THIS coming April 19 marks the 80th anniversary of one of the most significant events of the Second World War. On that date in 1943 – following mass defiance of the occupying Nazi forces among the 50,000 Jews who were still living in the Warsaw Ghetto – Jewish fighters launched the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The Nazis had already murdered 300,000 Jews whom they had transported from the ghetto to the death camp at Treblinka. However, when, in April 1943, it launched a military assault on the now insurgent ghetto, the Third Reich faced an armed insurrection by members of the ZOB (the Jewish Combat Organisation) and the ZZW (the Jewish Military Union).
Determined to die fighting rather than be murdered at Treblinka and sworn to cause maximum casualties on the Nazi side, the more than 750, mainly young, male fighters took on Hitler’s military machine for a remarkable 27 days.
The politics of the fighters varied: the ZOB (which numbered in excess of 500) was predominantly socialist and comprised of both anti-Zionists (such as the Jewish Labour Bund) and those who subscribed to a left-wing form of Zionism, whereas the ZZW (which had at least 250 fighters) was right-wing and Zionist in its orientation.
However, these distinct political tendencies notwithstanding, the fighters were united on the need to launch military resistance to the invading Nazi forces. In doing so they had the support of the majority of the ghetto’s population.
For Henry Maitles, Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) and an eminent authority on Holocaust education, the uprising was “one of the most inspiring events, maybe in world history, certainly in Jewish history”.
For the professor – who is Jewish and co-author with Paula Cowan, of the book Understanding And Teaching Holocaust Education – there are three principal reasons why the uprising was of such importance.
The first, he tells me when we meet on the Paisley campus of the UWS, is that the military resistance in the ghetto provided a powerful refutation of the Nazis’ vile, anti-Semitic ideology. Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s propaganda chief, wrote about the uprising in his diary with considerable dismay.
In particular, Goebbels was utterly bewildered by the news that Jews were daring to fight against the might of the German Empire. Not only that, but they were doing so using weapons they had captured from the Nazi forces. It was, Maitles comments, “a shock to the Nazi system that Jews were fighting back”.
The second significant feature of the uprising, the professor argues, is that “it tied down a whole Nazi German army for almost a month”.
Those were forces, he continues, “that could have been used either at the eastern front, against the Soviet Red Army, or, more likely, used to track down Jews who had fled from the Warsaw Ghetto into the Polish forests”.
In that sense, Maitles believes, the uprising “saved countless lives”.
The third historic factor of the Jewish uprising was, Maitles suggests, that it established the fact that most Jews remaining in the Warsaw Ghetto were now certain that the Nazis were engaged in the mass murder of those they were transporting from the city.
Moreover, they had now concluded that it was better to die fighting than to be exterminated at Treblinka.
That, for Maitles, made the uprising a beacon of resistance, not only for Poland’s Jews but for everyone – from the Roma and Sinti communities, to gay people and the Nazis’ political opponents – who was facing Hitler’s fascist genocide, “It was a message to the people outside the ghetto, the gentiles, if you like, that you could fight back,” says Maitles.
Indeed, Maitles, like many historians, believes that the very fact that Jews rose up against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 contributed to the wider Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
“There wouldn’t just be a few hundred of them in the uprising a year later, there would be tens of thousands,” he says.
The historical record indicates the link between the ghetto uprising of 1943 and the broader challenge to the Nazi regime across Warsaw in 1944. One leader of the 1944 uprising is quoted as saying: “The blood of the ghetto fighters was not shed in vain.”
Of the Jewish uprising in 1943, Maitles observes that the extent of the ghetto’s isolation from the rest of Warsaw was extraordinary, and the Nazi repression of anyone who attempted to smuggle food, medicine or weapons to the Jews in the ghetto was vicious.
Nevertheless, he says, there were a “small number” of non-Jewish supporters in wider Warsaw who managed to get guns and ammunition to the Jewish fighters inside the ghetto.
For the most part, however, the ghetto fighters were, the professor explains, “mainly using homemade Molotov cocktails, some pistols, at the beginning of the uprising, and other weapons that they had smuggled into the ghetto”.
Such was the Jewish fighters’ heroism and level of preparedness, Maitles says, that “on the first day [of the uprising] the Nazis retreated, temporarily leaving their dead on the streets”.
On that day, he explains, “the ZOB took a number of captured weapons [from dead Nazi soldiers].”
This new armoury included machine guns and hand grenades. Consequently, when the Nazi forces came back into the ghetto, their advance was much more difficult than they initially expected.
The ensuing conflict – in which the Jewish fighters used the tactics of urban guerrilla warfare to bravely engage the Nazi military machine – is detailed in Marek Edelman’s remarkable account The Ghetto Fights. Edelman, who was a commander in the ZOB, was one of the few fighters to survive the uprising.
Edelman and his comrades waged an almost unbelievably brave struggle against the Nazis’ plan to transport the remaining 50,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to their deaths at Treblinka.
The uprising was, as Maitles says, a “moment of inspiration”, both to the people of Warsaw at the time, and to succeeding generations of anti-fascists.
