Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943): Jewish Armed Resistance

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was an armed revolt by Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto against German forces who arrived on 19 April 1943 to deport its last inhabitants to death camps. Several hundred poorly armed young fighters held out for almost four weeks against a much larger, well-equipped German force, which crushed the revolt by burning the ghetto building by building. It was the largest Jewish uprising of the Holocaust and the first major urban revolt against German occupation in Europe.

Background: the Warsaw Ghetto

Before the Second World War, Warsaw had the largest Jewish community in Europe, about 350,000 people, roughly 30 percent of the city’s population. After Germany occupied the city in September 1939, Jews were forced to wear armbands, lost their property and were subjected to forced labour.

In October 1940 the German authorities ordered the creation of a ghetto in the northern part of the city, and on 16 November 1940 it was sealed behind a wall. At its peak more than 400,000 people, including Jews deported from nearby towns, were crowded into an area of about 3.4 square kilometres. Official food rations were far below survival level, and hunger, typhus and other diseases killed tens of thousands; estimates of deaths inside the ghetto before the deportations run to more than 80,000.

Inside, Jewish society tried to keep going. Underground schools, soup kitchens and cultural groups operated, and the historian Emanuel Ringelblum organised a secret archive, Oyneg Shabes, to document daily life and German crimes. Much of it was buried in milk cans and metal boxes and recovered after the war.

The Great Deportation

In January 1942 senior Nazi officials meeting at the Wannsee Conference coordinated the plan to murder Europe’s Jews. In occupied Poland this took the form of Operation Reinhard, which used the death camps of Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka.

On 22 July 1942 the Germans began the “Great Action” in Warsaw. Over the following eight weeks, until 21 September, about 265,000 Jews were taken from the ghetto’s Umschlagplatz (assembly point) to Treblinka and murdered there, and thousands more were killed inside the ghetto. Adam Czerniaków, head of the Jewish council, took his own life on 23 July rather than take part.

Afterwards roughly 55,000–60,000 people remained, many of them hiding without permits. Most of the elderly, children and the sick were gone. Those left were now in little doubt that “resettlement” meant death.

Organising resistance

On 28 July 1942, in the first days of the deportations, members of Jewish youth movements founded the Jewish Combat Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB). In late 1942 it expanded to include other political groups, among them the socialist Bund, and Mordechai Anielewicz, then in his early twenties and a leader of the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, became its commander.

A separate force, the Jewish Military Union (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, ŻZW), was organised mainly by members of the Revisionist Zionist movement, with Paweł Frenkel among its leaders. It had some former Polish Army officers and was comparatively better armed.

Weapons were the great problem. The fighters bought or obtained pistols, a few rifles and submachine guns, and grenades from the Polish underground and the black market, and made their own petrol bombs. The Polish Home Army supplied a limited quantity of arms; how much help it gave, and whether it could have given more, is still debated by historians. Fighters and civilians built bunkers and hiding places under houses and in cellars.

On 18 January 1943 German forces re-entered the ghetto to resume deportations. This time some ŻOB fighters mingled with a column of deportees and opened fire on the guards at an agreed signal, and street fighting followed. After about four days the Germans withdrew, having deported or killed around 5,000–6,500 people.

To the people of the ghetto the pause looked like a victory for resistance. More civilians prepared bunkers and refused German orders to report for “voluntary” transfer to labour camps, and both fighting groups intensified their training.

The uprising

Heinrich Himmler wanted the ghetto liquidated in time to present it as a gift for Hitler’s birthday on 20 April. Before dawn on 19 April 1943, the eve of the Jewish festival of Passover, German forces entered the ghetto. They were met by gunfire, grenades and petrol bombs at the corner of Nalewki and Gęsia streets and at Zamenhof Street, and pulled back with casualties.

The SS and police commander in Warsaw, Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg, was replaced that same day by SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, who took over the operation. His force averaged just over 2,000 men a day, including SS units, police, Wehrmacht engineers and artillery, and auxiliaries recruited from Soviet prisoners of war (the “Trawniki men”). They had armoured vehicles, flamethrowers and artillery.

The insurgents numbered roughly 750 organised fighters, about 500 in the ŻOB and 250 in the ŻZW, with other armed civilians. Heavy fighting took place at Muranowski Square, where ŻZW fighters raised a Polish and a blue-and-white Jewish flag over a building, and in the area of the brush factory, where ŻOB units under Marek Edelman held out for several days.

Unable to clear the bunkers with infantry, Stroop changed tactics after the first few days. His men set fire to the ghetto systematically, block by block, and used smoke and explosives against hiding places. Thousands of people died in the flames or were driven out and shot, and those captured were marched to the Umschlagplatz for deportation.

On 8 May German forces surrounded the ŻOB command bunker at 18 Miła Street. Anielewicz and many others inside died, many reportedly taking their own lives rather than surrender. A few days later a small group of survivors, including Marek Edelman and Zivia Lubetkin, escaped through the sewers to the “Aryan” side of the city with the help of Simcha Rotem and other contacts.

On 16 May 1943 Stroop ordered the destruction of the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street, outside the ghetto proper, as a symbolic end to the operation. His illustrated report to his superiors carried the title “The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!” Isolated groups continued to hide and fight in the ruins for weeks afterwards.

By the numbers

Key people

Mordechai Anielewicz (c. 1919–1943) commanded the ŻOB and died at 18 Miła Street. Marek Edelman (c. 1919–2009), a Bund member and ŻOB commander, survived, fought again in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and later became a cardiologist and a voice of the Polish democratic opposition. Paweł Frenkel led ŻZW fighters and was killed in the summer of 1943. Jürgen Stroop was tried in Poland after the war and hanged in Warsaw in 1952.

Consequences

Of the ghetto’s last inhabitants, Stroop counted about 7,000 killed during the fighting and about 7,000 sent to Treblinka. Most of the others were deported to Majdanek and to labour camps such as Poniatowa and Trawniki, where the great majority were shot in the mass killings of November 1943, known as Operation Harvest Festival. The ghetto area itself was later turned into a concentration camp and almost entirely levelled.

News of the uprising spread across occupied Europe. Prisoners in camps and ghettos learned that armed resistance was possible, and revolts followed in the Białystok ghetto in August 1943 and in the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps. In London, Szmul Zygielbojm, the Bund’s representative on the Polish National Council, took his own life on 12 May 1943 in protest at the world’s indifference.

Legacy

The Monument to the Ghetto Heroes by the sculptor Nathan Rapoport was unveiled in Warsaw on the fifth anniversary, 19 April 1948. In 1970 the West German chancellor Willy Brandt knelt before it, a gesture remembered as the Warsaw Genuflection. Since 2013 the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews has stood opposite the monument.

Each year on 19 April people in Warsaw wear paper daffodils in memory of the fighters, a tradition linked to Marek Edelman, who laid yellow flowers at the monument on every anniversary. In Israel, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah, falls on a date in the Hebrew calendar chosen with reference to the uprising.

The uprising is often confused with the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, a separate, much larger revolt by the Polish Home Army against German occupation of the whole city.

Timeline

• 1940, 16 November: The Warsaw Ghetto is sealed off.
• 1942, 22 July – 21 September: About 265,000 Jews are deported to Treblinka.
• 1942, 28 July: The Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) is founded.
• 1943, 18–21 January: The first armed resistance halts a new round of deportations.
• 1943, 19 April: German forces enter the ghetto and the uprising begins.
• 1943, 8 May: The ŻOB command bunker at 18 Miła Street falls; Anielewicz dies.
• 1943, 16 May: Stroop blows up the Great Synagogue and declares the operation over.
• 1948, 19 April: The Monument to the Ghetto Heroes is unveiled.

Why it matters

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a choice made by people who knew they could not win: to die fighting rather than be taken to Treblinka. It became a defining symbol of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and a reminder that, even in the face of overwhelming force, the victims of genocide were not passive.