Uprising at 75

75 years ago today (April 19, 1943) the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began. It lasted until May 16, 1943 - longer than many countries fighting the Germans lasted. The Germans had wanted to make Warsaw “Judenrein” (“Free of Jews”) as a present for Hitler’s birthday on April 20^th. After the Großaktion Warschau (Great-Action Warsaw) where in 2 months in 1942 the Germans had killed 10,000 Jews inside the Ghetto and sent 300,000 men, women and children from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Death Camp where they were gassed and burned within hours the Jews left in the Ghetto had built intricate tunnels and bunkers as well as collecting and making homemade weapons to fight the Germans.

The Jewish fighters (who numbered around 1,000 men, women and children) had been starved, beaten and used for forced labor since 1939 went up against 2,090 Germans (including 821 Waffen-SS) and an unknown number of Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Belarussian and Ukrainian SS collaborators. The Germans eventually went house by house and used flamethrowers to catch the fighters and any Ghetto resident. 13,000 Jews were killed in the Uprising (6,000 burnt alive) and 56,885 men, women and children were deported to concentration and death camps. A handful of people went through the sewers and made it to the partisans outside the city, but the leader of the Uprising: 24 year old Mordechai Anielewicz (I saw many things named after him when I was in Israel) and his fighters committed suicide in their bunker (at Miła 18) after the Germans discovered it and started using gas to poison them.

The picture above is from the SS Commander in charge of the suppression of the Uprising, Jürgen Stroop, who took many such pictures every day of the Uprising to give to Berlin along with a report (called the Stroop Report) of the number of attacks and deaths. It had 53 photographs and 125 typed pages. He was later convicted of war crimes and was hanged in Warsaw in 1952. While many in this picture were later identified -  The little girl peeking from the side is seven-year-old, Hannah Lemet who was murdered shortly after at the Majdanek Death Camp. The woman standing to her right is her mother, Matilda Lemet, who ends up surviving and immigrating to Israel. The boy holding a white bag is Aaron Krotoszynski, 14, who perished in Auschwitz. The German pointing the gun to the camera is Josef Blösche. Blösche was able to hide from justice until the East Germans found him in 1967. He was convicted of war crimes and executed in July 1969.

The identity and the fate of the boy with the raised hands is still unknown. Israel celebrates Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) in April/May (depending on the Hebrew Calendar) because of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.