While accounts of Jewish resistance during World War II tend to focus on armed uprisings in ghettos and guerilla warfare and sabotage in the forests of Europe, the fight against the Nazis involved more than guns and explosives. Many Jews took nonviolent action, assisting one another in hiding and taking steps to preserve their faith and culture through writing, schooling, religious observance, smuggling, and collective activities. 

In a special, late-morning Library presentation, renowned historian Samuel Kassow explores these potent, if overlooked, ways in which Jews defied Nazi attempts to dehumanize them and break their morale. The event is co-presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in conjunction with the exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. on display at Union Station through January 30, 2022. 

Kassow is the Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he has served on the faculty since 1972. He is the author of Who Will Write Our History: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archives, which was adapted into a film documentary in 2018, and The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police.