“Resistance: They Fought Back,” a feature documentary about Jewish resistance, community and strength during the Holocaust, premieres on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Monday, Jan. 27, at 10 p.m. (check local listings) on PBS, PBS.org, the PBS App and the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel.
Longtime PBS NOVA executive producer Paula S. Apsell interviewed survivors, their children and expert witnesses from the U.S., Israel and Europe to shine a new light on Jewish perseverance and revolts, dispelling the myth of “sheep to the slaughter”—the falsehood that Jews didn’t fight back.
I talked to Aspell about the origins of the film before its debut.
Tell me about the origins of the film. What inspired you, and why now?
The inspiration was actually a film I made with my co-director, Kurt Wolfinger, which was broadcast through the PBS Nova science series in 2017. We made a film called “Holocaust Escape Tunnel” in Vilnius, Lithuania, in which a group of geo-archaeologists led by the late professor Richard Freund discovered a tunnel in the Ponar forest killing site used by 80 Jewish prisoners—12 of them actually made it. The rest of them were shot.
This tunnel had been rumored to exist, but nobody knew whether it actually did. And you can’t dig in places where there are a lot of bodies, because it would desecrate them. This group of geo-archeologists, led by Freund, actually confirmed the existence of the escape tunnel, and I was there when it happened, which was a very thrilling event. That inspired me, and I started to research. I found that there were more incidents of Jewish resistance. It’s actually a myth used by antisemites and white supremacists that Jews won’t fight back. That’s not true. They certainly did fight back during the Holocaust.
Describe the research and discovery process, especially with so many Holocaust survivors being elderly or now gone.
I did many Zoom interviews with survivors’ children—children who have really now started to take it upon themselves to carry on this tradition of personal testimony, because they know and understand their parents’ stories. Children are now taking up the history. This is really helping us learn more about the role of women in the Jewish resistance, who were extremely important, which is something that really wasn’t known until recently. It never evolved from the scholarly literature into popular culture. That’s why it’s so important to me to share this message: “Sheep to the slaughter” is a myth; it is not true.
The research was extremely in depth. I think I did about 150 Zoom interviews. It was very difficult to know what to leave out, because there are so many amazing stories of Jewish resistance.
Who’s the audience for the film?
Everyone. People who are interested in how history really happened. Jewish people certainly will be interested, because so many of us heard “sheep to the slaughter” or experienced Holocaust courses and study programs where the focus was on Jewish victimhood. This is an important thing: The Holocaust devastated the Jewish community. But there’s another side to the story, and that side is what Jews did to resist the Nazis, and they did it even in the ghettos, where they had absolutely no weapons.
There were regular people just like us. They still resisted in the ways that they knew how, and in the ways that were really an integral part of Jewish tradition, which is to feed the hungry, to take care of orphans, to record everything that the Germans did, so that the guilty would be punished after the war in many ways, to thwart German deportations, all sorts of ways. They call it Amidah, which is also the Jewish prayer, standing up against the Germans; retaining your humanity, because part of what the Germans wanted to do is to dehumanize the Jews—and if you just resisted that, then you were resisting.
Of course, Jews in the ghettos did not realize what the Germans’ ultimate goal was, which is to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. Really, who can imagine that? It does take a jump in imagination to think that somebody is going to take 10 million Jews and exterminate them. It’s horrible. And it’s not something that humans can easily accept. So, they didn’t know about it at first, and then, even when they were told, they didn’t really believe it. But as this evolved and changed, so did Jewish resistance. They began to procure arms. Many young people went out to the forest and fought the Germans. There were 30,000 Jews in the forest fighting, and then even in the death camps—even when millions of Jews had already been murdered, and the rest were largely in death camps—there were seven uprisings against the Germans. Six were led by Jews. I didn’t know that, and I think that’s an amazing statistic.
This is what people in genocides do. It is, in a sense, redemptive. It really is that people—even when they believed they were going to die, which I think all of these resistance fighters did—fight, and they resist, for the honor of their people.
Why is the film poignant in 2025?
I think it’s important in terms of the rise of antisemitism that people understand that Jews are not cowards. They do defend the honor of their people. They did during the Holocaust. I think it’s important in terms of combating the rise of antisemitism. I think it’s important in terms of strengthening Jewish identity.
