Poland
Ghetto Uprising Memorial
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In 1942, about 300,000 Jews had been deported from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. Only 55,000 remained, mainly men and women without children because children and the elderly had been deported. Some of the “remnants,” as they called themselves, formed the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB), or Jewish Fighting Organization. They reached out to partisan groups and the Polish underground for weapons. They received very few such weapons but were determined to do as much as possible with what they had.
When a new round of deportations began in January 1943, the ZOB struck back, firing on German troops and helping other ghetto residents into prearranged hiding places. Nazi commanders retaliated by executing 1,000 Jews in the main square of the ghetto, but they also briefly stopped the deportations. Surviving Jews made preparations for a major revolt.
April 19, 1943, was the first day of the Jewish holiday of Passover and also the eve of Hitler’s birthday. German General Jürgen Stroop arrived in Warsaw ready to wipe out all opposition within a single day as a birthday gift to his Führer. Stroop had 2,100 soldiers with 13 heavy machine guns, 69 handheld machine guns, 135 submachine guns, several howitzers, and 1,358 rifles. The approximately 750 Jewish resisters had two submachine guns, a handful of rifles, and homemade explosives. But the resisters were able to fight off Stroop’s soldiers for the first few days, and they were able to hold out under siege for four weeks.
The Nazis finally put down the uprising on May 16 by destroying the ghetto and sending any survivors to death or labor camps. Anielewicz did not survive. Rotem and Marek Edelman were among the few to escape through the sewers to the “Aryan” part of Warsaw. Others took their own lives before the Nazis could reach them.
