Jews, were given the unfeasible task of aiding the smooth running of the extermination process. Within this Hieronymus Bosch-like realisation of Hell, which in itself offered no guarantee of survival as labourers were selected every day for the gas chambers in exchange for stronger newly arrived prisoners, a dream of resistance and revenge was hatched. [READ THE REST]
Related articles
- Images of horror (bbc.co.uk)
- Remembering the evils of the past: Keeping the flame (economist.com)
- Why Shoah still matters (guardian.co.uk)
Spanish Civil War: British volunteers lists available for the first time
Via Shiraz, I see this. Some snippets:
Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) KV5/118
Eric Blair is better known as George Orwell, author and journalist. Orwell’s work includes 1984, Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia, his personal account of his experiences during the Spanish Civil War. [At Poumista]
John Cornford was a Cambridge–educated poet. He fought initially with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) and saw action at Perdiguera and Aragon in 1936 before falling ill and returning to England. He quickly returned, having recruited several friends, to join the English Battalion of the International Brigades, and was badly wounded at the Battle of Madrid in November 1936. He was killed at the battle of Lopera on 27 December 1936, shortly after returning to the front. [At Poumista]
Robert ‘Bob’ Doyle KV5/120
Bob Doyle was an Irish member of the International Brigades. He was captured in 1938 at Calaceite, near the Aragon front, along with Irish Brigade leader Frank Ryan. After spending 11 months in a concentration camp he was among those exchanged for Italian prisoners of war. He died at the age of 92 on 22 January 2009. [At Poumista]
Frank Ryan KV5/130
Frank Ryan, a prominent member of the IRA, led a group of Irish volunteers to fight with the International Brigades in Spain. He fought at the Battle of Jarama and was seriously wounded in March 1937. He was later captured and imprisoned by Nationalist forces before being released to the Germans in 1940. [At Poumista]
The hats of the proletarian brothers
First, from Weimar, from a strange but fascinating collection, via Kellie:
Robert Capa, Spanish Civil War, Barcelona 1936
Barcelona. August-September 1936. The boy is wearing a cap belonging to a member of the Steel Battalions, of the “Union de Hermanos Proletarios” (Union of Proletarian Brothers), an anarchist militia.
And more on the hats of the UHP:
Asturias, Octubre 1934-1937. Hoy como ayer el Socorro Rojo de España cuidará de vuestras familias[Asturias, October 1934-1937. Today, as yesterday, the Spanish Red Aid will take care of your families]. Signed: Tomás.. Socorro Rojo de España. Gráficas Valencia, Intervenido U.G.T. C.N.T. Lithograph, 3 colors; 100 x 69 cm.
In this poster, the image of a fighting miner emerges from behind a hill inscribed with the word “Asturias”. This refers to a region located along Spain’s northern coast, on the Bay of Biscay. The fighter carries a rifle on his shoulder and prepares to throw a stick of dynamite. Behind him a mother cares for her two young children. The green color of the sinuous mountains evokes the greenery of a region known for its abundant rainfall.
The message under the image refers to events that occurred in Asturias in 1934 and in 1937, and also to the organization issuing this poster, the Socorro Rojo de España, or Spanish Red Aid. The Red Aid was founded by the Comintern in 1921; its activities in Spain had begun before the war, assisting in the revolutionary strike that was held in many parts of the country in the fall of 1934. This strike was most successful in Asturias, where it was led by a united front of miners of socialist, communist and anarchist persuasion; thus the initials UHP in the cap worn by the miner in this poster, which stand for Unión de Hermanos Proletarios, or Union of Proletarian Brothers. After two weeks of revolution, the rebellion surrendered on October 18, 1934. The repression was conducted by military forces led by General Franco on orders from the Republican government. It is to these events that the inscription “October 1934″ in this poster refers. The second date on the poster, 1937, refers to the Civil War. In the late summer of that year, military forces, this time in rebellion against the Republic, were set to attack Asturias. The region prepared for its defense, which was much publicized throughout the country. After intense fighting, Asturias finally fell to the Nationalist army on October 21. This poster shows the mythic dimension that the Asturias revolution of 1934 had acquired in Spain immediately before and during the war. The defense of Asturias in 1937 by revolutionary miners like the one represented in this image immediately evoked the earlier events and provided an ideal opportunity to rouse the passion of the masses anew.
The author of this scene, Tomás, designed other posters during the war, but he is not otherwise known. This poster must have been designed and printed at the time of the events it commemorates, in October 1937, presumably before the fall of Asturias to the Nationalist army on October 21.
[See also]
Collectives in the Spanish Revolution – Gaston Leval
We have so many times said, for it is important to bear this in mind that the Spanish libertarian revolution was set in motion as a consequence of the Francoist attack which made it possible to put into action revolutionary forces which without it were condemned to new and sterile failures. And when we say “sterile failures” we are referring to the attempts made in January 1932, January and December 1933 (revolutionary and insurrectional attempts organised and manned by the C.N.T.-F.A.I.) to which one must add the Asturian miners’ insurrection in October 1934 in which socialist, U.G.T. and C.N.T. workers (in spite of the stupid opposition of the national Comité of the C.N.T.) and even Communists took part. All these attempts were crushed by the more powerful forces of the State, supported by the non-revolutionary political parties which, for all that, were not fascist.
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- Capa’s Life (phillbrowncontextual.wordpress.com)
Patrick Leigh Fermor 1915-2011
Christopher Hitchens’ wonderful farewell salute to a great man. Extract:
One of Leigh Fermor’s colleagues, another distinguished classicist named Montague Woodhouse, once told me that Greek villagers urged him to strike the hardest possible blows against the Nazis, so as to make the inevitable reprisals worthwhile. He lived up to this by demolishing the Gorgapotamos viaduct in 1942, wrecking Nazi communications. But the brutality of the combat doesn’t negate that moment of civilized gallantry at Mount Ida, where the idea of culture over barbarism also scored a brief triumph. (Woodhouse went on to become a Conservative politician and active Cold Warrior, but while fighting Hitler he was quite happy to work with Communist and nationalist fighters, and he wrote in his memoirs that “the only bearable war is a war of national liberation.”)
What a cast of literally classic characters this league of gentleman comprised. Bernard Knox went with poet John Cornford to fight for the Spanish Republic, was later parachuted into France and Italy to arrange the covert demolition and sabotage of Vichy and Mussolini, and, after the war, set up the Center for Hellenic Studies at Yale. Nicholas Hammond, who had walked rifle in hand over the mountains of Epirus and Macedonia, later suggested from his study of the terrain that those seeking the burial treasure of Philip of Macedon might consider digging at Vergina. (He was right.) Some of the brotherhood was very much to the left: Basil Davidson helped organize Tito’s red partisans in Bosnia, and after the war he went to work with the African rebels who fought against fascist Portugal’s dirty empire. Frank Thompson, brother of the British Marxist historian Edward Thompson, was liaison officer to the resistance in Bulgaria before being betrayed and executed. Others were more ambivalent: Sir Fitzroy Maclean was a Tory aristocrat but helped persuade Churchill that Tito’s forces in Yugoslavia were harder fighters than the monarchists when it came to killing Nazis. On the more traditional side of British derring-do, Billy McLean and Julian Amery emerged from the guerrilla resistance in Albania with a lively hatred of Communism and later took part in several quixotic attempts to “roll back” the Iron Curtain. Col. David Smiley saw irregular action in almost every theater, and in the 1960s and 1970s he organized the almost unique defeat of a Communist insurgency in Oman.
Now the bugle has sounded for the last and perhaps the most Byronic of this astonishing generation.
Lots more from The Greatest Living Englishman website. Here is Erik Bruns:
Many will remember the TV show This is Your Life. Greek television had their own version, and in 1972 it was Paddy’s turn to be embarrassed and surprised by meeting again people that he had come across in his life. His surprise and clear delight at meeting with the ‘Abduction Gang’ of Cretan Andartes is clear. The ‘senior’ partisans, Manoli and George (see picture left) are the first two guests, and they seem barely changed.
The highlight must be when the presenter introduces a slightly frail General Heinrich Kreipe. Paddy is delighted to see him again, and immediately starts to talk to the General in German saying how good it is to see him after all these years. (more…)
Companero Roma Marquez Santo presente
Very sad to hear from Alan Warren that Roma Marquez Santo has passed away.
This morning (29th December, 2010), Roma Marquez Santo, miliciano of the Columna Lenin and teniente of the Ejercito Popular passed away peacefully in Barcelona at the age of 94.[...] (more…)
Music Mondays: partisan songs
Chava Alberstein: “Zog not keynmol”
Paul Robeson: “Zog not keynmol”
Two versions of the great Warsaw Ghetto partisan song I wrote about here.
The liner notes from the Paul Robeson version read as follows. I am curious about this. I hear what sounds like booing amongst the applause. This was the month, June 1949, when the greatest of Soviet Yiddish poets, among the greatest Yiddish poets, were arrested, to be murdered in 1952. I am curious about what Robeson knew about this, and if he knew what he thought. (more…)
¡Diego presente! Diego Giménez Moreno (1911-2010)
Obituaries from Entdinglichung, A-Infos.
Veteran of the Spanish civil war, died in Sao Paulo, age 99.
On this day 1937: death of Carlo Rosselli
Paris, 9 June, 1937: Assassination of Carlo Rosselli.Rosselli, an Italian socialist, had been in exile in Paris since 1929, where he was the main figure in the movement Guistizia e Liberta. Here is the next part of his story, as told by Stanislao G. Pugliese:
Several days after the attempted coup d’etat of 18 July 1936 in Spain, various members of Giustizia e Liberta met in the offices of the journal on Rue Val-de-Grace in Paris. Rosselli proposed quick and decisive intervention against fascism in Spain; here was the opportunity to transform anti-fascism from a negative, passive idea into a positive, active force. Unfortunately, the reform socialists were hesitant and the communists were awaiting word from Moscow on how to proceed. Only the maximalist socialists and the anarchists agreed with Rosselli’s demand for a volunteer force to leave immediately for Spain. For the next ten months until his assassination, Rosselli fought a battle on two fronts: against Franco and his followers, and trying to convince the supporters of the Spanish Republic that this was not just a civil war to defend the Republic, but the first scene in the last act of the drama of European fascism. Rosselli saw the Spanish Civil War as the first real opportunity to combat fascism on equal terms, on the field of battle, with the only element understood by fascism – force.
With his arrival in Barcelona during the first week in August 1936 noted by the police,4 Rosselli was received by a contingent of FAI (Federacion Anarquista Iberica) and introduced to members of the CNT (Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo) and POUM (Partito Obrero de Unificacion Marxista). He wrote back to his English-born wife, Marion, that for now, ‘it was not a real or modern war, but rather a slow siege’.5 Managing to hammer together an accord with the regional government of Catalonia, he created an Italian anti-fascist column of volunteers. Members of Giustizia e Liberta joined with Italian anarchists to create the ‘Ascaso’ Column.6 Together, Rosselli and the republican Mario Angeloni shared command of this first group of 130 Italian volunteers, of whom approximately 70-80 were anarchists, 20 were members of Giustizia e Liberta, and the remainder either socialists, communists or republicans.7 After a week, Rosselli returned to Paris where he tried to persuade the other anti-fascists to volunteer in Spain. By the end of the month he was back in Spain, on the Aragon front. [...]
Bella Ciao, etc
Post by Bob From Brockley
Radical Archives continues its excavation of the influence of Nietzsche on the anarchist scene with a post on Rudolf Rocker, which led me to the Russian anarchist blogger Laplandian.
Via Laplandian, two YouTubes, the first on the Yiddish melody which forms the basis of the anti-fascist partisan anthem “Bella Ciao”. The song is “Koilen” or “Dus Zekele Koilen” (” A small bag of coal”) by non-Jewish Gypsy musician Mishka Ziganoff, born in Odessa in the late 19th century, who recorded this record in 1919 and moved to the US in 1921. You can listen to more of his music here.
Here is Chumbawamba’s version of “Bella Ciao”, for comparison.
And here, again from Laplandian, “Bella ciao, Iran”:
Amidah: Defiance
From a review of Yehuda Bauer’s The Death of the Shtetl, on the Jews of the Eastern European shtetlach (shtetls) in the Nazi age.
Some were saved by erstwhile German Communists who had hidden their party membership and were in the Wehrmacht. Many young Jews saved themselves by fleeing into the forests and joining Soviet partisans, not all of whom welcomed them but needed them, if only temporarily, to kill Germans and their allies. (Soviet anti-Semitism would flourish after the war) Some few managed to live to tell the tale but recognized that it was merely chance that allowed them to live. All came close to death. “Some of them thought it had been the work of God, but most knew better: the same God, if he existed, had failed to protect their loved ones.”
From an interview with Bauer:
MO: In the book, you use the term “amida” to signify defiance, was there defiance in the shtetl?
YB: There certainly was defiance in many shtetlach — there was also a total collapse of society and the lack of any kind of defiance in other shtetlach. I tried to find out why there should have been just widely different types of reaction in communities that were geographically and socially so near to each other.
MO: How did the partisans fare?
YB: There were many, probably thousands, of Jews that were murdered by Soviet partisans, and there were thousands who survived because they joined the partisans. It is far from being a black-and-white story, and I tried to explain why that should have been so. Most people who survived owed their lives to either the few people who hid them and fed them, or to Soviet partisans. At least one major partisan commander (Vassily Chernishev [“Platon”]) was recognized as a “Righteous.” Some of the murderers among the partisans are also known by their names.
From another review:
Here is how Bauer describes the phenomenon of Amidah in his earlier book, Rethinking the Holocaust:
“The Hebrew term amidah…means literally “standing up against,” but that does not capture the deeper sense of the word. When I speak of resistance, I mean amidah, and that includes both armed and unarmed actions and excludes passive resistance, although that term is almost a non sequitur, because one cannot really resist passively. When one refuses to budge in the face of brutal force, one does not resist passively; one resists without using force, and that is not the same thing.
What does amidah include? It includes smuggling food into ghettos; mutual self-sacrifice within the family to avoid starvation or worse; cultural, educational, religious and political activities taken to strengthen morale; the work of doctors, nurses and educators to consciously maintain health and moral fiber to enable individual and group survival; and, of course, armed rebellion or the use of force (with bare hands or with “cold” weapons) against the Germans and their collaborators.(Rethinking the Holocaust, p. 120.)
The discussion in this book notes that, “Unarmed Amidah in the Kresy was limited by the impossible external circumstances, although it did exist in some places and was expressed in ways that were specific to the areas discussed here.” (And note how in this later book he capitalizes Amidah.)
Manolis Glezos
On March 9, police in Athens tear-gassed the 88-year-old Manolis Glezos. “On May 30 1941, in Nazi-occupied Athens, he and Apostolos Santas climbed up the Acropolis and tore down the Swastika – an action for which he was arrested and tortured the following year.” (Andy) (more…)
