The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
By April 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto held perhaps 60,000 Jews, the remnant of a population that had stood at over 450,000 in 1941. Between 22 July and 21 September 1942, the Großaktion Warschau had deported approximately…
Biblical Narrative
By April 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto held perhaps 60,000 Jews, the remnant of a population that had stood at over 450,000 in 1941. Between 22 July and 21 September 1942, the Großaktion Warschau had deported approximately 254,000 to the gas chambers at Treblinka, eighty kilometers to the northeast. Among those who remained were the young — the elderly and children had been taken first — and a hardened understanding that any further deportation meant death. In this remnant, two underground military organizations had formed: the Jewish Combat Organization, the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa or ŻOB, led by the twenty-three-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz of Hashomer Hatzair; and the Jewish Military Union, the Żydowski Związek Wojskowy or ŻZW, drawn largely from Revisionist Zionists and former Polish army veterans.
On the eve of Passover, 19 April 1943, SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop entered the ghetto with some 2,000 troops — Waffen-SS, Wehrmacht, Trawniki auxiliaries, Polish police — to liquidate it as a fiftieth-birthday present to Adolf Hitler. They were met at the corner of Nalewki and Gęsia Streets by improvised explosive devices, Molotov cocktails, and gunfire from rooftops and windows. Stroop's columns retreated. The Jewish flag and the Polish flag were raised together over the rooftops at Muranowski Square by ŻZW fighters. For 27 days, perhaps 700 Jewish fighters with a few hundred pistols, a handful of rifles and submachine guns, and homemade grenades held off the German army in street fighting.
Stroop's response was systematic. Unable to defeat the fighters in open combat, he ordered the ghetto burned, building by building. SS troops set fire to apartment houses while flame-throwers and dogs drove residents from cellars and bunkers. Anielewicz and the ŻOB command moved their headquarters to a bunker at Miła 18; on 8 May 1943, after the bunker was located and gassed, Anielewicz, his lover Mira Fuchrer, and most of the command died there, by their own hand or by suffocation. A handful of survivors, led by Marek Edelman, escaped through the sewers on 10 May to the so-called Aryan side; some joined the Polish partisans, some lived to fight in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army.
On 16 May 1943, Stroop blew up the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street as a symbolic conclusion. He sent his report — the so-called Stroop Report, a leather-bound illustrated album titled Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr, There is no longer a Jewish residential district in Warsaw — in three copies, to Heinrich Himmler, to his immediate superior Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, and to himself. He recorded 56,065 Jews killed or captured. The report, with its photographs of women and children with their hands up before SS guns — including the still-unidentified small boy in the cap and short trousers who has become one of the iconic images of the twentieth century — survived the war. Stroop was tried in Warsaw and hanged in 1952. The ghetto was now rubble. But the news of the uprising reached the Allies, the rest of occupied Europe, and the Polish government in exile in London. For the first time in the Holocaust, Jews had fought a German army in the field for nearly a month and the world had been forced to notice.
I cannot describe to you the conditions under which the Jews are living. Only a few, a very few, will hold out. The remainder will perish, sooner or later. The die is cast. In all the bunkers in which our comrades are hiding, no candle can be lit at night for lack of air. Farewell, my friend. Perhaps we shall yet meet again. The main thing is — the dream of my life has come true. Self-defense in the ghetto has become a fact.Mordechai Anielewicz, last letter to Yitzhak Cukierman, 23 April 1943, Yad Vashem Archives
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The standard scholarly history of the uprising is Israel Gutman's Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Houghton Mifflin 1994), drawing on Gutman's own underground experience and on the extensive Polish, German, and Yiddish documentation. Gutman places the fighters at approximately 750 — some 220-300 in the ŻOB, perhaps 250-450 in the ŻZW, the rest unaffiliated — armed with about ten rifles and submachine guns, perhaps fifty pistols, and homemade grenades and incendiaries assembled in the ghetto's underground workshops. Against them stood Stroop's force of approximately 2,090 men, with tanks, armored cars, artillery, and flame-throwers.
The two principal primary sources are the Ringelblum Archive — Oneg Shabbat, the Sabbath-pleasure circle of historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who from 1940 onward organized the systematic documentation of every aspect of ghetto life and burial of those records in milk cans and metal boxes beneath ghetto buildings. Two of the three caches were recovered after the war (1946 and 1950); the third remains lost. The archive contains diaries, ration cards, theater programs, sociological studies, and the only contemporaneous testimony of the death camps written by their victims. Samuel Kassow's Who Will Write Our History? (Indiana University Press 2007) is the standard study. The second principal source is the Stroop Report itself — held since the war by U.S. National Archives, the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, and Yad Vashem — which provides a complete German operational account from inside the destruction.
The ghetto uprising is not the only Jewish armed resistance of the Holocaust, but it is the largest and the most documented. Smaller revolts took place at the Treblinka extermination camp (2 August 1943, approximately 200 inmates escaped, 70 surviving the war), at Sobibór (14 October 1943, 300 escaped, 50 surviving), at Auschwitz-Birkenau Crematorium IV (7 October 1944, all participants killed), in the Vilna and Białystok ghettos (August 1943), and in scores of partisan units in the forests of Belarus and Lithuania, including the Bielski brothers' otriad which sheltered some 1,200 Jews. Yehuda Bauer's Rethinking the Holocaust (Yale 2001) and Nechama Tec's Defiance (Oxford 1993) provide the broader frame.
The uprising's place in postwar Jewish memory has been complex. Marek Edelman, in Hanna Krall's Shielding the Flame (Henry Holt 1986), insisted that the uprising had been less a strategic action than a choice of how to die — that the real heroism of the ghetto had been the millions who had carried children to the Umschlagplatz with dignity, not the few who had taken up arms. Yitzhak Zuckerman (Yitzhak Cukierman, ŻOB second-in-command), in his memoir A Surplus of Memory (University of California Press 1993), framed the uprising as the rebirth of Jewish military honor. Both judgments have shaped the way Israeli memorial culture reads the date 19 April — Holocaust Remembrance Day was set in the Israeli calendar to coincide with the anniversary of the uprising, 27 Nisan.
We didn't decide to fight in order to save the Jews. We knew we couldn't. We decided to fight in order to choose the manner of our death. To die with weapons in our hands, not lying down on a cattle car floor.Marek Edelman, in Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame (1986)