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IB History Resistance by Individuals Notes
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Individuals Who Chose to Act
Note
This article addresses the following inquiry question: What did individuals do to document, rescue, and protect people persecuted by the Nazi regime, often at grave personal risk?
Individual responses to the Holocaust ranged from documenting what was happening to directly saving lives. These responses operated under conditions of extreme danger: hiding a Jew was a capital offence in occupied Poland, so those who acted did so at risk of death for themselves and their families. Their actions saved tens of thousands of lives and created historical records without which understanding the Holocaust would be far more limited.
Documenting the Truth: The Oneg Shabbat Archive
Emanuel Ringelblum's secret archive. Ringelblum, a historian in the Warsaw Ghetto, organised a project called Oneg Shabbat ("Sabbath delight") from 1940. A group of researchers, diarists, and documentarians collected testimonies, statistics, underground newspapers, official German documents, and personal accounts of ghetto life and the deportations, and buried the archive in metal milk cans and boxes before the ghetto was destroyed. Two of three buried caches were recovered, in 1946 and 1950. The third has never been found. The surviving archive holds approximately 35,000 documents, the single most comprehensive contemporaneous record of Jewish life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto.
The cost of documentation. Ringelblum himself was captured and executed by the Germans in March 1944, along with the Polish family who was hiding him.
Case study
Janusz Korczak and the Treblinka Transport
Janusz Korczak was a celebrated Polish-Jewish pedagogue and author of children's books, widely known across Poland before the war. He ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto for 192 children.
When the children of his orphanage were ordered deported to Treblinka in August 1942, Korczak was offered personal exemption by German authorities and Polish resistance contacts. He refused.
He led his orphans in a procession to the Umschlagplatz, holding the hands of the youngest children. They were loaded onto trains and murdered at Treblinka. Korczak's act became a symbol of dignified refusal to abandon the vulnerable.
Rescue: Irena Sendler and the Children
Smuggling children out of the ghetto. Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker, worked from 1942 with the Jewish children's welfare organisation and later the Council to Aid Jews (Zegota). She smuggled approximately 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, using ambulances, coffins, toolboxes, and suitcases to conceal them during removal. She buried records of the children's original names and their new identities in jars under an apple tree, hoping to reunite families after the war.
Arrest and survival. Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo in October 1943, tortured, and sentenced to death. Zegota bribed a guard and she was rescued before her execution, surviving the war in hiding. After the war, the buried records allowed some children to learn their original identities, though most of their families had been killed.
Interactive question
Which Polish social worker smuggled an estimated 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto before being arrested and tortured by the Gestapo?
Markscheme
Irena Sendler worked with the Zegota network from 1942 to smuggle children out of the ghetto using false identities, and was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in October 1943 but survived.
Rescue from Above: Schindler and Wallenberg
Oskar Schindler. A German industrialist and Nazi Party member who employed Jews in his enamelware factory in Krakow. Initially motivated by profit, Schindler increasingly sheltered his workers, bribed SS officials, and relocated his factory to the Sudetenland specifically to remove his workers from Operation Reinhard's reach, saving approximately 1,200 Jews. His story reached global attention through Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark (1982) and Steven Spielberg's film.
Raoul Wallenberg. A Swedish diplomat sent to Budapest in July 1944, as Eichmann organised the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Wallenberg issued Schutzpasse (protective passes) claiming Swedish protection and established safe houses flying the Swedish flag, saving an estimated 20,000-100,000 Hungarian Jews alongside other neutral diplomats.
Case study
Raoul Wallenberg's Disappearance
When Soviet forces liberated Budapest in January 1945, Wallenberg went to meet Soviet commanders and was arrested by the NKVD, apparently suspected of being an American spy.
He was taken to Moscow and imprisoned in the Lubyanka. Soviet authorities later claimed he had died of a heart attack in 1947, but this was disputed, and several witnesses reported seeing him in Soviet prisons years later.
His fate was never conclusively established. Sweden declared him dead in absentia in 2016, over 70 years after his arrest. His case became a major Cold War symbol of Soviet disregard for international law.
Other Rescuers: Diplomats, Communities, and Public Protest
Other neutral diplomats issued protective documents against their own governments' orders. Japanese vice-consul Chiune Sugihara issued thousands of transit visas to Jewish refugees in Lithuania in 1940 against his government's instructions, Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes granted visas during the fall of France in 1940 in defiance of his government, and Swiss vice-consul Carl Lutz issued protective letters and ran safe houses in Budapest alongside Wallenberg. All three were reprimanded or dismissed by their own governments during or shortly after the war.
Whole communities sometimes acted collectively rather than through a single rescuer. The French Protestant village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, led by pastors Andre and Magda Trocme, sheltered an estimated 3,000-5,000 Jewish refugees between 1940 and 1944, smuggling many across the nearby Swiss border.
Not all individual defiance took the form of rescue. Sophie Scholl and the White Rose student group distributed leaflets in Munich condemning Nazi crimes and calling for resistance; the regime executed Scholl, her brother Hans, and other members in 1943. Their protest saved no one directly, but it became one of the most widely remembered acts of German internal dissent against the regime.
Historiography
Nechama Tec: argues that rescuer behaviour cannot be predicted by class, education, or politics alone. Independence and a history of nonconformity were common threads among those who chose to act.
Michael Marrus: cautions against a "heroes and villains" framework, arguing that individual rescue occurred within a wider context of collaboration and indifference that historians must not lose sight of.
Martin Gilbert: emphasises in The Righteous (2002) that rescuers came from every social class and nationality, and that their example matters precisely because it was not the norm.
Judgement: Individual rescue saved real, countable lives and produced the historical record on which later understanding depends, but it operated at a scale too small to alter the course of the genocide. Its significance is moral and evidential rather than strategic.
Key Idea
Rescue was statistically rare, which is part of why it is studied so closely. Yad Vashem has recognised more than 28,000 people worldwide as 'Righteous Among the Nations' for rescuing Jews, a tiny fraction of the tens of millions who lived under Nazi occupation, which is exactly why historians debate what made rescuers different from bystanders.
Rescuers were not uniformly motivated by heroism alone. Some, like Oskar Schindler, began by exploiting cheap Jewish forced labour for profit before choices under wartime pressure turned into deliberate protection, showing that motive could shift over time rather than being fixed from the outset.
Paper 3 preparation
Exam technique
Paper 3: 15 marks, To what extent: To what extent did individual acts of resistance and rescue change the outcome of the Holocaust for those they targeted?
Build the argument: Structure paragraphs around categories of individual response: documentation, refusal to abandon the vulnerable, direct rescue, and diplomatic protection, and use specific named individuals and figures throughout.
Evaluate perspectives: Weigh the moral and evidential significance of rescue against its numerical limits, and a strong answer distinguishes between whether resistance mattered to those it saved and whether it changed the war's outcome.
Active recall
What was the Oneg Shabbat archive and why was it historically significant?
Explain Janusz Korczak's choice in August 1942 and its symbolic significance.
How did Irena Sendler smuggle children out of the Warsaw Ghetto?
What diplomatic tools did Wallenberg use to protect Hungarian Jews?
Compare the motivations of Schindler and Wallenberg in their rescue activities.