Katriel Katz, director of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial institution in Jerusalem, said last night that there was no Jewish solidarity until after Auschwitz. It was only after the Holocaust that Jews considered themselves as one people, he told some 500 persons attending the Holocaust Memorial Day Observance at Yeshiva University.
Katz, a former Israel Consul General in New York and Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1965-67, said no Jew was left untouched by the Holocaust since one-third of the Jewish people was destroyed. He said the State of Israel has proven that Jews will not be stepped on again and will never again let themselves be out off from humanity. Katz said that Hiroshima and My Lai cannot be compared to the Holocaust since the Nazi terror was an attempt to exterminate an entire people.
Discussing Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, Katz said the desire to remain alive, the attempts to keep kosher, maintain journals, hold bar mitzvahs and other efforts were all forms of passive resistance against the Germans. As for active resistance which started in 1942-43, Katz said the Jewish resistance fighters knew they could not win but wanted to kill as many Germans as possible before they died. He noted that the Warsaw Ghetto held out for six weeks while Poland had fallen in three.
Katz also noted that 20 percent of resistance fighters in the French underground were Jews and Jews made up 80 percent of all resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Europe.
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