I want to share Anna Bat-Chai Wrobel's article on resistance and victimization during the Holocaust, featured in Jewish Currents magazine's Autumn 2015 special issue. The kernel of her article is that there is no clear dichotomy between resisters and victims. Everyone lost. Many died. She writes about the importance of fighting for the memory of the dead:
"My parents taught us that the foremost role of Jewish resistance is to fight for the memory of the dead — the beaten, broken, terrorized, starved, diseased, deceived. The majority of resisters and fighters, after all, were also killed. “Hero” and “victim” blur within actual contexts. Jews were trapped across a whole continent, where many non-Jews, too, lived in terror while others murderously practiced Jew-hatred without legal repercussions. All European Jews lost families, homes, and futures, as two thirds of the nine million fell to bullets, gas, and dust."
Read more here: http://jewishcurrents.org/protecting-the-victims-again-39792