Resistance during the Holocaust

In three cases, entire countries resisted the deportation of their Jewish population during the Holocaust. In other countries, notable individuals or communities created resistance during the Holocaust.

Since 1963, a commission organized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel, and headed by an Israeli Supreme Court justice, has been charged with the duty of awarding people who rescued Jews from the Holocaust the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations. As of January 2007, 21,758 people have received the honor.

There was also Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

The Netherlands
On 25 February, 1941, the communist resistance organized a general strike in Amsterdam and environment in protest against violence by Dutch fascist terror groups against Jews and discriminating measures by the German occupier against the Jewish population. Several hundreds of thousands of people participated in the strike and demonstrated in the streets. After two days the strike was broken violently by German military forces. Three communist organizers have been executed by a German firing squad, about ten other communist organizers have been sent to prisons in Germany.

Denmark
King Christian X of Denmark saved the lives of most of Denmark's 7,500 Jews in October 1943, by spiriting them in fishing boats to safety in Sweden. The few Danish Jews who were captured by the Nazis found their homes and possessions waiting for them when they returned, exactly as they had left them.

Bulgaria
The Nazi-allied government of Bulgaria, led by Bogdan Filov, did fully and actively assist in the Holocaust in the areas of Yugoslav Macedonia and Greece which it occupied. On Passover 1943 Bulgaria rounded up the great majority of Jews in the in its zones of Greece and Yugoslavia, transported them through Bulgaria, and handed them off to German transsport to be taken to Treblinka, where almost all were killed. It did not deport its own 50,000 Jewish citizens, after yielding to pressure from the parliament deputy speaker Dimitar Peshev and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

Finland
The government of Finland refused repeated requests from Germany to deport its Finnish Jews to Germany.

Norway
German demands for the deportation of Jewish refugees from Norway were largely refused.

Diplomats and people of influence
In a few cases, individual diplomats and people of influence, such as Oskar Schindler or Nicholas Winton, protected large numbers of Jews. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, Chinese consul-general to Austria Ho Feng Shan, and others saved tens of thousands of Jews with fake diplomatic passes.

Sweden
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues saved as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews by providing them with diplomatic passes.

Portugal
Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes issued 30,000 visas to Jews and other persecuted minorities, though it cost him his career in 1941, when Portuguese dictator Salazar forced him out of his job. He died in poverty in 1954.

Brazil
Brazilian diplomat Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas illegally issued Brazilian diplomatic visas to hundreds of Jews in France during the Vichy Government, saving them from certain death.

Japan
Chiune Sempo Sugihara, Japanese Consul-General in Kaunas, Lithuania, 1939–1940, issued thousands of visas to Jews fleeing Poland in defiance of explicit orders from the Japanese foreign ministry. The last foreign diplomat to leave Kaunas, Sugihara continued stamping visas from the open window of his departing train. After the war, Sugihara was fired from the Japanese foreign service, ostensibly due to downsizing. In 1985, Sugihara’s wife and son received the Righteous Among the Nations honor in Jerusalem, on behalf of the ailing Sugihara, who died in 1986.

Vatican City
Although Pope Pius XII did not publicly speak out against the murder of the Jews during the Holocaust, the Vatican did take action to save many Jews in Italy from deportation, including sheltering several hundred Jews in the catacombs of St. Peter's Basilica. In his Christmas addresses of 1941 and 1942, the pontiff was forceful on the topic but did not mention the Nazis by name. The Pope encouraged the bishops to speak out against the Nazi regime and to open the religious houses in their dioceses to hide Jews. In recent years, the Vatican has expressed its remorse for not speaking out with more authority against the genocide.

Belgium
In April 1943, members of the Belgian resistance held up the twentieth convoy train to Auschwitz, and freed 231 people (115 of whom escaped the Holocaust).

Poland
There were also groups, such as the Polish Żegota organization, that took drastic and dangerous steps to rescue victims. Witold Pilecki, a member of Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army, organized a resistance movement in Auschwitz from 1940, and Jan Karski tried to spread word of the Holocaust.

Italy
In Rome, some 4,000 Italian Jews and prisoners of war avoided deportation, many of them hidden in safe houses or evacuated from Italy by a resistance group organized by an Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty. Once a Vatican ambassador to Egypt, O'Flaherty used his political connections to help secure sanctuary for dispossessed Jews.

Communities
Some towns and churches also helped hide Jews and protect others from the Holocaust, such as the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon which sheltered several thousand Jews. Similar individual and family acts of rescue were repeated throughout Europe, as illustrated in the famous cases of Anne Frank, often at great risk to the rescuers.

Shanghai


Between 1933 and 1941, the Chinese city of Shanghai accepted unconditionally over 30,000 Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust in Europe, a number greater than those taken in by Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India combined during World War II. Shanghai was the only port in the world that allowed entry for Jews with neither an entry visa nor a passport. After 1941, the occupying Nazi-aligned Japanese ghettoized the Jewish refugees in Shanghai into an area known as the Shanghai ghetto. Some of the Jewish refugees there aided the Chinese resistance against the Japanese. Many of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai migrated to the United States and Israel after 1948 due to the Chinese Civil War.