Resistance during the Holocaust

In other countries, notable individuals or communities created resistance during the Holocaust which helped the Jews escape some concentration camps.

[1] In a few cases, individual diplomats and people of influence, such as Oskar Schindler or Nicholas Winton, protected large numbers of Jews.

The last foreign diplomat to leave Kaunas, Sugihara continued stamping visas from the open window of his departing train.

After realising the scale of the Germans' intentions, he also issued hundreds of Iranian passports in his consulate to non-Persian Jews, allowing them to go free.

The Pope encouraged the bishops to speak out against the Nazi regime and to open the religious houses in their dioceses to hide Jews.

[4] In April 1943, members of the Belgian resistance held up the twentieth convoy train to Auschwitz, and freed 231 people (115 of whom escaped the Holocaust).

[5] As stated in the article Jewish Resistance by Yehuda Bauer, weapons were originally from the Soviet Union and were parachuted in.

[5] The Nazis ended the rebellion by setting each building on fire in the ghetto and using poison gas to draw Jews out of bunkers.

Witold Pilecki, a member of Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army, organized a resistance movement in Auschwitz from 1940, and Jan Karski tried to spread word of the Holocaust.

One eyewitness reports that there was a shortwave transmitter hidden in Block 11 of Auschwitz concentration camp which sent information directly to London.

[6] Between January 1942 and spring 1943, much of the coverage of the London Dziennik Polski was devoted to exposing the Holocaust, and in late 1943 such topics as concentration camps and medical experiments were described in details.

[7] In Rome, some 4,000 Italian Jews and prisoners of war avoided deportation, many of them hidden in safe houses or evacuated from Italy by a resistance group organized by an Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty.

Once a Vatican ambassador to Egypt, O'Flaherty used his political connections to help secure sanctuary for dispossessed Jews.

Similar individual and family acts of rescue were repeated throughout Europe, as illustrated in the famous cases of Anne Frank, often at great risk to the rescuers.

Many of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai migrated to the United States and Israel after 1948 due to the Chinese Civil War.