The Holocaust: A Literary Analysis

Some people think of the Holocaust just as Jews being led to slaughter, while this is true for some there is other responses to their lives being threatened. Some chose to fight, whether by choice or by feeling they had no other decision they fought. Another aspect that some may overlook is that the resistance fighters were people too, they had personal lives and they all dealt with things differently. When boxed in a corner everyone acts differently, this is especially true when looking at the fight or flight response of the resistance fighters. Another aspect is how their religious beliefs influenced their actions. The final way we can compare the books Defiance and If not now, when? is how they felt about the other Jews that joined

This is because these were not only the easiest to do but with the over whelming amount soldiers that came at a time, a large scale resistance would have been suicide in many cases because of the small number that would have fought back and the lack of supplies/weapons to fight with. Compliance was easy for the Jews to justify in the beginning because it started as just “small” things like moving to the Ghetto. Most of the alleviation occurred inside of the Ghettos, mostly seen being done by Jewish counsel when they used the “feed the beast and it will go away” mentality. They thought that by giving up a few Jews at a time they could save the lives of the rest. Lastly there is the paralysis reaction. This is just how it sounds, this occurred throughout the Holocaust. When things like being told to gather all their belongings and move because this was no longer their house, unfortunately, some just froze and, consequently, were shot. In the book Defiance Three main responses are seen: resistance, compliance, and evasion. The other two responses that Hillberg covers are alleviation and paralysis, though we really just see the first

In late 1942, a special mission saved over a hundred Jews from the Iwie ghetto just as the Germans planned to liquidate it. The "Kalinin" also raided the surrounding area for weapons and ammunition, taken from dead Germans and Russians, food, clothing, medicine and whatever else would assist in their survival. Thus the Bielski brothers differed from other "otriad" or "partisan groups” where only men participated and whose primary purpose was to fight the Nazis, although the Bielskis did participate in active acts of resistance, but everyone fought that was old enough to fire a weapon. In contrast Levi’s book describes how mostly men and a few women fought. This I think is a difference in how the two were organized. It seems to me that Levi writes in more of a live to fight, whereas Tec writes mainly as a fight to live perspective. Levi’s story is not about the pain of war, nor the cold of the Soviet winter, though both of these are back of your mind the whole time reading this difficult story. This is the story of people who have seen and survived horrors which we can 't comprehend. The young Jews who watched the SS (boys scarcely older than himself) murder his family, the older Russian soldier who escaped a POW (prisoner of war) camp, and the man who watched all the Jews from his village forced to dig their own mass grave, before the Einsatzgruppen shot them