How an unlikely rebellion at a Jewish extermination camp was built on years of everyday resistance

Richard Glazar insisted that no one survived the Holocaust without help. To this Prague-born Jewish survivor, who endured Nazi imprisonment at Treblinka and Theresienstadt, plus years in hiding, it was impossible to persevere without others’ support. Glazar conceded that some of his fellow Treblinka survivors were “loners”, but he nevertheless believed that they “survived because they were carried by someone, someone who cared for them as much, or almost as much as for themselves”.

Carrying someone else took many forms. For fellow Treblinka prisoner Samuel Goldberg, a Polish Jew born in a small town called Bagatelle, it was the moment the women of his work detail stood up to a guard to save Goldberg’s life. For those around Glazar, it was the times he brought them more to eat because his position as a fence builder gave him chances to buy food outside the camp. Still more prisoners benefited from a friend willing to literally hold them up during roll call so no guard would notice they were sick – a near-certain death sentence.

In a place meant to destroy all Jewish life, the smallest acts of support and comfort were resistance.

On August 2, 1943, the Treblinka II extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland was the site of one of the most dramatic acts of armed...

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