ALEXANDER KIMEL - HOLOCAUST UNDERSTANDING & PREVENTION

WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was a turning point in Jewish history. The Jews realized that they had to fight, they had to break with the past passivity, give up hope for survival.

The Warsaw Ghetto, confined the local Jewish population as well as deportees from other countries. Soon after its establishment, in October 1940, it contained half of million people, 200 000 more then the area held ordinarily. It was surrounded by a high wall, its inmates were provide with little food, and they were deprived of hygienic aids and medicines. The death rate was so high that the daily burials had to be made in mass graves. Nevertheless, the Jews organized a pathetic semblance of communal life in which mutual assistance and the education of the children were the dominant features. The Jews refused to become demoralized.

The Liquidation of the Ghetto: In July, 1942, the Germans began a systematic liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. In order prevent resistance and rebellion, the Nazis resorted to trickery and sly subterfuge to keep the victims ignorant of their ultimate fate. No one knew for certain, but everyone suspected, what was happening to the 6,000 to 10,000 persons who were deported from Warsaw daily. By the autumn of 1942 only some 40,000 remained in the Warsaw ghetto, and for a time the deportations ceased. On January 19, 1943, they were to be resumed, and there occurred the first active opposition to the Germans on the part of the Warsaw Jews. The Nazis took a fearful revenge; yet this was but the prelude do a greater uprising a few months later.

Revolt in the Ghetto: From the beginning, some of the Jews kept in touch with the underground forces outside of the ghetto. At great risk they had smuggled in quantity of small arms and ammunition which they kept hidden against the day when the plans for resistance would be completed. Evidently that day had been postponed so long because of the unwillingness of the Jewish community leaders to believe the reports about the Germans. But by early 1942, the remaining Jews chose to die fighting, a Jewish combat organizations sprung to life.

Obtaining weapons was a crucial task, "The Jewish Combat Organization obtained 90 pistols, 500 hand grenades, 15 kilograms of explosives, 1 light machine gun." This was pitifully inadequate. "The leaders of the Jewish resistance movement demanded greater amount of material, but the {Polish} Home Army High Command argued that they could not spare more arms...although according to the memorandum of the Polish Government in exile , in spring of 1943 the Home Army possessed 25,000 riffles, 6,000 pistols, 1,000 light machine guns, 1000 heavy machine guns."

Almost without weapons, sometimes with one pistol per fighting group, the fighters decided not to seek survival through escape but to stay in the ghetto to put up a fight." On April 19, 1943, which happen to fall on the first night of Passover, a detachment of Nazis arrived in the of Nazis arrived in the ghetto to deport a number of Jews and their families, they were greeted with pistol shots and hand grenades. Thus began a struggle, which lasted more than a month. Practically unarmed, the population, consisting for the most part of women and children, held off all the might that the Germans could muster - their tanks, their field guns and their airplanes. Most of the ghetto was soon set o fire. Any Jew who was caught was tortured to death or thrown into the flames. The Germans were acting according to their Nazi training; the Jews fought with Maccabean courage and intelligence. Every house became a fortress under the flags of Zion and of Poland; every street was a battlefield. The German losses were high. On the forty- second day of fighting only one house remained still standing, and the few surviving Jews contested every floor until none was left to fight. Warsaw, the Nazis triumphantly announced, was at last 'free of Jews'".

The importance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising lies not in the fact that an unarmed and untrained groups of youthful survivors organized a hopeless struggle against the mighty German war machine, but in the symbolic importance of the change in Jewish national consciousness. The Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto was possible when the youth placed the value of honorable death above the aim of individual survival. It was a watershed in Jewish history, the notion of Kiddush Hashem, the compulsive compliance with the oppressors, was discarded. The first time after the Jewish Wars with the Romans, the first time after the Fall of Massada (135 AD.), the Jews fought their own battles under their own banners.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a turning point, the change in national consciousness that laid ground for the birth of the State of Israel and the rebirth of the Jewish nation five short years later. It an unbelievable a short span of 25 years, the survivors of the unbelievable trauma of the Holocaust, contributed to the creation of the modern, highly motivated, mobile fighting force of the Israeli Defense Forces. In 1967 a minute State of Israel faced the combined, numerical superior forces of the Arab countries - 3 million Jews faced over 80 million Arabs, and defeated them in a six days. The Six Day War is the real miracle of our time. Within one generation the symbol of Auschwitz was replaced with the symbol of the Six Day War.

The unbelievable Six Day War was possible to a miraculous dramatic change in the Jewish National consciousness within a short span of 25 years, in one generation the abyss of the Holocaust Syndrome was proceeded with the triumph.

kimel@systec.com