“Only Thanks to Warsaw Can This People Live On”: Zionist Resistance and Revolt after the Holocaust

On December 10, 1945, the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement informed its members in postwar Germany that all of their kibbutz groups would be renamed after the resistance fighters who had perished, taking on names like the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutzim named after Mordecai Anielewicz, Chaviva Reik, Yosef Kaplan, Tosia Altman, Aryeh Vilner, and Zvi Brandes. Zionist youth movements in Europe after the war pointed to their central role in organizing the resistance as justifying their postwar leadership of the Jewish public. Leaders of the displaced persons spoke about the important function that the Warsaw Uprising could play in organizing the Jewish public after the war. Levi Shalitan, a survivor from Shavli and editor of Undzer Veg, argued at a meeting to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt in 1946, “a people cannot live off Treblinka and Majdaneks – only thanks to Warsaw can this people live on.” In the aftermath, “Resistance” was intended to replace the traumatic individual past of the survivors and the collective sense of Jewish passivity in the face of persecution with the shared experience of wartime heroism in the ghetto revolts. Even so, the vast majority of the surviving population in postwar Europe had not in fact participated in the resistance movements, with most Jews residing in the DP camps returning from the far reaches of the Soviet Union in 1946. This paper will examine the use of the motifs of resistance and revolt in the construction of a collective Zionist identity for the “Surviving Remnant,” and its influence on the postwar politics of the Jewish DP population.