Jews reacted to the Holocaust in a variety of ways. Some, fearing for their lives and the safety of their families, collaborated under duress with the Germans, serving in the ghettos' Jewish councils or as Jewish police. Some American Jews, in the face of critical levels of antisemitism in the U.S., were too afraid to put political pressure on their government. Other Jews refused to face the devastating realities of the "Final Solution."

European Jews, however, fell into a spectrum that ran from adherence to their Judaism at all costs to guerrilla warfare against the murderers. Disgusted with God's apparent silence, some Jews rejected their religious beliefs. Rabbi Irving Greenberg argued after the war that debate about the nature of God is ridiculous in the presence of a burning child; the only appropriate behavior is to jump in and pull the child out of the fire. Rabbi Emil Fackenheim discovered a new commandment: to survive as a Jew. Rabbi Yitzhak Nissenbaum in the Warsaw Ghetto admonished Jews to do their utmost to save their own lives.

In the ghettos, before the machine guns of the SS and Einsatzgruppen, and before and in the gas chambers themselves, Jews made personal decisions. Some went to their deaths stoically, others defiantly, still others confident in the unalterable tenets of their faith.
Photo: Central Zionist Archives / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive