Today marks the 63rd anniversary of the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which less than 60,000 Jews, with less than 1,000 armed resistance volunteers among them, held out for almost a month against German troops in an effort to end the deportation of Jews to concentration camps and win them their freedom.
In the summer of 1942, after 300,000 Jews had been deported to Treblinka, the remaining Jews decided that their lives could only be saved by insurrection. News and rumours about Nazi death camps, as well as Nazi plans to completely liquidate the Ghetto that year, had been leaked back into the Ghetto. The hope that their usefulness as slave-labour would save them dwindled, and underground leaders called on the last Jews in Warsaw to resist being put into the cattle cars by any possible means.
The Warsaw Jews had slowly begun to smuggle in and hide guns, ammunition and incendiaries for years, and convinced the Germans to let them build a series of 631 air-raid bunkers in the Ghetto. The young men and women still left in the Ghetto, a hell on earth that included rampant disease, brutal overwork and constant hunger, formed the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB), or “Jewish Fighting Organization,” led by 23-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz, with the nearly impossible goal of armed combat with the Nazi forces of Poland.
On January 18, 1943, the group successfully repelled a Nazi attempt to deport more Jews to the extermination camps, forcing the armed deportation brigade to retreat after several days of fighting, and the ardent desire to protect Jewish lives and win their freedom swept the group towards a more ambitious plan: a conquest of the entire Ghetto.
On Passover eve, April 19, 1943, the Jews of Warsaw opened fire on German military men who had come to liquidate the Ghetto. The Nazis laid siege to the walled quarter, making inroads and rounding up every Jew they could capture. They shut off the gas, water and electricity to that part of the city, and cut off all entrances and exits. They killed the population of the Jewish hospital and destroyed all means of medical aid for the Jews. In an attempt to force the surrender of the ZOB, German forces set fire to random blocks of the Ghetto, catching and killing people as they were forced to jump from their windows, and laid down blanket machine gun fire into the residential sections. The Nazis piped gas into air-raid shelters, flooded the sewers to cut off escape, and then shelled the ruins to clear out any possible survivors in the bunkers.
The Germans were surprised and startled by the resistance they encountered, noting that both male and female Jews, and even children, were armed, and shot furiously from a gun in each hand or lobbed Molotov cocktails viciously. They had not expected this.
The 750 ZOB resistance soldiers were armed with the most makeshift pile of armaments, loyalty to each other, and the strongest weapon of all in their will to survive, and fueled their revolt for 28 days. They even received some help from non-Jewish Polish resistance groups on the outside, who started to attack the Germans from the rear. Soon, however, the more than 2,000 Nazi troops, under the command of SS Major General Jürgen Stroop, were able to outlast the Jews and crush the rebellion. 7,000 Jews were killed in the fighting, and approximately 6,000 were killed by fire or gas during the siege. 56,000 Jews were captured and were sent to the death camps. Major fighting declined after April 23, 1943, but Anielewicz (1919-1943) was killed in battle on May 8, 1943, and the uprising ended on May 16th. Nevertheless, the Germans were obliged to spend the summer of 1943 suppressing survivors who had regrouped and continued to resist.
There is often a tendency in Jewish circles today to emphasize the ZOB’s role as martyrs and heroes, and there is no question that they fought for a just cause and are admirable figures in Jewish history. However, one should not hold them up as the iconic image of the Jewish Holocaust experience. The truth of the matter is that these people were extraordinarily special. Their bravery, resources, and foresight should not be used as a slight against those Jewish communities – starved, uninformed, and defenseless – who did not resist in such a way.
Nevertheless, the example of the Warsaw Ghetto revolutionaries serves to remind us all that the Jews did resist, and we thank them for their legacy of very human struggle for life and freedom.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 failed in its goal to free the inmates and end the deportations, but the ZOB succeeded in many other ways, not just in the legacy of resistance and action they left behind, or in the sense of regained power they must have personally felt when resisting their tormentors. Stories of the Jewish armed insurrection in Warsaw spread throughout Europe, inspiring resistance amongst many other communities, even including some slave labour camps. The Jewish insurgents had failed, but the fact that they had held out at all gave hope to thousands.
By 1943 the German army was sapped by two fronts and a shortage of resources, including a lack of soldiers. These armed revolts were like small hemorrhages chewing at the insides of the Reich, reducing German forces in the interior and diverting German energy and attention away from the fronts. There can be no question that these uprisings had a positive effect on the Allied attempt to bring Hitler down.
In 1944 the Polish resistance, Armia Krajowa, staged a major uprising in Warsaw as part of the organized Operation Tempest throughout Poland, and the city was liberated by Soviet forces on January 17, 1945.
In 1949 a group of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising survivors established the Lohamey ha-Geta'ot (“fighters of the Ghettoes”) kibbutz in Israel populated largely by resistance fighters, and worked to record their testimonies. A Holocaust museum has been established there in their honour.
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