Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19-May 16, 1943) by a handful of Jews against the Nazis, although a futile effort against overwhelming odds that was brutally snuffed out by the SS in less than a month, was the largest Jewish uprising in German-Occupied Europe and was symbolically significant. In fact, the story of Warsaw ghetto uprising is a microcosm of the Holocaust: reflecting Nazism's vicious anti-Semitism, the brutality of a totalitarian ideology, the plight of a relentlessly prosecuted people, and individual heroism as well as extreme selfishness in the midst of a life and death situation. This paper about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, traces the background of the incident, discusses why it happened, who were the people involved in the revolt, and what was the outcome and aftermath of the struggle.

Background

Warsaw at the Start of World War II:

Before the start of the Second World War in 1939, the Jewish population in Poland was about 3.5 million. Approximately 350,000 Jews lived in the country's capital city, Warsaw alone constituting 30% of its total population.

When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, it not only signaled the start of the Second World War, it also sealed the fate of the Warsaw Jews. The Polish Army put up heroic resistance against the vastly superior German Army for a brief period, but was quickly overwhelmed by the Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg tactics during which Warsaw suffered devastating German air and artillery bombardment. Soon after occupying the city on September 29, 1939, the Germans started prosecuting its Jewish population. Jewish people had to carry special permits and licenses and were made to wear white armbands with a blue Star of David to distinguish them from the rest of the population. Jewish-owned property was confiscated and able-bodied Jews were conscripted as forced labor for the German war effort. Robbery of Jews was encouraged; violence against them was fostered, and even their murder was condoned. ("Warsaw"; Bell, pp. 167-168)

The Ghetto is Formed:

On October 16, 1940, the German governor general, Hans Frank announced the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto, a segregated area for Jews in the city. A Jewish Council for Warsaw named Judenrat was formed under the auspices of the Germans to "govern" the ghetto and a Jewish police force raised for maintaining order. All Jews in the city, one-third of its population, were ordered to be crammed into an area which was just one-twentieth of the city's size (just one square mile).

Within one month all non-Jews were shifted out of the ghetto and ten-foot high walls were built around it to seal the Jews off from the outside world. During the next year and a half, Jews from smaller cities and villages in the country were brought into the ghetto swelling its population to 400,000. Each room in the overcrowded ghetto held an average of twelve occupants. The Germans systematically closed-off labor opportunities for the Jews, so that 60% of them were unemployed. Official rations for Jews were severely limited to starvation levels and most of the ghetto inhabitants survived on a diet of watery soup served in public kitchens. (Bell, 167)

Survival Becomes the Priority:

In order to keep the Jews in line, the Germans resorted to terror tactics and applied the principle of "collective punishment" if any Jew dared to disobey the rules. For example, as early as November 1939, even before the official proclamation of the ghetto, 53 Jews in an apartment building were summarily shot for the beating of a Polish policeman by one of the tenants. (Edelman, para 5) When a radio transmitting station of the Polish Underground was found by the Germans in January 1940, the Germans arrested and executed over 300 Jewish social leaders, intelligentsia and professionals in a single night. (Ibid, para 9) Apart from the physical travails of the ghetto inhabitants, the Germans also subjected the Jews to psychological torture in order to break their spirit of resistance. A survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and a resistance fighter who was involved in the Ghetto uprising, Mared Edelman, later noted that the complete segregation of the ghetto from the outside world had "a very definite purpose"; it was intended to foster a special way of thinking among the ghetto inhabitants so that the only thing they would be worried about was simply to remain alive. In such an environment many of the Jews themselves turned collaborators and informants in order to be able to survive or resorted to smuggling and black-marketing even if it was at the expense of their own people.

Life in the Ghetto:

The Germans divided the ghettos into three categories. According to the Polish historian, Kazimierz Osmecki, the wealthy Jewish families and the intelligentsia were housed in the "little ghetto." The area was very different from the rest of the ghetto and contained cafes, restaurants, and concert halls that were well supplied with food, drinks and foreign delicacies. The second part of the ghetto was its industrial center, where the Jewish workers and their families were housed and were utilized as cheap labor -- running large-scale workshops. The workers were paid wages and received better food than the poor Jews. ("The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Poles" p.9) The worst part of the ghetto called "the big ghetto" was where the majority -- the poor Jews lived. They lived a life of extreme poverty and misery and barely survival. Homeless adults and children with emaciated bodies and dressed in grimy, torn rags roaming aimlessly in the streets of Warsaw ghetto became a common sight. Beggars begged and died in front of shops displaying food smuggled in from the "Aryan" area for those few who had the money to buy it. Even such harrowing scenes of misery were exploited by the German propaganda machine as examples of "depravity" of the "sub-human" Jews by contrasting it to the extravagant life-style of the few who had benefited from smuggling. (Edelman)

Death and Disease:

The over-crowded conditions, limited food and water, and the overworked sewers resulted in death and disease. Typhus epidemic became rampant and ravaged the ghetto. People could not be buried fast enough and bodies of dead people littered the streets. The mortality rate, particularly among the very young and the very old, began to mount. In 1940, 8,891 died of "normal" causes; in 1941, the figure climbed to 43,238, or 90 per 1,000 inhabitants; in 1942 the death rate had climbed to 140 per 1,000. (Bell, 168) By July 1942, death by disease and starvation, sporadic killings and arrests of Jews had reduced the population of the Ghetto from a high of 430,000 in May 1941 to 380,000. (Ibid)

Rumors of the Final Solution:

If the residents of the Ghetto thought that life could not possibly get worse for them, they were mistaken. In the early months of 1941 news of mass murder of thousands of Jews in gas chambers at Chelmno reached the ghetto. According to the news brought by three persons who had miraculously escaped before being put to death, 40,000 Jews from Lodz, Pomerania and the surrounding towns were taken to the gas chambers in Chelmno in November and December of 1940 and put to death. Despite the eyewitness account of the slaughter and the publication of the news by some organized youth organizations in the ghetto that favored resistance against the Germans, most of the Warsaw ghetto Jews refused to believe the story. They simply could not accept that such large-scale killings could take place for no apparent reason and tried to rationalize that the Germans needed the Jews for cheap labor and would, therefore, not resort to mass killings. (Edelman)

More disturbing news of the "final solution" for Jews arrived at the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Germans were reported to have killed thousands of Jews in the Western Ukrainian and White Russian territories. Most of the Ghetto Jews still refused to believe the stories and theorized that even if such killings did take place they were not the result of a plan to exterminate the Jews but may have been spontaneous acts on the part of isolated German troops in the first flush of victory.

Jewish Resistance Groups:

Organized youth organizations in the Warsaw Ghetto were in favor of armed resistance against the Germans from the beginning. A majority of the other groups such as the Bund

and the older generation of Jews in the ghetto were against armed resistance for various reasons. Most of them believed that armed resistance would provoke the Germans into retaliating more viciously against the Jewish community. Others believed that such resistance was a futile effort as it was bound to fail; they were thus resigned to the philosophy of bare survival. This was probably because the Germans had been successful in installing fear in the hearts of the majority of Jews through their brutal measures and psychological propaganda.

An underground right wing Jewish military organization -- ?ZW (the Jewish Fighting Union) was formed by former Polish army officers in October 1939. Due to its contacts with the Polish underground, the organization possessed a limited quantity of small arms. The Hashomer Hatzair was a Zionist socialist youth movement that later evolved into the ?OB (the Jewish Fighting Organization); it played a major role in the armed revolt against the Germans during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Bund had its own malitia that confronted Polish hoodlums in street battles and helped to organize public kitchens in the ghetto. All these Jewish groups, however, were not effective in opposing the Germans as they were not united and differed on the best way to oppose the Nazis. Moreover, the Germans had been succesful in dividing the Jews by forming a Jewish Council for governing Warsaw (the Judenrat) and they were collaborating with the Germans, supposedly as representatives of the Jews.

Deportation from the Ghetto:

On July 22, 1942, the Germans announced to the Jewish Council for Warsaw that "all Jews living in Warsaw, without regard to age or sex, are to be deported to the East" with certain exceptions for productive Jews. (Bell, 168) The Council was asked to provide a minimum contingent of six thousand people as the daily quota for deportation.

The Council complied and the round-up started on the very same day as the ghetto was surrounded by Ukrainian and Latvian guards, and the Jewish police carried out the task of rounding-up of the required number of Jews. Most people, starved into numbness, complied with the order without a semblance of resistance. Anyone who did was executed immediately. The deportations from Warsaw continued, without pause, until September 12 and in the seven-weeks period, a total of 265,000 Jews were sent by train, supposedly for 'resettlement in the East' and slave labor. Their actual destination was Treblinka, where three gas-chambers awaited them. (Bell 168)

On the day following the start of deportation, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, committed suicide probably because he knew about the fate of the depotees. On the same day, a meeting of the Jewish underground factions was held. Only Jewish youth groups, such as the Hechalutz and Hashomer organizations and the Bund supported active resistance against the deportation. The majority still thought that such action would be provocative and did not believe that the deportations were being made for mass execution of the Jews. Armed resistance was, therefore, postponed. (Edelman)

The youth groups, nevertheless, exhorted the people in the ghetto to resist deportation and distributed pamphlets warning them of the fate which awaited them. The Germans, in the meantime, countered by offering bread and marmalade to everyone who registered voluntarily for "deportation." The people in the ghetto were in such a state of starvation that they gladly took the bait. The German ploy was so successful hundreds of volunteers had to wait in line for several days to be deported.

Those who resisted, fearing the worst, were hunted down mercilessly and the Jewish Police, which rounded up the required numbers with ruthless efficiency, made the Germans' task easier. When the first phase of deportations finally ended on September 12, 1942, the population of Warsaw Ghetto had officially dwindled to just 37,000

; in reality the numbers were closer to 70,000 as thousands of people had hidden in secret bunkers or secret rooms. (Bell 169)

The Uprising

Preparing for Resistance.

During the pause in deportations, youth organizations convinced about the fate of the deportees, vowed to resist any future German attempts to deport the remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Although efforts to create a single fighting organization were not successful, the Jewish Fighting Organization (?OB) with Mordechai Anielewicz as military commander was formed. The Zionist Revisionist movement did not unify with ZOB and established a separate military organization called ZZW (the Jewish Military Union). The ZOB organized different fighting groups for resistance against future German moves in the ghetto but providing them with arms proved very difficult. Contacts were made with the Polish resistance groups on the "Aryan side" but they were reluctant to supply arms as they apprehended their confiscation.

A token contribution of just ten pistols is reported by some Jewish writers to have been provided by the Polish Home Army to the Jews. A few secret factories were set up to produce a handful of grenades and bombs. Some weapons were purchased and smuggled in by persuading and even blackmailing the wealthy Jews to contribute to the arms fund. Still the Jews were so poorly armed that the planned resistance seemed hopeless. Leaders of the ZOB were not unaware of the hopelessness of their effort, but they hoped to die with honor and inflict some casualties on their oppressors instead of meekly dying in the gas chambers.

The First Confrontation:

In January 1943, after a visit of Henreich Himmler himself to the ghetto, the Germans decided to carry out the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. On January 18, the Germans began another action to round up the remaining Jews still in the Ghetto. This time, the ZOB under the command of Anielewicz confronted the Germans in the streets. Although surprised at the affront of the Jews, the Germans slaughtered most of the ill-armed ZOB fighters in a firefight, while Anielewicz escaped miraculously. The Jews were exhilarated at their "success" in inflicting actual casualties on the Germans and the ZOB fighters now harassed the Germans regularly by directing sniper fire from ghetto buildings. The Germans retaliated by rounding up between 6,500 and 8,000 Jews but faced resistance and some casualties while doing so. (Bell, 170-172) During February and March there was sporadic fighting between the German SS troops and the Jewish fighters including a major fire fight on March 13 in which 400 Jews were killed but the Germans had to withdraw in the battle and were now reluctant to move about freely in the Ghetto.

The April Uprising:

Humiliated by the continuing resistance by Jewish fighters in the Ghetto, Himmler decided on its total destruction and appointed SS General Jurgen Stroop to direct the operation. The Germans started their action in the early hours of April 19 supported by tanks and armored cars with the SS troops marching behind the armor. The Jewish Fighters under the command of Anielewicz were prepared and lured the Germans into the inner Ghetto to effectively use their limited firepower before ambushing them with grenades and Molotov cocktails. The Germans were forced to pull back by the afternoon; the Jews were ecstatic.(Bell 174) On the second day of the fight, the Germans brought in more troops but were again repulsed when faced with more concentrated fire and well-laid mines in their path.