Jewish Ghetto Resistance (ZOB/ZZW)

Not a polity in any ordinary sense, and included because it governed and fought for a piece of ground when nothing else would. By late 1942 the Warsaw ghetto had lost around three hundred thousand people to Treblinka in three months, and the remaining inhabitants understood that deportation meant death rather than resettlement. Two organisations formed: the Jewish Combat Organisation, the ZOB, drawing on the socialist Bund and the Zionist youth movements under Mordechai Anielewicz, and the more right-wing Jewish Military Union, the ZZW. They had a few hundred fighters between them, pistols, homemade grenades and a small quantity of weapons obtained from the Polish underground, against SS troops with armour and flamethrowers. The rising began on 19 April 1943 when German forces entered to liquidate the ghetto and were driven out on the first day. Fighting continued for nearly a month, longer than several European countries had held out in 1940, and ended only when the Germans burned the district building by building. Anielewicz died at the Mila 18 bunker in May. Similar risings followed at Bialystok, Vilna and elsewhere, and prisoners revolted at Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz. A handful escaped through the sewers and joined the partisans. The point was never victory, and the fighters said so in writing at the time. The ghetto covered about three square kilometres at its largest. Emanuel Ringelblum's Oyneg Shabes archive, buried in milk cans and metal boxes, was partly recovered after the war and is the fullest record from inside. Jurgen Stroop's report to his superiors documented the destruction in photographs. The area was levelled and rebuilt after 1945.

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