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any chance for political organization, wondering where they were going. Some Jews from the West were transported to Auschwitz in comfort able railway carriages, having been told by the Germans that at their destination they would be housed in hotels and the men assigned jobs. Some ended up in the ghettos of the East. Children often were separated from their parents and taken away to special blocks and demarcation points. Some families, like the Franks, hid in cellars, attics or specially constructed rooms. Families fought with each other; strangers often were forced to live in the same room. The inability to protect or rescue children and infants had a devastating impact on consciousness and will, as it would on anyone unable to protect their family from violence.
    Demoralization produced by ghettoization is recorded in count less diaries describing life in Vilna, Lvov, Bialystok, Theresienstadt, Kovno, Lodz and Warsaw. 6 What emerges from these diaries – many written by teenagers with a painfully clear grasp of family life – is a picture of a community devastated by barbarism, never embracing underground movements, partisan fighters or strategies based on violence that might bring mass reprisal. Diary entries critical to an understanding of the Jewish community’s despair describe a popula tion increasingly suffering physical weakness and debilitation, and forced to confront the terror of not being able to protect children. By the time these victims reached the gas chambers – if they had not been killed by disease, brutality and mass starvation – they had been depleted by hunger and the war waged by the Germans on physical survival.
    It is that story – the progressive and unrelenting German assault in the ghettos – that needs to be examined side-by-side with Jewish violent resistance and partisan action. The one cannot be under stood without the other, since out of the psychological environment of despair came the ghetto undergrounds and partisans, the fighting units. The resistance faced tremendous odds from the Germans and the despair in the ghettos, although many fighters found moral comfort in the violence of resistance. Lerman:
    ‘We weren’t heroes; I’ll tell you about a hero, a little girl with us, about twelve years old. She had blond hair and blue eyes and looked very Polish. So we would send her on courier missions, to get supplies, send messages, things like that. For medicine we were always in need of iodine; this was before penicillin and iodine was effective in treating a number of different infections. We sent her into a village for a couple of liters of iodine, but she was caught. Someone told us the Germans offered to send her back to her mother if she would talk; if she would tell where our camp was. But she never talked. They tortured her horribly; but she died never having revealed our position. That child, she is the hero. They never intended to return her to her mother; by then her mother probably was dead.’
    The most dramatic underground action – the Warsaw Uprising of spring 1943, when only 50,000 people remained in the ghetto – gathered support from at the most a few hundred fighters. 7
    The devastation produced by the massive transports of the previ ous spring and summer had depleted the community of the sense of itself as a world with a future; life in the ghetto had been reduced to a monumental effort simply to survive physically, with many pacing the empty streets wondering when their turn would come. 8 The sur vivors of previous roundups watched as family members disappeared and died. Diaries of the mass roundups in the summer of 1942 describe children and infants killed or taken to the central train station, forced to wait for days without food or water; parents return ing home to find their children missing; children coming home to find their parents victims of roundups. The descriptions of death and dying on the streets, so graphically represented by Roman Polanski’s