The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on 19 April 1943 and ended on 16 May 1943. It was the largest single act of armed Jewish resistance in the Holocaust. Around 750 Jewish fighters of the Jewish Combat Organisation (ZOB) and the Jewish Military Union (ZZW) held off a German force of around 2,000 SS men, Wehrmacht troops and Ukrainian and Latvian auxiliaries for nearly four weeks. The Germans burned the ghetto to the ground, building by building, to drive the fighters out. By 16 May, around 13,000 ghetto inhabitants had been killed in the fighting and the burning. Another 56,000 had been captured and sent to Treblinka and Majdanek for murder. The uprising failed in its immediate purpose. It became, after the war, the central symbol of Jewish armed resistance to the Holocaust.
The setting
By April 1943 the Warsaw Ghetto held around 60,000 Jews, down from 460,000 in mid-1942. The drop was the result of the great deportation of summer 1942, in which around 280,000 Warsaw Jews had been sent to Treblinka and murdered. The remaining 60,000 were the working population: young, mostly aged between 15 and 40, employed in the German-controlled workshops that made uniforms and other goods for the Wehrmacht. They had survived the deportations because they were useful. They knew that the next deportation would be the last.
The remaining ghetto population had hardened during the months since the great deportation. Two armed underground organisations had formed during the autumn and winter of 1942 to 1943. The Jewish Combat Organisation (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ZOB) was led by Mordechai Anielewicz, a 23-year-old former Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth leader. The Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, ZZW) was led by Pawel Frenkiel and was associated with the Revisionist Zionist movement. The two organisations were rivals but coordinated their action when the moment came. Together they fielded around 750 armed fighters with around 200 pistols, 17 rifles, two machine guns, and various improvised explosive devices. The Polish underground had supplied a small but useful share of the weapons.
The first day
On 19 April 1943, the SS general Jürgen Stroop entered the ghetto with a force of around 850 SS men, Wehrmacht troops, and Trawniki men, with armoured vehicles and artillery support, to liquidate it. The operation had been timed for the eve of Passover, on the assumption that the Jewish inhabitants would be at home or at synagogue and the round-up would be straightforward. Instead the German force was ambushed at the entrance to the ghetto by ZOB and ZZW fighters using Molotov cocktails, grenades and small arms. Several SS men were killed. The German force withdrew. The ghetto was, for a few hours, in Jewish hands.
The fighting
Stroop returned the next day with reinforcements and a new tactic. The fighters were entrenched in bunkers and cellars beneath the ghetto buildings. Storming each one would be costly. Stroop ordered the systematic burning of the ghetto, building by building, to drive the fighters out. SS men with flamethrowers worked through the streets. Buildings were set on fire and the inhabitants who tried to flee were shot. People who stayed in the cellars were killed by smoke or by the collapsing buildings. Those who came out with their hands raised were taken to the Umschlagplatz at the edge of the ghetto and put on trains to Treblinka or Majdanek.
The ZOB and ZZW fighters retreated through the burning ghetto, fighting from cellars and bunkers, switching positions through the underground tunnels and sewers that the underground had prepared. The fighting continued for nearly four weeks. By early May, most of the fighting was concentrated around a few remaining bunkers. The ZOB headquarters at 18 Mila Street, the largest fighter bunker in the ghetto, was discovered by the SS on 8 May. Some of the fighters inside, including Anielewicz, killed themselves rather than be captured. Around 80 fighters died at Mila Street. A handful escaped through the sewers to the Aryan side of Warsaw with the help of the Polish underground.
The end
On 16 May 1943, Stroop personally pressed the detonator that demolished the Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street, the largest synagogue in pre-war Warsaw, as the symbolic end of the operation. He recorded in his report: There is no Jewish district in Warsaw any more. The Stroop Report, the SS account of the operation, is covered on its own page in the Specific Atrocities section.
By the end of the operation, around 13,000 ghetto inhabitants were dead, most from the burning. Another 56,000 had been deported. The ghetto itself was rubble. The Germans dynamited the few buildings that had survived the fires. The site was left as a wasteland for the rest of the war.
The escape and survival
A small number of fighters and ghetto inhabitants escaped through the sewers to the Aryan side of Warsaw during and after the uprising. Several were sheltered by Polish underground contacts in Warsaw and survived the war. Marek Edelman, the second-in-command of the ZOB after Anielewicz’s death, was among them. Edelman fought in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 (the larger Polish national uprising, distinct from the Ghetto Uprising), survived the war, and became a doctor in post-war communist Poland. He was active in the Solidarity movement in the 1980s and lived until 2009. His memoir, The Ghetto Fights, written shortly after the war, is one of the central sources on the uprising.
What it meant
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising did not save the lives of the people who fought it. Almost all the fighters were killed. The 56,000 ghetto inhabitants who were deported during the suppression were murdered. The Germans destroyed the ghetto. By the standards of military operations, the uprising failed completely.
By any other standard it succeeded. The Jewish fighters held out for almost four weeks against a far better-equipped force. They killed several dozen SS men. They forced the regime to deploy artillery, armoured vehicles, and ultimately to burn the ghetto to the ground in order to suppress them. They produced, in the figure of Anielewicz and his fighters, a model of armed resistance that subsequent uprisings at Białystok, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz and elsewhere drew on. They demonstrated, against the regime’s claim and against the post-war myth, that Jewish armed resistance was possible. They left a record. Anielewicz’s last letter, smuggled out of the ghetto on 23 April 1943, ended with the line: The dream of my life has come true. I have lived to see Jewish defence in the ghetto in all its greatness and glory. He was killed sixteen days later. He was 23.
See also
Sources
- Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, American Representation of the General Jewish Workers’ Union of Poland, 1945
- Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Houghton Mifflin, 1994
- Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, University of California Press, 1993
- Jürgen Stroop, The Stroop Report, Pantheon, 1979
- USHMM: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising