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Nechama Tec is a professor emerita of sociology at the University of Connecticut.  A Holocaust survivor and scholar, her books include When Light Pierced the Darkness (1986); her memoir Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (1984); Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (1993), for which she was awarded the 1994 International Anne Frank Special Recognition prize; and Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror (2013), from which this essay was adapted.

If Anne Frank Had a Gun

Nechama Tec

I am often asked why Jews went like sheep to the slaughter during the Holocaust. The question falsely assumes it was possible to resist, but Jews failed to do so.

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