Honoring everyday dignity and defiance in Holocaust

The full name of Yom HaShoah, which begins Monday night, is “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day.” It’s a name that “links remembrance with resistance in no uncertain terms,” Chad Gibbs writes: a day to remember not only victimization, but courage and dignity.

Gibbs, a historian at the College of Charleston, has spent years researching Treblinka II, a Nazi extermination camp where one of the most dramatic acts of rebellion took place. In August 1943, several hundred prisoners managed to escape, though most were recaptured and killed.

But it’s important not to lose sight of more everyday resistance throughout the Holocaust, Gibbs writes – the daily acts of defiance and empathy, like hiding a friend’s illness from guards, or even in the ways people “carried themselves on the way to a certain death.”

“In a place meant to destroy all Jewish life,” Gibbs writes, “the smallest acts of support and comfort were resistance.”

This week we also liked stories about China’s evolving beauty ideals, the role of the social media platform Discord in the huge Pentagon leak, and new research on how ancients apes – and humans – evolved in Africa.