The Jewish Resistance by Paul Roland

"The Jews have always lived in hope."

Threatened with extermination, many Jewish people refused to go passively to their deaths at the hands of the Nazis during World War II and instead put up heroic resistance. Prisoners at Sobibór and Treblinka organized successful revolts, while at Auschwitz they sacrificed their lives to dynamite the crematorium.

Beyond the barbed wire of the camps, hundreds of Jewish people were active in the French resistance and thousands fought with partisans in other occupied countries. One and a half million more served in the Allied armed forces. Incredibly, it took the Nazis longer to subdue the forces of the Warsaw ghetto than it had taken them to defeat the Polish army in 1939. This book reveals a little-known chapter of history and uncovers many stories of amazing courage in the face of overwhelming odds.

Over the years I have read many books, both fiction and non-fiction, regarding the Holocaust and with every book I continue to be shocked, appalled and heartbroken. It is completely outside of my understanding, and the understanding of most of us, how such atrocities could ever have occurred.

This book strikes a slightly different chord to many accounts of the Holocaust and details how many Jews fought back. I was unaware that the Baum Group, from Berlin, who were a resistance group within the Auschwitz death camp, organised the sabotage of various SS activities from within the camp itself.

Or Hannah Senesh, a Hungarian poet and partisan, who left the safety of Palestine to help Jews in Eastern Europe. She had emigrated to the Jewish Homeland in 1939. Four years later she enlisted as a paratrooper in the British Army.

There are a multitude of similar accounts that the author has presented with a good writing style and I encourage you to read them for yourself. Clearly well researched, Mr. Roland has added another excellent account of WWII atrocities to his existing works.

Without doubt, this is a sobering read and I can not finish this review without quoting a passage from the book. It is written by Irena Sendler who was a Polish nurse and helped rescue 2,500 children from the ghetto.

"Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory. Heroes do extraordinary things. What I did was not an extraordinary thing. It was normal.

I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality. The term 'hero' irritates me greatly - the opposite is true - I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little."

I do beg to differ with her claims here as, in my humble opinion, she and her contemporaries most certainly were heroes. May their memories be for blessing.

ISBN: 978 1788283977

Publisher: Arcturus Publishing

About the Author:

Paul Roland is a recording artist with many albums to his name. He has been called the godfather of steampunk.

Roland is the author of more than 40 books on the subject of mysticism, crime, WWII and the occult. His books, which have been translated into more than 15 languages including Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Hebrew, cover spiritual and occult traditions, which culminated in his creation of The Kabbalah Cards (AGMuller/Urania) in collaboration with artist Sylvia Gainsford. The cards are a radical reinterpretation of the Jewish mystical teachings with a serious psychological orientation which distinguished them from the Kabbalah themed tarot packs which preceded them.