Resistance - They Fought Back
“People have this myth stuck in their heads that Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter. But this is where the real story begins... Jews did not go as sheep to the slaughter... They fought back.” — Professor Richard Freund
We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., Resistance – They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis.
“Because the Holocaust was an epic event in human history, spanning several countries, multiple cultures and nearly incalculable number of people, making a film about the Resistance movement that grew out of these tragic events, would also need to be epic in scale. While a small core team, led by Paula S. Apsell, conceived and strategized the filmmaking, the effort would quickly grow to more than 24 collaborators in all phases of filmmaking from production planning, writing, filming, editing and post-production elements of musical composition, color correction and sound mixing.
We began filming in the Spring of 2021 and in the in middle of the Covid pandemic. Using as much caution as possible we attacked the project aggressively deploying our crew to 3 countries across eastern Europe – Latvia, Poland, Lithuania as well as Israel and the U.S. -- landing in 59 locations interviewing and filming scenes with over 60 witnesses, survivors, authors and scholars. Over 47 production days, some 150,000 air miles for the many crew members and talent, and 3500 miles of cross-country driving, we shot 172 hours of original footage. When you add 155 hours of accumulated archival footage it is no wonder it took 170 days of editing to end up with this 97-minutes of finished film.
I’ve laid the nuts and bolts of the process out, just as the film attempts to lay out and decipher for the audience how much went on under the surface of this movement known as the Resistance. What goes on behind the scenes of making a film is largely unseen and unrecognized by the casual viewer. Just as Resistance took many forms, much unseen and unrecognized even to many historians, I feel the analogy is appropriate.
As for the artistry and success of that process, it’s not for me to articulate how we did what we did or if we were successful. That is for you, the viewer, to judge.
But this effort, whatever it took, grew from one man’s relentless
passion to see this story told. Ironically, Richard Freund would not live to see the final version of the film. Yet, his spirit pervades every frame, zichrono livrakha.”
- Kirk Wolfinger