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During World War Two, the European Jewish population was faced with this during Shoah (the Holocaust). From Kristallnacht in November 1938 to the collapse of the Nazi Regime in May 1945, they relied heavily on each other and their instincts to discover ways to survive while in the ghettos, labor camps, and partisan units, if they managed to escape and head for the forests. Even with some Jews turning on their own to help the Nazis, the vast majority stuck together and did everything they could to persist and survive. While only two uprisings were viewed as successes, the ghetto and camp revolts that failed still showed the Jewish people were not going to lie down to the Germans and that they were never going to give up. This thesis details some of the ways Jews fought for survival in the ghettos, concentration/extermination camps, and as partisan fighters.

abstract: When the Warsaw Ghetto was demolished by German forces towards the end of World War II, there were few physical traces of the Ghetto left standing. As such, both historians and the public must look to other types of sources to understand what life and death were like for the inhabitants of the Ghetto, and how they have remembered their experiences within the Ghetto. These memories and representations of the Warsaw Ghetto can be found in memoir-style written works, and later, in films based on these works. This thesis will examine the ways in which the Warsaw Ghetto was represented by two authors who survived it, Władisław Szpilman and Marcel Reich-Ranicki, and how their memory of the Warsaw Ghetto is represented in the films based on their lives and survival, The Pianist, and Mein Leben: Marcel Reich-Ranicki. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis History 2020

The purpose of this diploma thesis is to analyse the works Ghetto Warschau by Max Zweig and Revolte der Heiligen by Ernst Sommer. The thematic focus of the thesis is the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The thesis aims to present a systematic analysis and subsequent comparison of both works, with emphasis on the issue of religion. It tries to find out how Judaism together with the inconsistent approach of the Jews to the Jewish faith influenced the approach of the Jews to the revolt in the studied works. The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter presents the history and principles of the Jewish religion as well as the history of the Jewish population. The second chapter focuses on the history of the Jewish population in Polish territory, also on the period of World War II and the emergence of ghettos, including the Warsaw ghetto. The next chapter presents both authors' biographies and works, with particular emphasis on common aspects of their work and life. The fourth chapter deals with the analysis itself. The conclusion of the diploma thesis contains a summary of the analysis and answers research questions.

In Holocaust research, the study of elderly Jews in Nazi German ghettos remains a blind spot. This thesis begins to fill the research gap by exploring the everyday life of elderly Jews and their agency under the structural conditions of the Warsaw ghetto. On a broader scale, my key findings contribute to scholarly debates and lay the foundation for further research, on Jewish responses to ghettoization and agency during the Holocaust, including the continuity and disruption of gender roles and social hierarchies in the family and Jewish ghetto community as well as religious practices as a coping strategy for elderly Jews in the ghetto. The theoretical framework augments current gender scholarship and explanations of agency and structure in the ghetto with intersectional theory, including gender, class as intervening variables, which represents a barely used theoretical approach to an under-researched subject. To answer my main research question "How did gender, class, and family as well as the Jewish community and German authorities influence the life of elderly Jews in the ghetto?”, the analysis is conducted in the tradition of the history of the everyday on the micro-level. My empirical analysis examines the living conditions, agency, survival, and vulnerability to violence and death of elderly people in the Warsaw ghetto. The primary sources used in the empirical analysis are a combination of archival documents - including the clandestine Oneg Shabbat ghetto archive -, diaries and memoirs by elderly Jews as well as oral history interviews of their grandchildren. A general scarcity of sources by elderly, especially poor elderly and female elderly Jews in the primary sources available to the author, constitute the limitations of this thesis.