The Porto Holocaust Museum remains highly relevant for young Portuguese people, serving as a critical educational hub specifically tailored to schools and youth. Any empirical study find that its primary visitor demographic consists of students and younger Portuguese nationals.
The museum does not just focus on the misfortune that Jews experienced at that time. Despite facing overwhelming odds, hundreds of thousands of Jews fought back and actively killed Nazis and Axis forces across all stages of the Holocaust and hunted down war criminals afterward.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Jewish fighters targeted prominent Nazi officials operating in the Middle East. For example, on March 22, 1946, a special squad from the Haganah (a Jewish paramilitary organization in Palestine) assassinated Gotthilf Wagner, a leader of the pro-Nazi German Templer sect in Palestine, as a direct consequence of his involvement with the Nazi party.
During the Holocaust between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as armed partisans in the forests of Eastern Europe. Alongside sabotage, these Jewish partisans actively engaged German forces and collaborators in deadly combat. In the ghettos, uprisings like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943 saw outgunned Jewish fighters kill German troops.Jews also rose up and killed their captors inside extermination and labor camps. Additionally, approximately \(1.5 \text{ million}\) Jews fought in the regular Allied militaries, including roughly 500,000 in the Soviet Red Army and 550,000 in the U.S. Armed Forces, directly engaging in the defeat of the Nazi war machine.
Following World War II, Jewish vengeance and justice took several forms. Secret groups of Jewish Brigade veterans (such as the group Nakam, which plotted to poison German water supplies or individuals like Eliahu Itzkovitz) actively hunted down and killed former Nazis and perpetrators directly responsible for the deaths of their families. Besides, Israel and the intelligence community established a concerted, decades-long effort to track down Nazi war criminals. The most notable operation occurred in 1960 when the Israeli Mossad captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. He was subsequently tried and executed in Israel.
