Resisters

“These are the stories that longtime readers of Holocaust literature have been waiting to read: evidence of small, covert acts of resistance (often by individuals working on their own initiative) against a fanatically coordinated genocidal force.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“[Gruner’s] broadened lens offers a more accurate and complex portrait of the responses of ordinary Jewish men and women living under horrific conditions.”—Linda Kantor-Swerdlow, Jewish Book Council

“It’s a narrative that both shocks and inspires.”—Jewish News of Northern California

Finalist for the 73rd National Jewish Book Award, Holocaust category, sponsored by the Jewish Book Council


“This important book shows in great detail, on the basis of numerous moving and often heartwrenching individual stories, that German and Austrian Jews often rebelled against and resisted their oppressors in a variety of ways. Gruner has given us a crucial corrective to the historiography of the Holocaust.”—Omer Bartov, author of Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past

“This deeply researched and highly original study highlights multiple forms and cases of courageous recalcitrance on the part of German Jews subjected to Nazi persecution. A welcome book as both a tribute to the tormented protagonists and a corrective to the historical record.”—Peter Hayes, author of Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Sensitized to the complexities of living as a non-conformist in a persecutory dictatorship by his own upbringing in East Germany, Gruner is ideally suited to teasing out from fragmentary evidence the historical reality behind the Nazi caricature of the ‘impudent Jew.’ He compiles impressive evidence and argumentation against the widespread assumption of Holocaust victim passivity.”—Christopher R. Browning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“Wolf Gruner has developed a unique perspective in Holocaust history, uncovering countless examples of individual Jews who protested Nazi policies. While devastating, these poignant stories are also hopeful, demonstrating that even in the worst dictatorships, individuals can and do defy discriminatory and even exterminatory policies.”—Marion Kaplan, author of Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940–1945