The Warsaw Ghetto: the Uprising

by Annette WIEVIORKA

Annette WIEVIORKA is a historian, Director of Research at the CNRS. Most recent book: Déportation et génocide. Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Deportation and Genocide: Between Memory and Oblivion) (Plon, 1992)

On 19 April 1943, at six in the morning, the troops of SS General Stroop entered the ghetto. They were to carry out, in the SS general’s own words, “a cleansing of what remains of the ghetto.”

The “cleansing” was to last three days. It lasted three weeks. It was the first uprising in a city of Nazi-occupied Europe.

The beginnings of the ghetto

In September 1939, the German occupier had entered Warsaw, where before the war 393,000 Jews lived, a third of its population. Very quickly, various measures were put into effect against the Jews — “Aryanization” of businesses, concentration of Jews in the large cities, the establishment of a Jewish council, the Judenrat, for each community, the obligation to wear, on the right sleeve of one’s clothing, a white armband at least ten centimetres wide marked with a blue Star of David, confiscation of property, a ban on using public transport or owning a radio set, forced labour.

As early as March 1940, the residential zone of the Jews of Warsaw was designated an “epidemic zone,” and the Judenrat was charged with sealing off its access routes with walls. On 12 October 1940, the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the Germans announced over loudspeakers the creation of what they would continue and never cease to call a “Jewish quarter” — in fact a ghetto, as they had already established at Piotrków and at Łódź, renamed Litzmannstadt. The Warsaw municipality and the Judenrat were charged with carrying out the rehousing, for the decision entailed enormous population transfers: 113,000 Poles and 138,000 Jews, according to German statistics, were to move into their respective “quarters” within short order.

New walls were built, three metres high, crowned with barbed wire and bristling with shards of glass. On 16 November the quarter was sealed off. “We went to bed as inhabitants of the Jewish quarter, and the next day we woke up in a closed ghetto, a ghetto lacking not a single detail,” Kaplan wrote. The population of the ghetto swelled. Jews from the surrounding towns were deported there, then Jews from Germany, from Gdańsk, from Austria. Some 150,000 refugees flooded in. Thousands of them wandered, homeless, or crowded into the buildings. Hunger grew terrible and typhus raged. Between January 1941 and July 1942, 61,000 people died of it.

And yet life organized itself, a multiform life in which social activists tried to help their own by setting up clinics, orphanages, centres for refugees, soup kitchens, and above all an entire network of building committees — more than 2,000 by September 1940 — which organized mutual aid and cultural activities, and which, when the ghetto came under siege, would build shelters, religious or secular schools. Religious services were celebrated clandestinely. Yeshivot operated, as did libraries, theatres, a clandestine medical faculty where systematic research was carried out on the effects of hunger. But above all — a phenomenon unique in history — the ghetto wrote, the ghetto archived. Many of those who kept their diaries, such as Chaïm Kaplan or Abraham Lewin, were members of the teams set up by Emmanuel Ringelblum within the framework of his vast project to archive the life of the ghetto.

A teacher and a Zionist activist, Emmanuel Ringelblum was a seasoned historian. Very quickly he wrote his own chronicle of the life of the Jews of Warsaw, then formed teams charged with gathering everything concerning the ghetto. This was the Oneg Shabbat, the joy of the Sabbath, the name he gave to these archives and to this resistance organization of a special kind. Aware very early of the Germans’ exterminatory intent, Ringelblum’s work became a pure historical act, an address to posterity. Two portions of the archives, placed in milk cans before being buried, were recovered in 1946 and 1950. The third is probably lost forever. The documents they contained (the clandestine press in its near totality, the correspondence and materials of the political organizations, documentation on the Jewish Combat Organization) are a major source for the history of the ghetto. Thus the task he had set himself entailed his remaining with his people. To bear witness, to write what one might call the testament of the ghetto — if one takes the word testament in its proper sense, that of the covenant.

Political life organized itself as well, cruelly handicapped by the fact that the prewar political elites had left Warsaw, and made difficult by the terror the Nazis brought to bear. The most active groups were the Zionist groups, those of the Bund, and the Communists once the mortgage of the German-Soviet pact had been lifted. All published a clandestine press, much resembling that of the prewar years. The articles often took up the line of the Zionist or Bundist party, mechanically repeating the old ideological formulas without examining whether they were adequate to the new situation. Polemics raged, to which were added new divisions over the objectives of action: social action? cultural? political? Until the first reports on the mass murder of the Jews arrived, no plan of armed resistance was drawn up, even within the youth movements, which very quickly became the lifeblood of the Resistance, but which were above all preoccupied with the spiritual survival of their members, animated as they were by the certainty that, once the war was over, they would guide the destinies of their people.

The first news of the mass murder was brought to the ghetto in the autumn of 1941 by a man coming from Wilno. Other news would arrive regularly through messengers. For Yisrael Gutman, the foremost specialist on the history of the ghetto, this news caused a shock, but the massacres described by the messengers who reached Warsaw were perceived as a wave of pogroms of particular violence, which did not necessarily have implications for the Jews of Warsaw. The detailed testimony given in January 1942 by Yakov Grojanowski, a young Jew escaped from the Sonderkommando of Chełmno, then in April 1942 that of two brothers, militants of the Betar, recounting the deportation of the inhabitants of the Lublin ghetto, met with scepticism. “It is difficult,” wrote Marek Edelman, today the sole survivor of the group that led the uprising, “for a normal man to understand that one can murder people because they have other colours of eyes and hair and because they have a different origin.” Yet this news altered the attitude of the political groups. There was talk of unifying them; the possibility of armed struggle was raised.

The liquidation.

In the summer of 1942 the Aktion Reinhardt began, whose aim was to make the Jews of the General Government disappear. To this end, three killing centres, in the terminology of the historian Raul Hilberg, had been fitted out: those of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. On the morning of 22 July 1942, the eve of the Ninth of Av, day of commemoration of the destruction of the two Temples, the walls of the ghetto were placed under the guard of the “blues,” that is, the Polish police, and of Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Latvian troops. Höfle, charged with the liquidation of the ghetto, and his aides went to the seat of the Judenrat. To compel the Judenrat to sign the poster announcing the “resettlement of the Jews,” in the expression used by the Nazis, and whose technical organization fell to it, the Germans had arrested sixteen Jewish notables whom they held hostage. The poster would be put up, but it would not be signed, like the other notices, by the president of the Judenrat. On 23 July, Adam Czerniaków took his own life. He left a note to his wife: “They want me to kill the children of my people with my own hands.”

The Jewish order service was charged with conducting the Jews to the Umschlagplatz, the place where they were concentrated before being deported. At a rate of 5,000 to 7,000 deportees per day, the ghetto emptied. The Jews were led to the Umschlagplatz, guarded by SS troops and by the Jewish police, where a station had been fitted out from which the trains departed for the Treblinka killing centre, 120 kilometres away. The deportation lasted seven weeks. On 12 September 1942, when it ended, 33,400 Jews remained in the ghetto. Eight thousand had managed to pass over to the “Aryan” side. In principle, those spared were the Jews who worked in the administration of the Judenrat (6,000 people), in the Jewish police, or in the workshops set up by the German firms. To these were added some thirty thousand who lived in hiding. Between 265,000 and 310,332 Jews deported from Warsaw, according to the various estimates, were gassed upon their arrival at the Treblinka camp.

If Yisrael Gutman is to be believed, the population of the ghetto, with the exception of a handful of activists, never understood the meaning of the deportation, nor the destination of the transports. The real truth of the “resettlement” — that is, the nature of Treblinka — did not appear until after the destination had been discovered in mid-August thanks to an emissary of the Bund, Zalman Friedrich, sent on the trail of the deportees, who slowly made his way back into the ghetto. No act of violent resistance marked the great deportation, for multiple reasons: ignorance and uncertainty about the fate awaiting the evacuees, the belief that the Germans would deport only a fraction of the population — a belief reinforced by the constant rumours announcing the end of the deportation — and finally the violence that annihilates all strength, in men and women whose capacity had already been weakened by isolation, hunger, and the death that for two years had haunted the ghetto.

After the deportations, the ghetto was reduced to four enclaves, separated by no man’s lands. In principle the entire population there worked in workshops. What remained of the ghetto had become a labour camp.

The state of mind had changed. Whereas during the deportation everyone was focused on their own survival or that of their loved ones, the Jews now grasped their situation. The certainty was now anchored in many that surrendering to the Germans did not grant survival. The idea of an armed resistance grew.

In October 1942, after several attempts, agreement was fully achieved among the various political organizations. The Jewish Combat Organization was born. Its leaders were in their twenties. At its head, a leader of the Hashomer Hatzaïr, Mordechaï Anielewicz, then aged 24. “He measured exactly the chances of this unequal combat,” wrote Emmanuel Ringelblum. “He foresaw the destruction of the ghetto and of the workshops. He was certain that neither he nor his fighters would survive the liquidation of the ghetto, that they would perish like dogs, without hearth or home, and that no one would even know the location of their grave.”

The first operations, the JCO conducted against the Jewish police, in reprisal for its attitude during the deportations, against the members of the Judenrat close to the Germans, against Jews who were Gestapo agents. Szeryński was wounded, and Jacob Lejkin, his deputy, who had shown particular zeal, was executed on 29 October 1942. The next day, a poster was put up by the JCO announcing death sentences and the imminence of their execution. At the same time, the JCO called on the inhabitants to evade any possible arrests. They thus began to set up hideouts, shelters, most often in the cellars of the buildings.

On 18 January 1943, the ghetto awoke as usual. The workers who laboured outside found the exits blocked and made out the movements of soldiers and gendarmes on the other side of the wall. At half past seven, the German units entered the ghetto. It was the start of the second Aktion, which no one in the ghetto suspected. Indeed, two days after his visit to the ghetto, Himmler had given the order to deport 8,000 Jews. Three thousand of them were taken on the first day by the effect of surprise. But the JCO decided to act. A group, commanded by Anielewicz, positioned itself along a column heading toward the Umschlagplatz. At the signal, they sprang from the column and opened fire. In this brief combat, Germans were wounded and killed. The surprise among the Germans was total, all the more so as other groups acted by surprise, practising a kind of guerrilla warfare made possible by their knowledge of the terrain.

The inhabitants of the ghetto hid in the shelters, the streets were deserted. On the fourth day, the Aktion ended.

The baptism of fire of 18 January 1943 marked a turning point. If the losses were heavy (four-fifths of the members of the JCO perished), the Aktion had nonetheless been stopped, and the change was manifest among the inhabitants of the ghetto. The idea that any resistance would bring about the liquidation of the ghetto had vanished. A part of the clandestine press of the Polish resistance described the fighting of January and expressed its admiration for the Jewish fighters. The JCO then received forty-nine new revolvers and decided to manufacture Molotov cocktails. It was now clear to the Germans that the Jews would no longer leave the Warsaw ghetto of their own free will.

The uprising.

On 19 April 1943, at two in the morning, the first reports from the watch posts set up by the JCO indicated that German gendarmes and police were encircling the ghetto. It was the alarm for all the combat groups. The civilian population hid in the bunkers, the cellars, the networks of underground passages fitted out for that purpose.

At five in the morning, in small groups, the Germans entered the vacant lots surrounding the ghetto. At seven, in close ranks, marching in cadence, they advanced in two columns through the apparently deserted streets of the central ghetto. One column, advancing in song, was attacked, forced to retreat, leaving wounded behind. The second tried to set up its headquarters at the intersection of Miła and Zamenhof streets. It was then that the combat groups opened a concentrated fire. The Germans tried to flee, but the road was cut off. By two in the afternoon, there was no longer a single German in the ghetto. The victory was total for the JCO.

The next day, the fighting resumed. General Stroop had changed tactics. It was now a matter of conquering the houses one by one, of setting them ablaze to force the fighters to surrender.

The fighting continued for more than another fortnight. On 8 May 1943, the command of the Jewish Combat Organization, the bunker at 18 Miła Street, was encircled by the Germans. No one wished to surrender alive. Most of those who were in the bunker, among them Mordechaï Anielewicz, took their own lives. On 10 May, two combat groups remained in the ghetto. By mid-June, their trace was lost. On 16 May 1943, SS General Stroop symbolically destroyed the largest synagogue in Warsaw, situated outside the limits of the ghetto. He could proudly announce the end of the Jewish quarter of Warsaw.

For three weeks, the fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization — poorly armed with pistols, grenades, and Molotov cocktails — were pitted, each day, against some 2,000 soldiers on the German side, trained for war, equipped with armament identical to that used at the front: tanks, cannon, flamethrowers.

In July 1943, the Germans installed a small concentration camp in the ghetto, to which they transferred some three thousand detainees from the Auschwitz camp, to recover the Jewish property and clear the ruins, for no trace was to remain. The site where the Jews had lived for centuries was to be replaced by a park.

Heroic, the Jews’ struggle was waged in the greatest of solitudes. And yet the Allies knew, thanks notably to the reports transmitted by emissaries of the Polish resistance such as Jan Karski, or, during the uprising itself, by the radio broadcasts. All the efforts to make the Allies sensitive to the fate of the Jews were in vain. The liquidation of the ghetto and its struggle did not halt the annihilation of the Jews. On 12 May 1943, Artur Zygielbojm, the representative of the Bund on the Polish National Council, took his own life. In his last letter, he wrote: “By passively witnessing the extermination of millions of defenceless men, women, and children, tortured to death, these countries have made themselves accomplices of the murderers (…) I cannot keep silent, I cannot go on living while the remnants of the Jewish population of Poland to which I belong are being eliminated (…) Through my death, I wish to protest with all my strength against the extermination of the Jewish people.”

Very quickly, the memory of the Warsaw uprising was chosen as the date par excellence for commemorating the fate of the Jews during the Second World War. It is a site of memory par excellence, a particularly ambivalent site, something well expressed by the “monument to the Jewish people, its heroes and its martyrs,” by the sculptor Nathan Rapoport, installed for the fifth anniversary of the uprising, on 19 April 1948, on the site of the ghetto, and studied by the American James Young. On the western wall, facing the great square that permits mass gatherings, seven figures of heroes have been sculpted. In the foreground, clothes in tatters, sleeves rolled up, Mordechaï Anielewicz undergoes, as James Young writes, “without any doubt a proletarian treatment: at once worker and partisan, fused into a single image, he steps forward to lead his fighters.” Around him, the figures of the people rising up to resist.

One must leave the open space of the square, go around the monument, to find its shadow face, that of the martyrs. Twelve bowed figures — the twelve tribes of Israel — representing the Jews of the Exile, Jews bent, resigned, going passively toward their fate.

This representation of the uprising given by the sculptor is emblematic of what took place in the Jewish world of the postwar period, in Poland, in France as in Israel. The memory of the fighters allows the Jews to be reintegrated into combatant humanity, and thereby into the humanity from which Nazism had wished to cut them off. The heroes, following the formula they themselves already used, “saved Jewish honour” — as if there were dishonour in being the victim of a mass murder. They showed that “the Jews did not let themselves be led like sheep to the slaughter.” At the same time, this vision effaces what the tragedy of the ghettos was, allows one to avoid looking at the agonizing reality. The uprising of the ghetto is not a battle pitting two armies against each other, like that of Stalingrad to which it was often compared, notably in the Communist world. Nor is it a rising, an insurrection, aimed at overthrowing an established power. The choice before which the JCO was placed was simply that of its death. To die at Treblinka or with weapons in hand. “Can one even speak of an uprising?” wonders Marek Edelman, the sole survivor of the leaders of the JCO. “Was it not rather a matter of not letting them come to slit our throats? At bottom, it was only a matter of choosing one’s way of dying.”

This text is an abridged version of the article that appeared in the review L’Histoire, March 1993.