It's generally true that Jews weren't massively participating in military actions due to religious and cultural tradition. Secondly no one imagined that such a highly cultured nation as Germany would conduct genocide, the talk was always resettlement, forced labor and such. The Pianist shows very well how deceptive Germans were till the very end.
During the first stage of the war, till the Aktion Rheinhardt on March 16-17, 1942, German terror was aimed at Poles. Meanwhile ghettos were set up as early as 1940 and the left -leaning underground forces or partisan groups weren't organized till much later due to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and the Soviet attack on Poland. Polish society was extremely hostile towards anyone associated with communist organizations and even socialists of the pre-war Sanacja gravitated towards AK. The strongest leftist groups were located in the east and that's where a large number of Jews chose to go after Germany attacked Poland creating resentment among some parts of Polish population.
Now we can learn from the documents published in the book " The secret face of GL-AL and PPR" how People's Army allowed the murder of representatives of the Jewish community, cultivated the widespread anti-Semitism, and in addition collaborated with the occupying forces responsible for the Holocaust to break apart AK - the official Polish underground forces, which participated in some large-scale actions to save Jews from extermination.
Given all that you would be just as clueless till it was too late if you were a Jew living during those times. Your assumptions don't show adequate knowledge of a very complex political situation in Poland during WWII. It's also immature to play a know-it-all hero sitting safe and comfy in front of the computer.
I don't want to write a long post so read this to get a better idea of the political situation of that period(it's Google translated).
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&u=http://nin iwa22.cba.pl/pulawski_postrzeganie_zydowskich_oddzialow.htm&prev=/ search%3Fq%3Dzydzi%2Bw%2Bpartyzantce%2Bludowej%2B%2Bw%2Bpolsce%26clien t%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3DOoO%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26channel% 3Dsb
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erol-mehmet-a
10 years ago
Well, it is not really that complex. Germany tells you that you are a Jewish and just because of this i will shut you down in a rotten ghetto. No need to know if they will start mass genocide. That one thing is enough to escape and to join the nearest partisan group; be it nationalist polish groups or bolhevik groups.
It is not heroism either. Heroism would be extraordinary sacrifice you would make for your country. This is plain simple SELF-DEFENSE. Jews didn't self-defend themselves probably because they already accepted the so-called "resettlement". That is precisely what i call as "the problem" of the Jews. Nations started revolts for much less than ghettos, forced labour and humiliating wrist bands. And at that time, there were plenty of resistance organizations to join.
This is similar to the case of so called "Sonderkommandos". These people were rehabilitated some time after WWII with the reasoning that they couldn't have done anything else other than obeying the orders. No, they could have attacked Germans with forks-axes-shovels etc. if they are brave enough, if not they could have simply committed suicide instead of sending their fellow men-women into death.
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