Yes, the Jews did resist
Kaplen JCC will screen Paula Apsell’s ‘They Fought Back’
Paula S. Apsell spent 33 years at “Nova,” the PBS science program. Most of that time, she was the series’ executive producer. Along the way, she garnered several Emmys, including a lifetime achievement award, a Peabody, and a fistful of other prizes.
Around nine years ago, she was on location, filming a documentary near Vilna in Lithuania. Specifically, she was at the Ponero Forest killing site, where approximately 100,000 people — 70,000 of them Jews — were slaughtered. Toward the end of the war, the Nazis — hoping to hide evidence of their atrocities — brought the last 80 surviving Jews to the site, to exhume and burn the bodies.
Knowing that they would be killed as soon as they completed their task, these Jews secretly built a tunnel, using their hands and spoons and any utensils that might help. Of the 80, a dozen managed to escape to the surrounding woods where partisans awaited them.
That story, “Holocaust Escape Tunnel,” became a 2016 episode of “Nova.” And maybe even more importantly, it raised Ms. Apsell’s awareness.
Speaking on Zoom from her winter home in Sarasota, Ms. Apsell, 77, recalled: “When they confirmed the existence of this tunnel, which had just been rumored to exist, I wondered why hadn’t I heard about this before. In fact, why hadn’t I heard of any example of Jewish resistance to the Nazis during the Holocaust, except for the Warsaw uprising?”
A few years later, retired and apparently restless, she began producing and directing independent films. But thoughts of Vilna never left her.
“Is it true that Jews went to their deaths passively, like sheep to the slaughter, as I had heard so many times?” she wondered. “Or is that a kind of pernicious myth?”
Her research proved “how prevalent Jewish resistance was. Instances that we never heard of. Even me, who’d taken Holocaust courses, and that kind of got under my skin.
“What surprised me and shocked me was that there were so many examples of Jewish resistance that I could make 10 films. It also surprised me that they’re not taught all the time. It’s as if Jewish history ignored the Maccabees.”
The Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly will screen the fruit of Ms. Apsell’s efforts, “Resistance: They Fought Back,” on January 27; that’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. The movie also will air on PBS that evening, at 10 p.m.
The film is divided into three sections.
The first is called “Amidah,” like the prayer, and recounts efforts by Jews to stand up, albeit passively, to the Nazis. In the ghettos, they opened illegal schools and libraries and had prayer services, risking death by doing so.
The second section is “Armed Resistance.” As the film points out, the most well-known example, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, lasted longer than the armies of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands resisted the Nazis. But there were others, as well. Most famously, the Bielski Brothers, who established a partisan camp in Belarus, and are credited with saving more than 1,200 Jewish lives.
Among the less well-known actions are, for example, the efforts of Abba Kovner, who unsuccessfully attempted to start an uprising in the Vilna ghetto. When that failed, he escaped and joined Soviet partisans. He ultimately made aliyah and, perhaps counterintuitively, became one of Israel’s greatest poets.
The film’s final chapter is “Resistance in the Camps.” “There were seven uprisings in the camps,” Ms. Apsell said. “Six were led by Jews. How can we not know this? I hope my film will remedy that.”
Ms. Apsell grew up in Marblehead, a suburb of Boston, where her parents helped found Temple Emanuel, a Reform synagogue where Paula attended Hebrew school and sang in the choir. “Girls were not bat mitzvahed then,” she said.
Her dad, David, was a salesman; her mom, Evelyn, was a homemaker, but also a world-class bridge player. “We were solidly middle-class people,” she said. “My parents realized they had to save for college, so my mother and grandmother opened the Wardrobe Exchange, which was the first consignment shop in New England.”
At her parents’ insistence, Ms. Apsell went to Brandeis, where she became a psych major. But she also had a part-time job at the school’s high energy physics lab, which provided some early training for what was to become her career. Even more important, it is where she met Sheldon, a graduate student.
They got married after she graduated. “His family was much more observant than mine,” Ms. Apsell said. “They were Conservative, maybe leaning toward Conservadox. They kept a kosher home. So that was kind of the direction in which we tended in our marriage.”
In fact, when they moved to Newton, they joined a Conservative synagogue named, yes, Temple Emanuel — and just before this interview, Paula spent an hour on a Zoom with her Temple Emanuel sisterhood’s Talmud class.
After college, Ms. Apsell took a low-level job at WGBH, Boston’s public television station, which probably is the most important public television station in the nation. It is where “Nova” is produced, and also “Frontline,” “American Experience,” and “Antiques Roadshow.”
Ms. Apsell slowly made her way up the ladder, producing children’s shows and other programs on WGBH’s radio outlet. But she wanted to get into television and took a demotion from show producer in radio to production assistant on “Nova” to make the switch.
Making “Resistance” was an “amazing five-year adventure,” she said. She hopes the film will change the perception about Jewish behavior during the Holocaust. “What’s stressed about the Holocaust is Jewish victimhood, which, of course, was a very real thing. But there’s another side to the story, which is how Jews reacted to this.”
Who: The Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly
What: Will show “Resistance: They Fought Back”
When: On International Holocaust Remembrance Day — that’s Monday, January 27 — at 7 p.m.
How much: Kaplen JCC members pay $12, and nonmembers pay $15
And also: Marvin Raab, the assistant director of the New Jersey Holocaust Education Commission and the son of Esther, one of the film’s heroines, will lead a discussion after the film.
For information and to register: Go to jccotp.org, scroll down to Upcoming Events, and click on “Resistance — They Fought Back,” or call Marissa at (201) 408-1496.
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