This chapter examines Jewish responses to “Operation Reinhardt” from the spring of 1942 until the fall of 1943. Examining the attitudes of the rank-and-file members of the Jewish Councils and the underground, as well as individual Jews in the ghettos in the Generalgouvernement, it pays close attention to the dilemmas Jews who remained in the ghetto faced, as more people tried to escape to the “Aryan” side and planned armed resistance.

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.

This chapter discusses Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust as a distinctive form of literary production practiced by Jewish adults, youth, and children across Europe. Jewisih diaries took on particular significance in the context of the Holocaust. They open a window on the cultural, social, and political history of the Holocaust. By preserving victims’ voices, diaries contribute to the writing of new histories of the Holocaust, in particular because of the attention to gender and social relations among victims.

In the transformative decade marked by the rise of Solidarity (1980–1989), the cross came to serve as a source of metaphysical legitimation for the growing opposition movement. Used to imply the “sacred” nature of anti-Communist mobilization, the symbol of the cross became not only a default signal of anti-Communist politics, but also an extremely popular motif that came to dominate both Solidarity’s visual culture and Poland’s memorial landscape. Solidarity used the symbol to mark spaces of anti-Communist dissent, mourn workers killed in standoffs with the police, and foster a rift in the popular mind between “the nation” and the Communist rulers, portrayed as “anti-nation.” Three case studies illuminate how the symbol was instrumental in both solidifying and challenging this boundary. Communist attempts to hijack celebrations held at the foot of the Poznań Crosses in commemoration of the workers’ rebellion of 1956, Solidarity’s campaign to rebrand May Day using Catholic symbols, and the project to display the symbol of the cross during the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising throw into relief the contradictory nature of the symbol in the late socialist period

But where did the story of Jewish deportees fit into all this? Isaac Schneersohn, a Russian immigrant who had survived the war in hiding, emerged at the Liberation to found the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, which undertook to write the history of the genocide of the Jews. Schneersohn was also the moving force behind construction of a monument completed in 1956, the Mémorial du Martyr juif inconnu, now known as the Mémorial de la Shoah. The object of all such efforts was at to evoke the specificity of Jewish suffering and to find a way to include Jews qua Jews in memorial events connected to the Deportation. Schneersohn had more success at this than is often appreciated.