Page 44 - Witness: Passing the Torch of Holocaust Memory to New Generations

On April 19, 1943, the remaining Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto launched the heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Germans had planned to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto in three days, but the stubborn ghetto fighters held out for four weeks. Thirteen thousand Jews were killed in the ghetto during the uprising – many of whom were burnt alive.
The Warsaw Uprising, which began in August of 1944, was the largest single military revolt initiated by European resistance fighters during World War II. The courageous Polish resistance – led by the Armia Krajowa (Polish Home Army) – fought for 63 days, with almost no outside assistance, until they were crushed by the Nazis. In addition to thousands of military casualties, some 200,000 Polish civilians died, the majority during mass executions, and some 250,000 were exiled from the city. By the end of the war, more than three-quarters of the city had been destroyed.
Throughout Europe, Jewish partisan and resistance units displayed remarkable courage in resisting the enemy in the face of the overwhelming military superiority of the Nazi war machine. An estimated 30,000 Jewish men and women served as partisans in the forests in Poland alone. Armed Jewish resistance took place in approximately 60 ghettos, three major concentration/death camps, and 18 forced labor camps.
From outside occupied Europe, the Allied armies fought to liberate Europe from the deathly grip of Nazi Germany. In the latter stages of the war, with the Soviets approaching from the east, and the other Allied forces from the west and south, Nazi Germany’s hold over Europe began to crumble.
When these forces encountered the labor camps and death camps, they came across thousands upon thousands of corpses and emaciated prisoners who seemed more dead than alive. Indeed, many perished in the immediate days following their liberation as a result of the years of torture and deprivation they endured.*
Those who did survive lived the rest of their days with a feeling of deep gratitude for those who liberated them – at the last moment – from the jaws of death, often referring to them as “angels” in their post-Holocaust memoirs.
* For the sake of historical accuracy, of course, one must distinguish between the various forms of physical resistance. The national movements, such as the Polish Home Army (often rife with anti-Semitism), had a different motivation from the Jews in their fight against the Nazis, just as the Allies did. Their impetus was not to save European Jewry, but to defeat Hitler. Further, uprisings by Jews against overwhelming odds and abandoned by the entire world, are not comparable to organized armies fighting with the support of their governments and fellow citizens.
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