Introduction Who doesn''t like a good story? Stories can entertain us, but they can also inspire and educate us. In fact, stories can give us important messages and teach valuable lessons for our lives today and in the future. I''ve got such a story for you here. Imagine This Scenario To start, imagine the following situation with its three aspects. Think how you would deal with the situation if you were in it. Your country has been invaded and swiftly conquered by a foreign power. This power has a reputation for cruelty. While your home and your family, as well as your relatives living nearby, are fine at the moment, the invasion caused much destruction in towns and cities as well as civilian casualties.
Just go out your front door and you can see the death and destruction in your own community. How would you deal with this situation? In addition, this conquering power has designated a small percentage of your country''s population as part of the Other and segregates these Other people into their own enclaves. Movement in and out of these enclaves is restricted, and food supplies have become limited in them. These enclaves have been set up in different cities around your country, including in your own town. By the way, you, your family, and extended family members have been designated as part of this Other group and are now crowded into one of these enclaves. How would you deal with this situation? Furthermore, much of the rest of the population of your conquered nation is indifferent to the plight of those in the Other group, and some are downright hostile to them. In fact, some of your fellow citizens have gladly joined in to assist the administration of this foreign power to regulate and control the activities of the Other people. The message from this new administration is that anyone who tries to help these Other people will be arrested and imprisoned, and these Other people will be fine as long as they cooperate and join in work details.
Yet you have seen in your own town some from the Other group who went off into a work detail and never returned. The word out there is that these people were executed. How would you deal with this situation? If you are struggling to come up with good answers on how you would deal with this scenario, you are not alone. Even if you thought about escaping your enclave into the dangerous and hostile unknown, where would you go? Who could you count on to help you? What would you do with your family members, especially children and elderly parents? This imaginary scenario was once real, and it happened in a period known as the Holocaust. The Holocaust began in 1933 in Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party gaining power. Before World War II broke out in Europe during September 1939, Austria and Czechoslovakia had been taken over by Nazi Germany. By the time the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Nazi Germany had conquered and controlled most of Europe. The mass murder phase of the Holocaust was now in full operation.
That small percentage of the European population now trapped under the grip of Nazi Germany, those of the Other group, who were the number one target on Hitler''s list of inferiors and undesirables, the Jews. They faced the impossible odds described here. Eta Chait was a young Jewish woman in her 20s at the time. Despite these most difficult circumstances, she not only escaped her enclave--the ghetto--but was also involved in an all-Jewish armed resistance unit and was even part of its leadership. The Uniqueness of This Story Eta Chait''s story is not only unique because it is about resistance in the face of a nearly impossible and extremely adverse situation, but also because many of the stories of resistance in the Holocaust have not received much attention over the years. In particular, the subject of the Holocaust covered through books, education, and even films falls into three categories: The history of the tragedy and the evil psychology of its perpetrators. Many big thick books have been written in this first category, which is often the main emphasis in school textbooks and what gets taught in history classes. For learning about what happened in this tragic period, all are very important.
The individual stories of survivors or those who did not survive. As Holocaust survivors have aged and started to pass away, many now have been willing to share their tragic stories. The two most widely read books in this second category are Night, Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel''s horrific story of surviving the concentration camps, and The Diary of Anne Frank, the journal of a young Jewish girl''s attempt to survive in hiding. In fact, these books have been the two most widely read book of all Holocaust genre and are often found in the curriculum of many English classes at the middle school and high school levels. These individual stories of survival and loss are also very critical to a thorough understanding of the struggles of those entrapped by the Holocaust. The stories of resistance and rescue. This third category on the subject of the Holocaust is least recognized, least known, and least taught. It contains the stories of the Jews and non-Jews who stood up against the Nazi tyranny to try and save the lives of Jews from certain death.
These are the stories of ordinary people, not governments, or armies. They are the people who fought back despite the tremendous odds against them, or who worked to help Jews escape to safe destinations, or who helped Jews hide from the Nazi authorities and their collaborators. This book represents my second book in this category of resistance and rescue. My other book in this category eventually led me to write this story about Eta Chait. The Righteous Few: Two Who Made a Difference is the true story of a young married Dutch Christian couple named Frans and Mien Wijnakker. During World War II when the Netherlands was under the brutal occupation of Nazi Germany, this couple got involved when most people did not, and saved the lives of more than two dozen Jews from certain death. It is a story in which I also have a meaningful personal connection, as you will discover when you read the book. The Righteous Few: Two Who Made a Difference has put me on an unexpected journey, now ten years and counting.
I have had hundreds of events including speaking engagements and book discussions on this story across multiple cities in the United States and one in Canada, too. As the journey has evolved, I have given other related presentations under the umbrella of Heroes in the Holocaust, focusing on Jews who offered forceful resistance and other non-Jews and Jews who worked to rescue Jews from the clutches of Nazi tyranny. For the last few years, Eta Chait''s life has been one of the people of resistance and rescue I have included in these talks. These engagements have been in a wide variety of venues: places of faith, places of work, places of learning, places of service, and many others. Whether I have spoken directly on my first book in this area or about other Holocaust heroes and heroines, I commonly receive these comments: Amidst the horrific tragedy of the Holocaust, I didn''t know there was anything positive. Thank you for these inspirational stories of courage and compassion. How come we haven''t been hearing stories about these courageous people; they are very important for people to know about. Keep sharing these stories.
They teach valuable lessons and remind us of the good in people. In today''s often polarizing political climate, these stories of people standing up for themselves and for others and doing the right thing are needed now more than ever. These comments apply to Eta Chait and her resistance story. She became part of the leadership of an all-Jewish partisan unit in the forests of Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. Partisan was the term used for those Jews and non-Jews who went underground, taking up arms to engage in combat and defense activities against the Germans and their collaborators throughout all of Nazi-controlled Europe. By the time the United States got directly involved to fight in World War II, at the start of 1942 when the war in Europe was already over two years into it, Nazi Germany and its allies in the Axis Powers controlled most of Europe. Beyond a few countries allowed to remain neutral at this time (Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Turkey), only Great Britain and the Soviet Union were still standing trying to fight Germany and its allies. Both were losing badly at the time, before the United States even began to get its military involved in the fight.
As a consequence, the odds were stacked against anyone who got into any kind of partisan unit in German-occupied areas, even more so, Jews who were the top target of the Nazi extermination list. The Importance This Story Provides This book has an added importance. It is meant to counter the appalling bias that has gone on for many years that "the Jews went like lambs to the slaughter." This blame-the-victim bias is not typically applied to other people who became victims in this genocide or any other ones that have occurred before or since the Holocaust--Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda. For example, during the Holocaust in the fall of 1939 in Poland, the Germans initiated what Nazi officials referred to as Intelligenzaktion. After Poland had succumbed to the invasion of Nazi Germany by the end of September 1939, over the next three months some 60,000 people who the German conquerors viewed as part of Poland''s political and social elite, predominantly Catholic Poles, were rounded up and murdered. This intelligentsia or elite consisted of former government officials, former military officers, professors, teachers, priests, doctors, and wealthy landowners. This action was before Germany carried out its.