Shmuel Krakowski, chief archivist of Yad Vashem, lectures on the Holocaust at the University of Tel Aviv, and is exceptionally well placed to treat this subject: what happened to those Jews in German-occupied Poland who determined to try and fight, instead of going as ordered to the death camps. He deals only with the rump of Poland, the original General Gouvemement, in its four districts of Warsaw, Lublin, Kraków and Radom. He omits the fifth district, of East Galicia, centred on Lwów, which was thrown in with the rest in August 1941 by German administrators, because its primarily Ukrainian population posed different problems from those in the other four, primarily Polish, districts.

To have any reasonable chance of success a resistance movement against an occupier needs hope, arms, leadership, intelligence, security, and propaganda to induce popular support; help from an outside power is often indispensable as well. The Jews in occupied Poland had few resources of this kind: no outside support, no propaganda vehicle beyond gossip and the occasional poster, feeble intelligence, weak security (because of the proliferation of Gestapo agents), hardly any arms, and no hope. There were a few leaders of distinction; most of them found early deaths. Even the one tactical advantage usually open to guerillas - the initiative in seizing the moment for an ambush - was unavailable to those of the Jews inside the Warsaw ghetto who were determined to resist: they were surprised by a German incursion on 18 January 1943, before they were ready to riposte. The four days’ impromptu scuflling that followed gave useful lessons to the survivors, so that the Germans’ final incursion on 19 April led to several weeks’ bitter fighting, house to house, cellar to cellar, sewer to sewer. Most of it was over by late May; a few tiny groups hung on, without friends, without light, almost without food, until October. A few more handfuls of men managed to tunnel their way out of the ghetto and go on with the war; several dozen fought in the Warsaw rising of AugustSeptember 1944, a very few survived it.