Hello, and thank you for joining me for today's history lesson.

I'm Mr. Marchant, and it'll be my responsibility to help guide you through all of our resources today.

My top aim is to make sure that by the end of the lesson, you can meet our learning objective.

Welcome to today's lesson, which is part of our unit on the Holocaust, where we've been asking ourselves, what was the Holocaust? By the end of today's lesson, you'll be able to explain what it meant for Jews during the Holocaust.

to face choiceless choices.

There are two key words which will help us navigate our way through today's lesson.

Those are liquidated and compliance.

Liquidated means to destroy something and compliance means behaviour which obeys an order, rule, or request.

Today's lesson will be split into three parts, and we'll begin by focusing on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The Warsaw ghetto was the biggest in Europe.

The ghetto was first established in 1940 and had a population of roughly 400,000 Jews.

In 1943, Jews living in the ghetto staged a violent uprising against the Nazis.

Like in other ghettos, Jews forced to live in the Warsaw ghetto faced terrible conditions.

The ghetto was overcrowded and underfed.

Daily allocations of food averaged 180 to 220 calories by 1941.

In other words, Jews living in a ghetto were provided with less than 10% of their daily recommended calorie intakes.

By July, 1941, almost 200 people a day were dying inside the Warsaw ghetto.

So, thinking about what we've just heard, I want you to identify an example which shows that living conditions in the Warsaw ghetto were poor.

Pause the video here and press play when you're ready to check your answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that daily allocations of food average 180 to 220 calories by 1941, demonstrating that Jews living in the ghetto were underfed.

Or alternatively, you may have said that by July, 1941, almost 200 people a day were dying inside the ghetto, demonstrating that conditions must have been poor.

The 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a response to both short-term and long-term issues.

The uprising was the largest revolt by Jews to occur anywhere in Europe during the Holocaust, and has been remembered as a significant example of Jewish resistance to the Nazis.

The decision to stage an uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was triggered by mass deportations known as the Great Action, from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942.

After these deportations, just 70,000 to 80,000 Jews remained in Warsaw, to whom it seemed clear that any further deportations would mean death.

Subsequently, a resistance organisation was formed known as the Jewish Combat Organisation or the ZOB.

This was committed to the self-defense of Jews who remained in Warsaw.

The ZOB also agreed to cooperate with another armed group in the ghetto, the Jewish Military Union, otherwise known as the ZZW.

Together, the ZOB and ZZW commanded over 700 fighters and managed to smuggle weapons into the ghetto.

So let's make sure we have a secure understanding of what we've just heard.

What was the Great Action in the Warsaw ghetto? Was it a revolt by Jews against the Nazis? A mass deportation of Jews to extermination camps? Or a mass deportation of new Jews into the ghetto? Pause the video here and press play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that the correct answer was b.

The Great Action occurred in 1942.

This was the name given to the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to extermination camps like Treblinka.

In April, 1943, the ZOB received advanced warning of a final deportation action planned by the Germans.

In response, the ZOB warned residents in the Warsaw ghetto to retreat to their hiding places or bunkers and began to fight against German forces on the 19th of April.

Initially, Jewish fighters was successful at forcing German forces back outside of the ghetto walls.

However, Jewish fighters were poorly equipped and lacked military training.

Meanwhile, the Germans were able to command around 2000 soldiers and police, reinforced with artillery and tanks.

Although fighting lasted for nearly an entire month, resistance fighters in Warsaw were simply unable to match the military power marshalled by the Nazis.

The Germans razed the Warsaw ghetto to the ground, meaning that they destroyed it, demolishing buildings block by block in order to force out their opponents.

In the course of the fighting, German-led forces suffered over 100 casualties.

However, this compared to a total of over 7,000 Jews who died during the uprising.

Once the fighting had ended, the Warsaw ghetto was completely liquidated.

7,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka, where they were murdered, and another 42,000 survivors were sent to a range of forced labour and concentration camps.

The vast majority of those sent from Warsaw to forced labour and concentration camps were murdered during a two day mass shooting operation in November, 1943, known as Operation Harvest Festival.

So let's check our understanding of everything that we've just heard.

Which statement is most accurate? That the Nazis had better trained forces in Warsaw, but were outnumbered by Jewish resistance fighters.

That Jewish resistant fighters in Warsaw were better trained than the Nazis, but were outnumbered.

Or that Jewish resistance fighters in Warsaw had less training than Nazi forces and were outnumbered.

Pause the video here and press play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that the correct answer was c.

Jewish resistance fighters in Warsaw had less training than Nazi forces and were outnumbered.

This contributed to the ultimate defeat of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

And let's try another question.

This time we have a statement which says, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising helped most Jews who had remained in the ghetto to survive the Holocaust.

Is that statement true or false? Pause the video here and press play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that that statement was false, but we need to be able to justify our response.

So why is it that that original statement was false? Pause video here and press play when you are ready to check your justification.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that our original statement was false because 42,000 survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were deported to forced labour and concentration camps where most were murdered there as part of Operation Harvest Festival in November, 1943.

This clearly shows that the vast majority of people who had remained in the Warsaw Ghetto before the uprising were murdered before the end of that year.

And so now we're in a good position to put all of our knowledge about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into practise.

We have a set of events in our table, and starting with the earliest, I want you to sort those events into chronological order.

You should use the numbers one to six to indicate your answers.

So pause video here and press play when you are ready to check your responses.

Okay, well done for all of your hard work on that task.

So I asked you to sort the events in our table into chronological order, and your answers should have looked as follows.

The first event was that many Jews were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto as part of the Great Action in 1942.

This helped trigger the ZOB and the ZZWs preparations and plans for an uprising against the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto.

The third event you should have identified was that German forces were pushed outta the ghetto walls when the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising first began in April, 1943.

The fourth event you should have identified was that the uprising was defeated after nearly a month of fighting.

The fifth event was at 42,000 Jews who survived the uprising were deported to labour and concentration camps.

And finally, you should have identified that most survivors at Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were murdered during Operation Harvest Festival, which occurred in November, 1943.

So, really well done if you identified all of those events in their correct chronological order.

And now we're ready to move on to the second part of our lesson where we are going to focus on the Lodz ghetto.

The Lodz ghetto was another location where Jews were imprisoned by the Nazis.

160,000 Jews were forced into the ghetto when it was set up in early 1940, and it became the longest lasting ghetto established during the Holocaust.

Unlike in Warsaw, there was no major violent resistance to the Holocaust in the Lodz ghetto.

Like other ghettos set up by the Nazis, living conditions in the Lodz ghetto were terrible.

Most of the ghetto had neither running water nor a sewer system, whilst overcrowding and starvation were widespread.

Forced labour was also a major feature of life in Lodz.

96 factories were established around the ghetto, which Jews were forced to work in.

These factories produced goods, including uniforms for the German military.

In just over three years, somewhere between 45,000 and 50,000 Jews who entered the Lodz ghetto died due to starvation, disease, brutal treatment, or a combination of those factors.

As in Warsaw, large scale deportations from the Lodz ghetto began in 1942.

55,000 Jews were resettled to use the Nazi's term between January and May, followed by another 15,000 in June, all of whom were murdered at Chełmno extermination camp in Poland.

So, thinking about what we just heard, I want you to write the missing word for the following sentence.

96 blank was set up in Lodz ghetto where Jews had to work as forced labourers.

So what's the missing word? Pause the video here and press play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that the correct answer was factories.

96 factories were set up in the Lodz ghetto, where Jews had to work as forced labourers.

The Lodz ghetto had a leadership known as the Jewish Council headed by Chaim Rumkowski and also its own Jewish police force.

Understandingly, overwhelming difficulty that armed resistance posed, Rumkowski and other leaders in Lodz chose to comply as much as possible with German orders.

This choice was informed in part by the knowledge that leaders who resisted German orders would simply be shot and replaced.

22 of the first 30 council members in Lodz had been shot by the Germans, simply to set an example.

Compliance in Lodz included an emphasis on making the ghettos factories productive and useful to the German war effort.

It was hoped being a productive ghetto would lead to the ghetto being preserved, simply out of Nazi self-interest.

Compliance in Lodz also extended to orders for deportations.

In early 1942, the head of the Jewish Police, Leon Rosenblatt, complained that whilst he knew deportees would be murdered, he said, I have to choose people for this.

If not, I will be shot.

What will the Germans do then? They've already told me.

Then they will choose which Jews to deport.

Rumkowski expressed similar ideas when justifying his own decision to comply with an order demanding the deportation of Jewish children from Lodz.

Like other leaders in Lodz, Rumkowski and Rosenblatt hoped their choices would allow those who remained to survive.

Between September, 1942 and May, 1944, there were no further deportations from the Lodz ghetto, during a period when other major ghettos were liquidated.

However, in the spring of 1944, the Nazis made the decision to destroy the Lodz ghetto.

By this time, Lodz was the last remaining Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Almost all of the ghetto's remaining population was deported to Chełmno and Auschwitz where most were murdered, just half a year before the area around Lodz was liberated by Soviet armies.

So, let's make sure we have a secure understanding of everything that we've heard.

How did leaders like Chaim Rumkowski and Leon Rosenblatt respond to the Holocaust? Was it that they used a policy of compliance with German orders? That they used a policy of peaceful resistance? Or that they used a policy of violent resistance? Pause the video here and press play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that the correct answer was a.

Leaders of the Lodz ghetto, like Chaim Rumkowski and Leon Rosenblatt followed a policy of compliance with German orders.

And let's try another question.

This time we have a statement which reads, Jewish leaders in Lodz believed they could not prevent Jews from being deported.

Is that statement true or false? Pause the video here and press play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that that statement was true, but we need to justify our response.

How can we tell that that original statement was true? Pause the video here and press play when you're ready to check your response.

Okay, well done to everybody who said the Jewish head of police.

Leon Rosenblatt argued that if he did not identify Jews to be deported, then the Nazis would kill him and choose Jews to be deported themselves.

So clearly he believed, just like Chaim Rumkowski did as well, that they could not prevent Jews from being deported.

And let's try another question.

What was the eventual fate of Lodz ghetto? Was it that it was liquidated in 1944? That it was liberated with most Jews surviving in 1944? Or that it fought and defeated the Nazis in 1944? Pause the video here and press play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that the correct answer was a, the Lodz ghetto was liquidated in 1944.

It had become, by that point, the longest lasting ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland.

However, like all the rest, such as Warsaw, it was still liquidated.

So, we are now ready to put all of our knowledge about the Lodz ghetto into practise.

How did responses to deportations differ between the ghettos in Lodz and Warsaw? You should include the following terms as part of your answer, compliance, uprising, and productive.

So pause the video here and press play when you are ready to reflect on your response.

Okay, well done for all of your effort on that task.

So I asked you how did responses to deportations differ between the ghettos in Lodz and Warsaw? And your answer may have included German plans to carry out large scale deportations of Jews helped to trigger an uprising in Warsaw in 1943.

By contrast, leaders of the Lodz Council preferred to avoid armed resistance even when mass deportations occurred in the ghetto in 1942.

It was hoped that compliance with German orders would help as many Jews in Lodz ghetto to survive for as long as possible.

For instance, leaders like Chaim Rumkowski, encouraged productive work in the ghetto's factories in the hope that this would lead the Germans to preserve the ghetto and its Jewish population out of self-interest.

So, really well done if your own response look something like that model, which we've just seen, especially if you manage to include all three of those terms, which I provided before we started the task.

And now we're ready to move on to the third and final part of our lesson for today, where we are going to focus on the idea of choiceless choices.

Jews responding to persecution in Holocaust, were able to make choices.

As was the case in Lodz and Warsaw, the choices Jews made about how to respond sometimes differed.

However, the meaningfulness of these choices has been questioned by many historians.

Lawrence Langer developed the idea of choiceless choices to describe situations many Jews faced during the Holocaust.

Choiceless choices refer to situations where critical decisions people had to make did not offer realistic options between life and death.

Choiceless choices required people to choose between responses, which were all unfavourable and would not ordinarily be made or chosen.

So, thinking about what we've heard so far, which other phrase could help describe the idea of choiceless choices? Is it a draw-draw situation? Lose-lose situations? Or win-win situations? Pause the video here and press play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that the correct answer was b.

Choiceless choices could also be described as lose-lose situations because these were circumstances where the options that Jews were choosing between were all unfavourable and would never ordinarily be chosen.

Choiceless choices were made by Jews in situations that were extreme and gave them little real control over their own survival.

For this reason, historians have argued that people must carefully consider the situations Jews faced when analysing the ways in which they responded to the Holocaust.

Despite the differences between the actions taken in the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos, decisions taken by Jews in both could be understood as choiceless choices.

So let's make sure we have a secure understanding of what we've just heard.

I want you to change one word to correct the following statement.

When making choiceless choices, Jews usually had considerable control over the overall situation they faced.

So consider which word appears to be incorrect and what should it be changed to? Pause the video here and press play when you are ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that the incorrect word was considerable and that they should have been changed to little.

When making choiceless choices, Jews usually had little control over the overall situation they faced.

We can use some source materials produced during the Holocaust to help us explore this idea of choiceless choices further.

On the screen you can see an extract which comes from a leaflet produced by the Jewish Combat Organisation, the ZOB in the Warsaw ghetto in December, 1942.

The extract says, "Do not go willingly to your death.

Make the enemy pay for blood with blood, for death with death.

Let us fall upon the enemy, kill, and disarm him.

Let us stand up against the criminals, and if necessary, die like heroes.

If we die in this way, we are not lost.

Make the enemy pay dearly for your lives." So, historians using this extract can use it to support the idea that those who decided to fight in the Warsaw ghetto were making a choiceless choice.

That conclusion can be reached, for example, by looking at the part of the extract where it says, make the enemy pay for blood with blood, for death, with death.

This phrase does not claim that armed resistance would defeat the Nazis, but it does suggest that death was the probable outcome of trying to resist the Nazis, that the death of Jews would be paid for with the death of Germans and their collaborators, that the blood of Jews would be paid for with the blood of the Nazis and their collaborators.

The language is not of success and freedom.

Furthermore, if we look later on in the extract where it talks about if we die in this way, we are not lost, and make the enemy pay dearly for your lives.

Again, we have this idea that resistance is presented as a choice on how Jews were likely to die, not as a choice between surviving or dying.

And that's the kind of choice that people would not ordinarily make unless they'd been forced into a situation where their survival was pretty much out of their own control.

Hence, this extract helps to demonstrate the idea that Jews during the Holocaust faced and had to make choiceless choices.

So let's make sure we have a secure understanding of what we were just discussing.

We have a statement on the screen that reads the ZOB, believed in uprising was likely to free Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.

Is that statement true or false? Pause video here and press play when you're ready to see the right answer.

Okay, well done to everybody who said that that statement was false, but we need to be able to justify our answer.

So why is it that that original statement was false? Pause video here and press play when you are ready to check your response.

Okay, well done to everybody who said the ZOB did not suggest an uprising was likely to free Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, but argued that it would give them control over the way in which they were likely to die.

This shows that Jews, even in the Warsaw ghetto who chose to fight, felt they had very little control over their own survival and over the overall situation which they faced.

So, we're now in a good position to put all of our knowledge about choiceless choices into practise.

How did the leaders of Lodz ghetto face choiceless choices? Your answer should explain what a choiceless choice is and provide at least one specific example of this situation being encountered in the Lodz ghetto.

So pause the video here and press play when you're ready to reflect on your response.

Okay, well done for all of your hard work on that task.

So I asked you how did the leaders of Lodz ghetto face choiceless choices? And your answer may have included, choiceless choices are situations where people have to make decisions where all the options available to them are bad and would not ordinarily be chosen.

In Lodz ghetto, Jewish leaders chose compliance with Nazi orders even when it was demanded that they select Jews for deportation.

This was a choiceless choice because agreeing to do so, actively sent some Jews away to their deaths.

But resistance was unlikely to make much difference either.

As the police chief in Lodz ghetto, Leon Rosenblatt explained, refusing to comply would simply have led to the execution of those leaders who resisted German orders and deportations would've taken place anyway.

Furthermore, Jewish leaders in Lodz ghetto feared that resistance might provoke collective punishments like even bigger deportations leading to more deaths.

Jews in Lodz were unable to escape this situation where deaths would occur no matter how they chose to respond, and therefore had to make a choice between options, which all seemed poor.

In this way, the decisions made by leaders in Lodz ghetto can be understood as choiceless choices.

So, really well done if your own response looks something like that model, which we've just seen.

And that means we've now reached the end of today's lesson, which puts us in a good position to summarise our learning about choiceless choices during the Holocaust.

We've seen that the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the largest Jewish revolt against the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising failed to defeat the Nazis, and most survivors were murdered by the end of the year.

Jewish leaders in Lodz ghetto complied with German orders rather than resist them during the Holocaust.

The Lodz ghetto was the longest lasting ghetto in Poland, but despite its compliance, it was liquidated by the Nazis in 1944.

And Jews faced choiceless choices, which offered them little meaningful control over whether they survived the Holocaust or not.

So, really well done for all of the effort that you've put into today's lesson.

The Holocaust can be a complicated and difficult topic to study, especially this idea of choiceless choices, which is particularly complex.

And I hope today's lesson has helped you better understand what the Holocaust was and how Jews experienced and responded to it differently.