In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labour camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong and took many forms; fighting with those few weapons that could be found, fighting with sticks and knives, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food under the threat of death, the nobility of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair. Even passivity was a form of resistance. ‘Not to act,’ Emanuel Ringelblum wrote in the aftermath of one particularly savage reprisal, ‘not to lift a hand against the Germans, has become the quiet passive heroism of the common Jew.’ To die with dignity was a form of resistance. To resist the dehumanizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be abased to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were resistance. Merely to give witness by one’s own testimony was, in the end, to contribute to a moral victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit.

- Martin Gilbert,
The Holocaust: A Jewish Tragedy (Collins, 1986)