?Against the Current?: Hashomer Hatzair in the Warsaw Ghetto

Abstract

;4 P emrepare to defend yourselves in case the enemy attempts to completely destroy your community!' This was the new slogan of the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement in Warsaw in April 1942 when word spread of the destructive tidal wave engulfing Jews. By March of the same year, implementation of the Final Solution had reached Lublin and other ghettos within Germanoccupied Poland. While anxiously anticipating the Red Army's spring offensive after the Russian snows began to melt, the Hashomer Hatzair engaged itself in an antifascist struggle. These two commitments-a Jewish one and a pro-Soviet one-were two facets of the same dramatic landmark in the ideological odyssey that Hashomer Hatzair in Warsaw traversed between the outbreak of World War II and April 1943 when, alongside other groups, it led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. However, both of these concepts were foreign to the pre-war ideology of the Hashomer Hatzair.