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- The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was the first urban uprising in German-occupied Europe.
- The Warsaw Ghetto uprising would later inspire more acts of resistance in World War II.
- Jewish resistance often took the form of aid and rescue.
- Established in 1940, Warsaw held about 400,000 Jews, the largest Ghetto in World War II.
On the eve of the Passover holiday 80 years ago, brave Jewish rebels in German-occupied Europe waged an uprising that later would fuel more resistance efforts against the Nazis.
Acts of resistance on April 19, 1943, in Poland, later termed the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, remain a potent symbol for remembering the victims of the Holocaust and are tied to a memorial day meant to honor courageous and heroic fighters.
About 700 young Jewish fighters took up arms in the “largest and, symbolically, most important” uprising after the Nazis stationed an army around the Warsaw Ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
With the knowledge 50,000 Jews who remained in the Ghetto could not be saved from inevitable death, the uprising became an incredibly risky and last-ditch effort to go down fighting and have a say in how they would die.
“They fought for the sake of Jewish honor and to avenge the slaughter of so many Jews,” said Sheryl Silver Ochayon, program director at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. “It (Warsaw Ghetto uprising) occurrence shattered the limits of the imagination.”
With each passing year, the rite of remembrance becomes more urgent as the number of those who experienced the Holocaust continues to dwindle.
What were conditions leading up to it?
Warsaw was the city with the largest Jewish population in prewar Europe.
In October 1940, all Jewish residents of Warsaw – almost 30 percent of the city’s population – were forced to move into a small area, sealed off from the rest of the city, in what became known as the Warsaw Ghetto.
A month after German authorities established the ghetto, Jews were enclosed by a 10-feet-high wall with barbed wire and closely guarded. Residents were forced to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 persons per room.
Between January 1941 and July 1942, Jews from smaller nearby communities in Germany and German-occupied areas of western Poland were deported to the ghetto.
Overcrowding and food shortages deliberately exacerbated by German policies –including a food ration at just 181 calories a day – led to an extremely high mortality rate in the ghetto.
In 1941, one year before mass deportations, one Jew died on average every nine minutes from infectious diseases, starvation or Nazi violence.
Between 1940 and 1942, approximately 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease.
Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Mutual Aid Society, the Federation of Associations in Poland for the Care of Orphans, and the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training, tried to meet the needs of the residents as they struggled to survive by smuggling food and medicines.
Deportations inspire self-defense unit
Around two-thirds of the Warsaw Ghetto, some 265,000 people, were deported to the Majdanek and Treblinka death camps in the summer of 1942. In response, several Jewish underground organizations banded together that July to create an armed self-defense unit known as the Jewish Combat.
By early 1943, the surviving Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto numbered approximately 70,000 to 80,000 individuals.
The following spring, the Nazis began preparing to deport the ghetto’s remaining Jews to their deaths.
What did Jewish resistance look like before the uprising?
Jewish civilians in over 100 ghettos in Poland and the Soviet Union offered a forceful form of opposition under the most adverse conditions – organized armed resistance against Nazi-occupiers.
Their main goals included organizing uprisings, fleeing the ghettos and joining partisan units in the fight against the Germans.
Jewish prisoners organized escapes to join partisan units in several dozen camps and killing centers.
In an earlier act that came to be known as the “January uprising,” various groups of fighters had fired the first shots against the enemy. Under the leadership of Mordecai Anielewicz, Zivia Lubetkin and Zecharia Arnstein, fighters pulled concealed guns out of their pockets, fired at the Germans and ambushed them in the street from the windows of apartments above.
Fearful of recent mass deportations to killing centers, many Jews in Warsaw sought refuge in bunkers when more troops arrived. Nazis tried to snatch people from the streets but had a difficult time apprehending residents.
“The Jews began to realize that it was not only possible to kill Germans, but to remain alive afterwards,” Ochayon said. “This brought about a sharp change in the psychology of the Jewish community.”
Between January and April, 1943, the population of the ghetto worked to set up subterranean bunkers and hiding places with stores of food, water, and in some cases electricity.
The uprising
With Molotov cocktails, hand grenades and a handful of small arms, members of the Jewish Fighting Organization and other groups rose in armed revolt and attacked Nazis entering the ghetto with motorcycles, tanks, light cannons and armored vehicles.
Each fighter had a revolver and one hand-grenade. The entire unit had two rifles and made homemade bombs, the kind where a fuse had to be lit with a match, Lubetkin, a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and a fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, said in a 1961 testimony at the Eichmann trial.
During the uprising, residents resisted German forces by refusing to assemble at collection points and burrowing in underground bunkers.
In order to locate the underground bunkers the Germans made use of dogs, listening devices, and informers.
German troops used long-range weapons and flamethrowers to pulverize and torch the buildings, turning it into a blanket of flame and rubble.
On the first day, the Germans were driven out of the ghetto, but they were ultimately able to end the major fighting within a few days. It took nearly a month before they were able to completely pacify the ghetto and deport the rest of the remaining inhabitants.
Most fighters of the resistance took their own lives rather than fall to German troops.
“It is impossible to put into words what we have been through. One thing is clear, what happened exceeded our boldest dreams,” Mordecai Anielewicz, leader of the ZOB forces, wrote April 23, 1943, in a letter smuggled out of the burning ghetto and left in a Jewish cemetery. “The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality.”
The uprising, which was crushed By May 16, 1943, led to the deaths of at least 7,000 Jews who fought or hid.
During the same year, Jews resisted the Germans in Vilna (Vilnius), Bialystok, and a number of other ghettos. Jewish prisoners rose against their guards at three killing centers. At Treblinka and Sobibor, prisoners armed with stolen weapons attacked the SS staff and guards.
Camille Fine is a trending visual producer on USA TODAY’s NOW team.
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