Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Jewish fighters in the Warsaw ghetto opened fire on German troops on 19 April 1943 and held out for nearly a month. The ghetto had held some 400,000 people in about 3.4 square kilometres, sealed behind a wall in 1940, with a food ration of a few hundred calories a day. Around 100,000 died of starvation and disease before any deportation began. Between July and September 1942 roughly 265,000 were taken to Treblinka and killed. The 50,000 or so who remained understood by the winter what resettlement in the east meant, which is the fact that made resistance possible — they were not choosing between life and death but between two deaths. Two organisations formed: the Jewish Combat Organisation under Mordechai Anielewicz, and the Jewish Military Union. Between them they had a few hundred fighters, some pistols, a few rifles, and homemade grenades and petrol bombs. The Germans entered on 19 April, the eve of Passover, to finish the deportation in three days, and were driven out on the first morning with losses. SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop then burned the ghetto block by block, and his own report — bound in leather and titled to record that the Jewish quarter of Warsaw was no more — is the principal source. Anielewicz died in the command bunker at Miła 18 in May. It was the largest Jewish revolt of the war and the first substantial urban uprising anywhere in occupied Europe. Stroop was hanged in Warsaw in 1952. The city itself rose in August 1944 and was destroyed in its turn.
- Year: 1943 CE
- Category: Military
