On April 19, 1943, eighty years ago, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began, in which about seven hundred Jews rebelled against the Nazi occupiers and deportations to concentration camps. They were mainly young people who formed small resistance groups, poorly armed and poorly equipped: the revolt lasted almost a month and was then put down. The entire neighborhood of the ghetto was razed to the ground and thousands of Jews were captured, killed or deported to concentration camps in Poniatowa, lawns e Majdanek, always in Poland. Ma la Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has become a symbolic episode of resistance to anti-Semitic persecution in Jewish and world history.
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest Jewish ghetto of German-occupied Europe. It was established in the late 1940s, and all Jewish residents of the city (and later from other areas as well) were ordered to move into it. It was located in the center of Warsaw, the capital of Poland, and extended for 3.4 square kilometers, surrounded by a wall over 3 meters high, covered with barbed wire and guarded by Nazi soldiers to prevent Jews from leaving. It is estimated that there were around 400 thousand, locked up in rooms of around 7 people each.
From the Warsaw Ghetto, the German police and the SS, the notorious paramilitary group of the Nazi regime, deported hundreds of thousands of Jews, mainly to the extermination center of Treblinka in northeastern Poland. Only during the big action (“great action”), i.e. the deportation which lasted from the end of July to mid-September 1942, around 265,000 were deported. Another 35,000 were killed inside the ghetto, where at the beginning of 1943 there were about 80,000 survivors.
At the time of the revolt, Poland had been occupied for four years, i.e. since the beginning of the Second World War, provoked by the Nazi invasion of the country in September 1939. Shortly after, the Soviet Union responded by invading the country , which for years suffered from the foreign occupation of two forces hostile to the self-determination and culture of the Polish people. An estimated six million Poles, over 20 percent of the population, died between 1939 and 1945. Half of these six million were Jews.
The revolt came gradually. Already towards the end of 1942, many Jews in the ghetto began to form clandestine organizations. One of the first was the Jewish Struggle Organization (ZOB, ZJewish Fighting Organization), the most numerous among those who participated in the revolt the following year. At first the ZOB had 200 members, which later grew to over 500. Also in 1942, the Jewish Military Union (ZZW, Jewish Military Union), which participated in the revolt with about 250 members. These two organizations were then joined by other smaller ones, with very different ideological positions: there were Zionists, i.e. supporters of the fact that the Jewish people deserve a homeland in Israel, and non-Zionistscommunist-inspired groups e conservatory.
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To obtain weapons, especially pistols and explosives, these groups managed after several attempts to get in touch with the National Army (AK, Home Army), the main resistance movement to Nazi Germany in occupied Poland, active since 1939.
A first attempt at an organized revolt took place in January 1943, when the SS and the German police organized a new round of deportations, this time to concentration camps in the Lublin area, in southeastern Poland. A small group of fighters armed with pistols infiltrated the column of Jews heading for thetranshipment point, the point in the ghetto where the people to be deported were gathered, and at a prearranged signal he started shooting. Most of the fighters were killed in the exchange of fire with the German forces, but in the confusion some Jews gathered in the square managed to disperse and temporarily avoid deportation.
The deportations were suspended for a short time and this encouraged other inhabitants of the ghetto to join the armed movements, which in the following weeks built bunkers and underground shelters to hide and organize other revolts.
In mid-April, the ZOB learned of another major deportation operation planned by the SS, and urged the ghetto residents to retreat to their bunkers and hiding places. The Germans, in turn, organized themselves to deal with another possible revolt and appointed General Jürgen Stroop as head of the SS in the Warsaw ghetto, who had already had experience of repressing insurrections and partisan struggles in the 1930s. Stroop raised about 2,000 soldiers and policemen under his command and heavily armed them with artillery and tanks.
On April 19, 1943, the ZOB uprising began, led by twenty-four-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz and in which about 700 young Jews participated. including many women. They were armed only with pistols, a few rifles and grenades, many of which were handcrafted and built in the previous weeks. Most of them did not have sufficient military training, but despite this on the first day of the uprising they fought fiercely and with intensity, forcing the Germans to retreat outside the ghetto walls. According to Stroop’s account, 12 German soldiers were killed or wounded on the first day of the revolt alone.
The fighting took the form of guerrilla warfare and went on for 27 days, during which even the entire population of the ghetto, including those who did not join the armed struggle, did everything to hinder the deportation attempts by the Nazis, for example not showing up at rallying points and hiding in underground bunkers.
The following 8 May, Stroop and the forces under his command began to gradually regain control of the ghetto: they left from the building which in the meantime had become the headquarters of the ZOB, at number 18 in via Mila. It is not clear how the leaders of the armed movement died. According to some reports, yes suicidal to avoid capture.
The German reconquest of the ghetto was completed on 16 May. The Germans demolished the area one piece at a time, going block by block to capture the people inside the buildings. Many buildings were burned, and the city’s main synagogue, the Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street, was blown up on May 16, 1943. On the same day, Stroop declared that “the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw no longer exists”. Over the following weeks, the SS and German police arrested and deported some 42,000 people. Most of them were killed in November 1943, in the operation that later came to be known as harvest festival, Operation Harvest Festival. Another 7 thousand people were killed directly in the ghetto.
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