April 19,1943 - The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

LEST WE FORGET. Today is the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the German Nazi occupation and systematic elimination of the Polish Jewish community durong World War II. April 19, 1943 - the first organized act of Jewish resistance against the holocaust. In the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Polish Jews fought against Nazi Germany's final effort to transport the remaining Ghetto population to the Treblinka extermination camp. The most significant portion of the rebellion took place beginning 19 April 1943, and ended when the poorly armed and supplied resistance was crushed by the Germans, who officially finished their operation to liquidate the Ghetto on 16 May. It was the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II. To understand the situation, we should remember that in 1940, German occupational authorities began to concentrate Poland's three million Jews into a number of extremely crowded ghettos located in large Polish cities. The largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, concentrated 300,000 – 400,000 people into a densely packed 1.3 square mile central area of Warsaw. Thousands of Jews died due to rampant disease and starvation under the SS, even before the mass deportations from the Ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp began. Just before the first operation began in summer 1942, the German "Resettlement Commissioner" called a meeting of the Ghetto Jewish Council to explain the "resettlement to the East." The Council decided not to oppose the resettlement, but when the truth was learned, the Council president committed suicide. On 18 January 1943, the Germans began their second deportation of the Warsaw Jews, which led to the first instance of armed insurgency within the Ghetto. While Jewish families hid in their so-called "bunkers", fighters of the Polish ghetto resistance reacted, engaging the Germans in direct clashes. The deportation was halted within a few days. Only 5,000 Jews were removed, instead of the 8,000 planned. Hundreds of people in the Warsaw Ghetto were ready to fight, adults and children, poorly armed with handguns, gasoline bottles, and a few other weapons that had been smuggled into the Ghetto by resistance fighters. Two resistance organizations, the ŻZW and ŻOB, took control of the Ghetto, built dozens of fighting posts and executed a number of Nazi collaborators, including Jewish Police officers and members of the fake (German-sponsored and controlled) resistance organization Żagiew, as well as Gestapo agents. On 19 April 1943, on the eve of Passover, the police and SS auxiliary forces entered the Ghetto. They were planning to complete the deportation action within three days, but were ambushed by Jewish insurgents firing and tossing Molotov cocktails and hand grenades from alleyways, sewers and windows. The Germans suffered casualties and their advance bogged down. Two of their combat vehicles were set on fire by insurgent petrol bombs. Because the SS commander failed to contain the revolt, he was replaced by SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, who proceeded to lead a better-organized and reinforced ground attack. The longest-lasting defense of a position took place at Muranowski Square where the ŻZW chief leader, Dawid Moryc Apfelbaum, was killed in combat. On the afternoon of 19 April, a symbolic event took place when two boys climbed up on the roof of a building on the square and raised two flags, the red-and-white Polish flag and the blue-and-white banner of the ŻZW resistance. These flags remained there, highly visible from the Warsaw streets, for four days. After the war, Stroop recalled: "The matter of the flags was of great political and moral importance. It reminded hundreds of thousands of the Polish cause, it excited them and unified the population of the General Government, but especially Jews and Poles. Flags and national colours are a means of combat exactly like a rapid-fire weapon, like thousands of such weapons. We all knew that – Heinrich Himmler, Krüger, and Hahn. The Reichsfuehrer [Himmler] bellowed into the phone: 'Stroop, you must at all costs bring down those two flags!'" When Stroop's ultimatum to surrender was rejected by the defenders, his forces resorted to systematically burning houses block by block using flamethrowers and fire bottles and blowing up basements and sewers. "We were beaten by the flames, not the Germans," a Jewish survivor said in 2007, recalling: "The sea of flames flooded houses and courtyards....There was no air, only black, choking smoke and heavy burning heat radiating from the red-hot walls, from the glowing stone stairs." While the battle continued inside the Ghetto, Polish resistance groups AK and GL engaged the Germans between 19 and 23 April at six different locations outside the Ghetto walls, firing at German sentries and positions. In one attack, three units of the AK joined in a failed attempt to breach the Ghetto walls with explosives. Finally, the resistance lost all of its commanders and on 29 April the remaining fighters escaped the Ghetto through the Muranowski tunnel and relocated to the Michalin forest, marking the end of significant fighting. Organized defense collapsed and surviving fighters and thousands of remaining Jewish civilians took cover in the sewer system and in the many dugout bunkers. The Germans used dogs to look for such hideouts then usually dropped smoke bombs down to force people out. Sometimes they flooded the bunkers or destroyed them with explosives. A number of captured fighters - especially women - lobbed hidden grenades or fired concealed handguns after surrendering. The suppression of the uprising officially ended on 16 May 1943, when Stroop personally pushed a detonator button to demolish the Great Synagogue of Warsaw. In the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 13,000 Jews were killed - 6,000 burnt alive or smoke-suffocated. After the Uprising, the remaining 50,000 Warsaw Ghetto Jews were transported to work or extermination camps, most to Treblinka. Survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, known as the "Ghetto Fighters," went on to found the kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta'ot ("Ghetto Fighters"), which is located north of Acre in Israel. In 1984, members of the kibbutz published Edut ("Testimonies of Survival"), four volumes of personal testimonies from 96 kibbutz members. The settlement features a museum and archives dedicated to remembering the Holocaust. In 2008, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenaz led a group of Israel Defense Force officials to the site of the uprising and spoke about the event's "importance for IDF combat soldiers." A Warsaw Ghetto survivor interviewed today on French television said that she is concerned that fascist groups in Europe may try to restart the Jewish persecution prevalent all over Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. She also said that she stays in Poland because it is a relatively 'safe' place to live as a European Jew. ~~~~~ Dear readers, it is important not to forget the horrendous details of the Holocaust. But, above all, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising speaks to the unbreakable human spirit, to man's indomitable faith in the value of human existence, to the undying strength of the Jewish people...and it reminds all of us, each man and woman, that we are the past, the present and the future, and that we are all individually responsible for every other human being ever born. That is the significance in the words "eternal vigilance" of Thomas Jefferson.