Monday, Jan. 27, 2025 at 10 p.m. on KPBS TV / PBS app
"Resistance: They Fought Back," a feature documentary about Jewish resistance, community and strength during the Holocaust, premieres on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Monday, Jan. 27, 2025
Told by survivors, their children, and expert witnesses from the U.S., Israel, and Europe, "Resistance: They Fought Back" is a revelation based on extensive research ofhow the Jews of Europe fought back against the Nazis. It uncovers evidence of non-violent methods that served as crucial tools of resistance and evolved into Jewish armed revolts in ghettos, forests and death camps, even as the odds of success were vanishingly small.
Today, almost 80 years after the Holocaust, this story remains largely unknown with many believing that “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” But this is where the real story begins. Jews did not go as sheep to the slaughter. They fought back. Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., the film provides a much-needed corrective to the myth of Jewish passivity.
Executive Producer and Co-Director Paula S. Apsell, former executive producer of the PBS science series NOVA, recounts: “I was on location in Lithuania when anarchaeological team led by the late Professor Richard Freund discovered a tunnel in the Ponary killing site in Lithuania, where Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered 100,000 people, including 70,000 Jews. The Germans, fearing their war crimes would be known, brought in 80 remaining Jews to exhume and burn the bodies of those they had murdered. Those Jews, knowing they would be the next victims, decided to try to escape by digging a tunnel. Of the 80 Jewish prisoners that dug the tunnel, 12 succeeded in making it into the forest where Jewish partisans were waiting. I had not previously known anything about this heroic tunnel escape or other examples of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, except for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, so I embarked on a quest to uncover what are, to most of us, lost chapters of history. This evolved into the feature documentary ''Resistance: They Fought Back.'”
Watch on Your Schedule: "Resistance: They Fought Back" will be available to stream on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and the PBS app, available on iOS, Android, Roku streaming devices, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV, Chromecast and VIZIO.
Credits: Executive produced and co-directed by Paula Apsell and Kirk Wolfinger and executive produced by Professor Michael Berenbaum, Michael J Bohnen, Ori and Mirit Eisen, the late Professor Richard A. Freund, and Richard A. Salomon. A production of Leading Edge Productions, Inc., in association with Lone Wolf Media, distributed for broadcast to PBS.
