April 19, 1943 – With the Allies dithering, as they had for the last decade, on how to respond to the Jewish refugee situation, and with SS head Heinrich Himmler bent on liquidating their ghetto as a grotesque birthday “gift” for Adolf Hitler, Polish Jews began the first urban revolt against the Nazis in World War II. In the end, the odds against them were insurmountable, but the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became an enduring legend in the resistance against evil.
On this date, as it had done for the last 10 years (and as it would do again initially 50 years later, when the breakup of Yugoslavia led to mass rapes, massacres and “ethnic cleansing”), the non-German, non-occupied West did nothing but wring its hands over the fate of Europe’s Jews. British and American delegates, after nearly another two weeks of deliberation, decided: Not too much could be done.
Arguably, they remained wrong (bombing the trains taking Jewish prisoners to death camps might have been a start), but they were right in one respect: The time for really effective action would have been before Hitler re-started Germany’s war machine, even as he was systematically marginalizing Jews within weeks of taking power.
Warsaw Jews couldn’t wait for diplomats: They had literally been penned up within a ghetto within the city, encircled by 10-feet-high walls, by Nazi decree since November 1940. They couldn’t even communicate with anyone outside, since radios and telephone lines had been removed, mail censored, and incoming packages confiscated.
Imagine 400,000 people inside this enclosure, unable to buy food, permitted only half the usual rations; several families often crowded into one apartment; lack of fuel and medical supplies; sewage pipes freezing; human excrement being dumped into the streets. It was a prescription for a humanitarian disaster, which is what happened as typhus epidemics, beginning in the synagogues and buildings for the homeless, radically reduced the population.
And that was before the mid-1942 mass resettlement of residents began. Jewish leaders in the city believed that no more than 60,000 would be seized, and that resistance would only make matters worse. Unable to imagine the worst that evil could produce, they were shocked that more than five times that amount were taken and sent off, most to Treblinka. The Nazis even made Jewish doctors choose which of their patients would be deported to concentration camps. The scope of the roundup led the city's Jewish leadership to a momentous decision: the next time, they'd resist.
Before long, they began organizing in self-defense groups, under the command of a 24-year-old named Mordecai Anielewicz. I had never heard his name before I began researching this post. He deserves better, and as part of that effort I’ll write a bit about him here, along with including the picture that accompanies this post.
Coming from a poor family in a poor neighborhood, Anielewicz might have, under ordinary circumstances, continued the studies in Hebrew, history, sociology and economics that meant so much to him. But early in the war, he became active in the underground resistance against the Nazis, even returning from Lithuania to Warsaw to be at the heart of the struggle, organizing defiance with every lecture given, paper issued, cell group organized, paper issued, and bunker constructed.
In January 1943, the Nazis surprised the resistance by taking another 6,500 people—but then the Nazis were in turn surprised when a melee began and a German official was badly injured. Four days later, they stopped the roundup effort. Himmler vowed not to be humiliated again.
At 3 am on April 19, with Passover about to occur, the Germans began what they expected would be short work of Warsaw’s last Jews. They had all the tools they could possibly hope for: 2000 troops armed with all the firepower they could ever want, along with more than 7,000 security personnel.
The 600-700 in the Jewish underground possessed only two or three light machine guns to go with a few thousand grenades, as well as a few hundred rifles, revolvers and pistols that the Polish resistance had managed, against the odds, to smuggle into them. It would have to do.
On this date, as it had done for the last 10 years (and as it would do again initially 50 years later, when the breakup of Yugoslavia led to mass rapes, massacres and “ethnic cleansing”), the non-German, non-occupied West did nothing but wring its hands over the fate of Europe’s Jews. British and American delegates, after nearly another two weeks of deliberation, decided: Not too much could be done.
Arguably, they remained wrong (bombing the trains taking Jewish prisoners to death camps might have been a start), but they were right in one respect: The time for really effective action would have been before Hitler re-started Germany’s war machine, even as he was systematically marginalizing Jews within weeks of taking power.
Warsaw Jews couldn’t wait for diplomats: They had literally been penned up within a ghetto within the city, encircled by 10-feet-high walls, by Nazi decree since November 1940. They couldn’t even communicate with anyone outside, since radios and telephone lines had been removed, mail censored, and incoming packages confiscated.
Imagine 400,000 people inside this enclosure, unable to buy food, permitted only half the usual rations; several families often crowded into one apartment; lack of fuel and medical supplies; sewage pipes freezing; human excrement being dumped into the streets. It was a prescription for a humanitarian disaster, which is what happened as typhus epidemics, beginning in the synagogues and buildings for the homeless, radically reduced the population.
And that was before the mid-1942 mass resettlement of residents began. Jewish leaders in the city believed that no more than 60,000 would be seized, and that resistance would only make matters worse. Unable to imagine the worst that evil could produce, they were shocked that more than five times that amount were taken and sent off, most to Treblinka. The Nazis even made Jewish doctors choose which of their patients would be deported to concentration camps. The scope of the roundup led the city's Jewish leadership to a momentous decision: the next time, they'd resist.
Before long, they began organizing in self-defense groups, under the command of a 24-year-old named Mordecai Anielewicz. I had never heard his name before I began researching this post. He deserves better, and as part of that effort I’ll write a bit about him here, along with including the picture that accompanies this post.
Coming from a poor family in a poor neighborhood, Anielewicz might have, under ordinary circumstances, continued the studies in Hebrew, history, sociology and economics that meant so much to him. But early in the war, he became active in the underground resistance against the Nazis, even returning from Lithuania to Warsaw to be at the heart of the struggle, organizing defiance with every lecture given, paper issued, cell group organized, paper issued, and bunker constructed.
In January 1943, the Nazis surprised the resistance by taking another 6,500 people—but then the Nazis were in turn surprised when a melee began and a German official was badly injured. Four days later, they stopped the roundup effort. Himmler vowed not to be humiliated again.
At 3 am on April 19, with Passover about to occur, the Germans began what they expected would be short work of Warsaw’s last Jews. They had all the tools they could possibly hope for: 2000 troops armed with all the firepower they could ever want, along with more than 7,000 security personnel.
The 600-700 in the Jewish underground possessed only two or three light machine guns to go with a few thousand grenades, as well as a few hundred rifles, revolvers and pistols that the Polish resistance had managed, against the odds, to smuggle into them. It would have to do.
Anielewicz and his confederates began organizing hit-and-run attacks on the Germans—targeting crossroad streets in the ghetto from rooftops and attics. They had no realistic hope of winning, the last surviving leader, 89-year-old Marek Edelman, has remembered—all they wanted to do was “protect the people in the ghetto, to extend their life by a day or two or five."
One of the German tanks entering the enclosure was driven off after being met with Molotov cocktails (one of the most effective improvised weapons of the underground). Weeks of fighting ensued, with the resistance battling insane conditions (heat, smoke, burning buildings, poison gas, manholes blown up to prevent escape through sewers) as well as the enemy. The Nazis were forced to take the ghetto one street at a time.
The beginning of the end came on May 8, when, somehow or other, the Nazis located the bunker where Anielewicz and four other underground leaders were stationed, at Mila Street Number 18 (giving rise to the Leon Uris novel of the event, Mila 18). The Nazis blew up all five exits to the bunker and hurled in poison gas. Rather than being taken prisoner, Anielewicz and his partners committed suicide. Resistance was over within a week.
Several thousand Jews had died in the fires during the month-long struggle, and another 56,000 captured, with at least half being sent off to the death camps. However, Anielewicz and his fellow rebels had provided a clear example of what even badly armed (if ingenious) resistance could accomplish. In the postwar era, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising formed, along with the ancient Jewish revolt at Masada, a rallying point for the Zionist leaders who brought the state of Israel into being.
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