The Białystok Ghetto Uprising began on 16 August 1943, exactly four months after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had ended. It lasted five days. Around 300 Jewish fighters of the Białystok underground fought against around 3,000 SS men and Ukrainian auxiliaries. By 21 August the uprising had been crushed. Around 7,000 ghetto inhabitants were killed in the fighting and the burning. Most of the remaining 25,000 were deported to Treblinka and Majdanek and murdered. A small number, around 200, escaped through the surrounding forests to the Polish and Soviet partisans, where they continued to fight until the end of the war. The Białystok rising is the second-best-known of the Polish ghetto uprisings after Warsaw.
The setting
Białystok in north-eastern Poland had been a major Jewish centre before the war. The pre-war Białystok Jewish community of around 50,000 was about half the population of the city. After the German occupation in June 1941 (Białystok had been under Soviet rule from 1939 to 1941), the German army carried out an immediate massacre of around 2,000 Jewish men, burning hundreds alive in the Great Synagogue on 27 June 1941. The remaining Jewish population was concentrated in the Białystok Ghetto in August 1941. The ghetto held around 50,000 Jews at peak, including refugees concentrated there from surrounding smaller towns.
Białystok was unusual among Polish ghettos for its productive economy. The German civil administration kept the ghetto operating as a textile manufacturing centre, and the Judenrat under Ephraim Barash pursued the strategy of survival through productivity, similar to Rumkowski’s policy at Łódź. The strategy bought time. The deportations of 1942, which had emptied most other Polish ghettos, came to Białystok later and on a smaller scale. By summer 1943 the ghetto still held around 30,000 Jews.
The decision to fight
The Białystok underground had begun to organise in 1942. Several political tendencies operated separately: the Communist underground, the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth, and the Bund socialist organisation. The leader of the combined underground was Mordechai Tenenbaum, sent into the ghetto from outside by the Warsaw underground in November 1942. Tenenbaum had been a participant in the Vilna underground and brought the experience of similar attempts in other ghettos.
The Białystok underground had limited weapons and limited training. Tenenbaum’s plan was to fight only when the final liquidation came. He calculated that fighting earlier would only accelerate the deportations. The strategy was contested by some of the Communist faction, who argued for breaking out into the surrounding forests to join the Soviet partisans. The Communists eventually went their own way and a number of Białystok fighters escaped to partisan units before the August uprising.
The uprising
The Germans surrounded the Białystok Ghetto on the night of 15 to 16 August 1943 to begin its liquidation. The underground attacked. Tenenbaum led a force of around 300 armed fighters and around 100 unarmed support staff. The fighting concentrated around the ghetto perimeter, where the underground attempted to break a hole through the wire to allow a mass breakout to the surrounding forests. The breakout failed: the Germans had already deployed forces in the forests outside the ghetto in anticipation. The fighters retreated to bunkers and continued the fight inside the ghetto for five days.
The Germans, drawing on the experience of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising four months earlier, used the same tactics: systematic burning of the buildings, suppression of the bunkers with explosives and grenades. The Białystok uprising was smaller than Warsaw and was suppressed more quickly. Tenenbaum was killed on 19 August. By 21 August the fighting had ended.
The breakout
Around 200 fighters and ghetto inhabitants did succeed in breaking out to the forests during the uprising. They reached the Soviet partisan units operating in the surrounding Białystok area, particularly in the Bialowieza forest. The Białystok partisan unit, formed of these escapers, fought as part of the Soviet partisan command for the rest of the war. Several of its fighters survived to liberation in 1944.
The aftermath
The remaining ghetto population, around 25,000 people, were deported to Treblinka and Majdanek between 21 and 24 August 1943 and murdered. Around 1,200 children, including the 50 children of the Białystok Jewish orphanage, were sent separately to Theresienstadt and from there, in October 1943, to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
The Białystok Jewish community, which had been one of the great centres of Polish Jewish life for two centuries, was effectively gone by the end of August 1943. The post-war Polish Jewish community in the city was tiny, around 1,000 people in the late 1940s, and dwindled further with emigration. The community today is a few dozen.
What it tells us
Białystok confirms the pattern that began at Warsaw and would continue at Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz. The Jewish armed resistance movements in occupied Poland fought when they had no other option, knowing they would lose, knowing most of the fighters and most of the population they were trying to defend would be killed. They fought anyway. Tenenbaum left a final message before he died: We do not want to be saved. The ones who escape will be the witnesses. We must die with weapons in our hands.
See also
Sources
- Sara Bender, The Jews of Białystok During World War II and the Holocaust, Brandeis University Press, 2008
- Bronka Klibanski (ed), The Diary of Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, Yad Vashem, 1947
- USHMM: Białystok