Resistance Studies

Stellan Vinthagen July 8th, 2007

Resistance is, when it is studied, regularly understood firstly as a collective project; within a movement, a organisation or a “mass” of people. Secondly resistance is connected to dramatic and public confrontations. That might be because such resistance makes more noice, more headlines and through its very nature; disturbance on the public streets of urban environments. Both these assumptions might be wrong. James Scott has in his now classic work on resistance shown that resistance is, at least in severe oppressive situations (like serfdom, slavery, small farming in the country side in the Global South, in the cast system in India, or generally in authoritarian or totalitarian states) more likely to be hidden and disguised.

A strong statement showing how resistance might be entirely individual, yet massive in its scale, is the book by Martin Gilbert (www.martingilbert.com): The Righteous – The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (2002) (Bye for about $13 at Amazon). In it Gilbert vividly describe the stories of individual brave actors who, while risking their own life, saved Jews during the Nazi occupations in various European countries. He describe the general phenomenon of “the righteous” in the introductory and concluding chapters, and between them he goes through various stories structured according to the situation in various countries, like Poland, Germany and Hungary.

An amazing number of today 21 758 (see the list at Wikipedia) non-Jewish individuals have already been formally recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” (hasidei umot haolam) by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. And a lot more candidates are on the way being recognized (only in Lithuania another 2 000 individuals), while others don’t want to be public about their brave contributions (e.g. in Denmark the underground resistance movement has asked the whole collective to be named, not individual heroes).

I think about my own grand father, Gustaf Nilsson, who was a soldier in Sweden during the war and who ended up in a military prison after letting Jews who had arrived in a small boat (probably from Denmark) and walked through his guard at the South border of Sweden. He never talked about it, at least my my father and grand-mother never talked about it, even though my grand-father was a trade union activist and thus an out-spoken political individual. I just found out about it when I cleared out the house of my grand mother after she died. Then I found the court papers of the military. I guess there are a lot of people like him, people who for various reasons did not talk about it, people we probably never will know of, who made a life saving act but didn’t see it as much in the light of the war, the Holocaust and all the suffering that happened.

It is interesting to see that these brave individuals come from all kinds of social sectors (clergy, organized support groups, farmers, work camp guards, SS-soldiers, German supervisors, etc…). And it looks like more or less equal division between those who knew and had a good relation before the war/occupation to the Jews they saved, and those who saved strangers who just knocked on their door or were in a dangerous situation. (For more information check the website Holocaust Heroes).

The high number of individuals and their mainly isolated decision to risk torture, death and danger for their own family by helping people, without having anything to gain from it, is impressive and demands our interest. The thousands that did help become even more interesting to understand when we think about all the millions who did not make such brave acts, the many million Jews that were exterminated and tortured without getting any help…These “islands of exception” becomes a challenge to explain since even though six million Jews were murded, tens of thousands were saved.

Major Helmrich and his wife who helped Jews in Poland explained it by saying: “we decided that it would be better for our children to have dead parents than cowards as parents” (p. 526).

Gilbert presents a number of reasons given by the “righteous” themselves but no clear common denominator seems to surface. Not Christian values, earlier friendship, opposition to the Nazi occupation or ideology, contempt for prejudice, a value for justice or any other reason seem to explain it fully. The almost universal “explanation” from the righteous was in the line of what a Lithuanian couple said: “We did the only thing a decent person would do…” (p. 525), does not explain it either. And maybe there is no single factor, or even a common combination of factors that unite the individuals who faced death while helping those who suffered and risked even more just because they happend to be Jews. Maybe individual resistance demands individual explanation?

But some interesting tendencis exist, e.g. the difference of numbers who helped in the various countries. In Bulgaria (where relatively few Jews where murded) only 17 individuals have been recognized, but in Poland (where a lot of Jews where murded and a general anti-Semitic sentiments existed, even before the Nazi occupation) there are at least 6 004 individual resisters (see Yad Vashem, and Gilbert p. 550).

So, when we do resistance studies it needs to recognize the extremly individual and hidden nature of some forms of resistance. Resistance studies need to investigate such resistance as well since it do matters; for each saved person or particular reduced oppression it means a lot, at least for those concerned, and, it might, taken together represent a massive resistance activity which in its effects actually seriously undermines oppressive structures. The difficult question, though, is HOW do we study such individualized and hidden resistance?

• Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Resistance , War , subaltern agency
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