The Uprising memorial in Warsaw. There’s an identical one at Yad Vashem

Like Pesach, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was another attempt by Jews to gain their freedom

SEVENTY years ago, the Jewish people witnessed another miraculous occur- rence as a group of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto fought for their own freedom from tyranny and slavery at the hands of the Nazis. This year when we celebrated Pesach, we read a story from the Hagadah that told us how – with the leadership of Moses and his brother Aaron – we were freed from the yoke of slavery in Egypt. During this commemoration and celebration, I am reminded of a much more recent attempt to secure Jewish freedom which sees its 70th anniversary this year – the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.   In the spring of 1943, a group of young Jews in the Warsaw   Ghetto were making the last preparations for what they were convinced would be their final stand against the Nazi war machine that had the destruction of all Polish and European Jewry as its aim.   The Warsaw ghetto had been the largest ghetto in all of Nazi-occupied Europe. It had been established in October 1940 and at its peak contained around 450,000 Jews, primarily from Warsaw and its environs, in an area of 1.3 square miles. Living conditions had steadily deteriorated as the effects of war and occupation, overcrowding and starvation took their toll. During 1942, many of the ghetto’s inhabitants, particularly those unable to work, were deported to Treblinka extermination camp and by 1943 there were no more than 60,000 Jews left in the ghetto.   The remaining Jews were split between those who believed that by working for the German war machine they would be able to save themselves (or perhaps ‘ride   out’ the war) and those who believed that resisting the Nazi attempts to dehumanise and murder them was the only way to emerge with dignity from their situation.   ZOB – the Jewish Fighting Organisation – included young Jews from many different political and social   backgrounds. The young leader, Mordechai Anielewicz came from the Hashomer Hazair Zionist youth movement, Antek (Yitzhak) Zuckerman came from Dror Hehalutz and others came from the non-Zionist Bund movement.   ZOB had connections with the Polish   Home Army that helped it acquire weapons and from the beginning of 1943 it overcame its differences to work together with the Betar youth movement’s Jewish Military Union (ZWW) against the Germans. Together these groups built bunkers and other places of hiding in and under the ghetto, smuggled arms and made crude weapons with which they hoped to derail or delay the process of deportation when it resumed. Their preparations came to fruition on Erev Pesach 19th April 1943, when the German forces under the command of SS General Jurgen Stroop began the planned liquidation of the ghetto.

Stroop had organised a filmmaker to be present to record the final days of Warsaw Jewry ‘for posterity’ – little did he suspect that the photographer would record the largest single act of resistance against the Nazis on Polish soil to date. ZOB and ZWW together defended their bunkers and fought hard against the vastly superior German weaponry. They had caught Stroop and his men completely by surprise and this enabled them to maintain their resistance for much longer than they had originally anticipated. Stroop was forced to call in reinforcements after losing 12 of his men on the first day of fighting and by day three, he turned to the drastic strategy of burning the ghetto to the ground, building by building and street by street in order to flush the Jews out, whether they were in hiding or resisting. As the ghetto was being reduced to rubble, the resistors carried on the fight albeit in smaller groups and individually. Anielewicz was killed in an attack on the ZOB command bunker on 8th May and little more than a week later, after a month of resistance, fighting and destruction, Stroop declared the ghetto liquidated. Although most inhabitants of the ghetto were killed or captured by Stroop’s men and the ghetto itself completely destroyed, the uprising has become the ultimate symbol of Jewish resistance to the Nazis. It is widely regarded to have been the single most successful act of resistance by Jews during the Holocaust. Not only did a small group of Jews disrupt the German efforts to liquidate the ghetto, they were a strong symbol of hope and humanity for Jews in other ghettos as well as for their fellow Poles. Pesach is of course a festival of liberation, and the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto did not manage to liberate themselves in the conventional sense. They did however die with the dignity they wished for and they were free in the sense that they chose their own destiny in circumstances which made it almost impossible to do so. And although Moses, who led the children of Israel out of slavery, never lived to see the Promised Land, a handful of those who survived the Holocaust did just that. Antek Zuckerman and his wife Zivia who had fought alongside him in Warsaw were among those who formed Kibbutz Lohamei haGetaot in the newly-formed State of Israel in 1949. 

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