Polish Resistance
Learning from the Righteous has produced a series of downloadable learning resources about eleven acts of resistance by Jewish and non-Jewish Poles under German occupation during World War Two.
About half of the six million European Jews killed in the Holocaust were Polish. In 1939 a third of the capital city Warsaw, and 10% of the entire country was Jewish. By 1945 97% of Poland’s Jews were dead.
These eleven examples of Polish resistance do not proport to give an overview of what happened in Poland during The Holocaust. They have been chosen to reflect the unimaginably difficult choices made by both Jews and non-Jews under German occupation – where every Jew was marked for death and all non-Jews who assisted their Jewish neighbours were subject to the same fate.
These individuals were not typical; they were exceptional, reflecting the relatively small proportion of the population who refused to be bystanders. But neither were they super-human. They would recoil from being labelled as heroes.
They symbolise the power of the human spirit – their actions show that in even the darkest of times, good can shine through. We've prepared some PDFs and PowerPoint presentations for you to download.
