Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz commanded the Warsaw ghetto uprising at twenty-three, and said plainly that he did not expect to win. He grew up poor in Warsaw, the son of a shopkeeper, and was active before the war in Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist-Zionist youth movement. He fled east in September 1939, was arrested by the Soviets trying to open an escape route to Romania, and came back to occupied Warsaw to do underground work when he could have stayed away. The turning point was information. Reports from Vilna and then from Treblinka established during 1942 what resettlement in the east meant, and after the great deportation removed some 250,000 people from the ghetto in two months, the argument that resistance would only bring reprisals lost its force - the choice was no longer between life and death. He became commander of the Jewish Combat Organisation, which had a few hundred fighters, a handful of pistols, some rifles and homemade grenades. When the Germans entered on 19 April 1943 to liquidate the ghetto in three days, they were driven out by fire from the rooftops and came back with flamethrowers, burning the district building by building. It held for nearly a month. He died on 8 May in the command bunker at Mila 18, probably by his own hand. His last surviving letter says that the dream of his life had come true, that he had lived to see Jewish resistance in the ghetto in all its greatness and glory - written while it was being destroyed.

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