Resistance : the Warsaw Ghetto uprising /

Using letters, diaries, and poignant segments of poetry, Gutman has proved that Nazi ideology and definitive plans for extermination, not Jewish passivity, drove the implementation of the "final solution." Several factors led to an initially passive response: the element of surprise in German actions; lack of food; use of the Jews themselves as accessories; the employment of a gradual but intensifying selection process; disintegration of the ghetto from within; and the isolation of the individual in the face of totalitarian assault. Until the final assault, resistance was viewed as survival, a sanctified response to Nazism. Only when all hope for survival was ultimately abandoned could resistance enjoy widespread support. Particularly intriguing because of its moral ambivalence is Gutman's portrait of Czerniakow, who, as the head of the Judenrat, had to respond to the Nazis and to the Jews, whose needs he tried to meet. All levels. D. J. Dietrich; Boston College

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, following Hitler's orders to annihilate the Jewish population of Poland's capital, pitted hundreds of poorly armed, starving Jews fighting to the death, in total isolation, against an overwhelming Nazi army. This superb, moving, richly informative history of the uprising, which was led by an underground resistance group, should erase the stereotype of the passive Jewish victim. Himself a survivor of the battle, Gutman ( The Jews of Warsaw ), a history professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, uses contemporaneous diaries, letters, underground press articles, survivors' accounts, poems and Nazi documents to create a vivid picture of daily life in the ghetto, and of temporary alliances forged among Jewish fighting factions torn by ideological rifts. He also illuminates contacts between Jewish partisans and the Polish underground and fills in the cultural background by delineating Warsaw's vibrant pre-war Jewish community. Photos. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Gutman, a survivor of the Holocaust and a scholar on the subject, here traces the events that led the peaceful Warsaw Jewry into active resistance against the Nazis. In the 1920s and 1930s, Warsaw had Europe's largest and most vibrant Jewish community. After Warsaw fell to Hitler, the Jewish underground formed in order to preserve the humanity of the Jews. They ran a clandestine press, established an uneasy alliance with the Polish underground, and eventually armed themselves while plotting retaliatory strategies. Gutman explores commonly held beliefs, e.g., that the Jews waited too long to defend themselves and that many did not believe reports of a Final Solution. The facts of the book are supported by excerpts from diaries, letters, newspapers, rare documents, and photographs. Gutman presents a dramatic and memorable picture of the ghetto. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.-Mary Salony, West Virginia Northern Community Coll. Lib., Wheeling (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A richly documented short history of the Warsaw Ghetto by Gutman (History/Hebrew University), who is a death-camp survivor and the director of the research center at Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial. There are many well-chosen citations from diaries, underground papers, and other rare documents--along with several maps and photographs (some previously unpublished). The title is the book's major flaw, as if the publisher grasped for the few moments of heroic resistance in an account dominated by hopeless victimization. Gutman himself criticizes the Israelis for giving disproportionate play to armed revolt when commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto. The shots heard 'round the occupied world are first fired more than halfway through the book. The harrowing entries and statistics describing life in the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of the typhus traps carefully planned by the Nazis, make clear that resistance was impeded by the Germans' use of Jewish police (often assimilated or converted Jews) and by the deadening effects of slow starvation and strategically strewn crumbs of hope (``those who cooperate and work will survive''). Gutman moves from the painful details to the larger, ideological picture, such as Himmler exhorting his troops to battle the Soviets, aka the ``Jewish'' Bolsheviks, for the Aryan world ``as we have conceived it: beautiful, decent, socially equal.'' Only after the ghetto is largely depleted from evacuations to the death camps do we hear poet and partisan Abba Kovner ring out with ``Arise! Arise with your last breath!'' The final weeks of armed struggle are brought to life with excerpts from dismayed German generals (referring to Jews as the ``enemy''), rival Jewish militias, and distantly admiring Poles. As the index and bibliography indicate, one would have to read dozens of German, Jewish, and Polish accounts to get what Gutman has gleaned for us here. An essential one-volume read for the layman or undergraduate.