Mila 19 Bunker

From Untold Stories of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany’s Facebook:

(Excavations of the bunker in 2022)

Nearly 80 years after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Archeologists in Poland are working to exhume the Miła 18 site from the Earth.

Famously portrayed in Leon Uris's 1961 novel of the same name, and in its 2001 TV movie adaptation "Uprising," Miła 18 served as the underground bunker headquarters of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. On May 8, 1943 while surrounded by Nazi Soldiers, around 120 of the resistance fights committed suicide inside the building.

(Post-War Picture of the bunker)

On June 7, 2022, another round of archeological research and excavations began in the former Ghetto area, conducted by the Warsaw Ghetto Museum together with a team of scientists from Christopher Newport College and the Aleksander Gieysztor Academy in Pułtusk – a branch of AFiB Vistula.

(Pre-War Picture of Mordechai Anielewicz)

At the site of the non-existent tenement house, children’s shoes, stove tiles, ceramic floor tiles, fragments of crockery, tools and other objects were found by archeologists.

^ Mila 18 (named after the Street and Number where the Bunker was built in the Warsaw Ghetto) is known as Warsaw’s Masada – in reference to the Masada Fortress in Israel where 960 Jewish Men, Women and Children hid from the Romans in the year 74.

When the Romans were about to enter the Fortress (after a Siege) and either kill or enslave everyone all 960 agreed to die. Since Judaism forbids suicide the people selected Warriors to kill the people in groups with the Warriors then killing the other Warriors. The last Warrior committed suicide.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising lasted from April 19 – May 16, 1943. It was in response to the Germans Ghetto Liquidation Order.

After the Germans carried out the Große Aktion Warschau (Great Action Warsaw) where form July-September 1942 300,000 Men, Women and Children were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Death Camp those remaining in the Ghetto built bunkers and connecting tunnels throughout the Ghetto.

At Mila 18 the 24 year old leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz, led the Uprising against the Germans. When the bunker was discovered on May 8, 1943 their were 300 Men, Women and Children inside. The Germans pumped gas into the bunker. A handful of people managed to escape and flee the Ghetto. Around 100 Civilians left the bunker and surrendered to the Germans (they were then killed on the spot.) 150 Fighters, including Anielewicz, killed themselves inside the bunker rather than be shot or gassed by the Germans.

A total of 13,000 Jewish Men, Women and Children were killed during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (6,000 were burnt alive.) Another 57,065 were deported to the Treblinka and Majdanek Death Camps and murdered in the Gas Chambers.

79 years may have passed but the Men, Women and Children that lived, fought and died in the Warsaw Ghetto continue to be remembered through their clothes and other personal items that are still being found. ^