Jews attempted mass escapes and uprisings in many dozens of ghettos and camps during the Holocaust. This chapter discusses armed resistance in ghettos and camps, looking both at the better-known instances such as the Warsaw ghetto uprising or the Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz–Birkenau and also at other cases of armed resistance in ghettos such as Białystok, as well as Sobibór and Treblinka death camps, seeking to identify patterns and connections between these instances.

This chapter describes the “choiceless choices” of the leaders as circumstances changed over time and as a result of Nazi strategies of annihilation. Similarly, the chapter addresses the motivations and strategies of the Jewish police and its role at different stages of the “Final Solution” and how these decisions affected Jews according to gender, age, country of origin, and class.

Even in the worst conditions, Jews needed to hear music, read books, attend lectures, watch actors perform, and participate in a myriad of cultural activities in order to connect to prewar values and memories. This chapter highlights the extraordinary cultural production of Jews in situations from cramped, dangerous ghettos, to the worst possible extremes, concentration and extermination camps. Jews stressed how much cultural activity helped them retain their psychological integrity and resist Nazi attempts to dehumanize them.

This chapter focuses on Poland and France to discuss examples of the emergence of Jewish armed resistance. It stresses different forms of resistance over time and the shift it took when Jewish activists became aware of mass murder. In the east, the creation of ghettos and the mass shootings and deportations of Jews to extermination camps led the Jewish underground and many individual Jews to engage in armed resistance. In the west, armed resistance emerged in response to mass roundups. Jewish resistance in both eastern and western contexts relied, in part, on longstanding personal networks within Jewish organizations and communities, which transcended linguistic, political, and intra-communal divides.