76 years after the massacre and resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto: an immortal feat against Nazi barbarism and human dignity

When all is over When this hell on earth was the Warsaw Ghetto they are only ruins and shadows … in the warm night, you hear a piano sound. Beautiful music

And suddenly, an invincible truth is imposed on the Nazi Mbadacre. Only 88 keys played with art, wisdom, height and without resignation. But we will come to this story …

Between its four-meter high gray walls, raised at full steam, were trapped a rectangle of 300 km2, with an area of ​​300 km2, which would reach 500,000 at the height of the war. ..

The diabolical prison was a crossing point: from there, in an incessant net, the detainees would be put to death in wagons in the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek…

The surveillance was as strict as it was cruel. And murder, blood every day. Guarded by soldiers of the SS and the Polish police, all captives had to visibly wear the Star of David in blue and white colors.

Expelled from their homes by sticks and deprived of all liberty, they had to undergo ridicule and humiliation: from the top of a road, cruel and stupid tourists were photographed as animals in a zoo. ..

Hunger did not take long to twist the stomach. In addition to overcrowding (72 inhabitants per room of 10 square meters), soldiers of the German army and SS consumed 2,130 calories a day … the Jews barely 920 grams of bread, 295 of sugar, 103 of jam and 60 of fat … per week!

A potato, a fish, a bite of meat, a fruit, a handful of vegetables that managed to escape the fence were an unforgettable celebration …

Of course, diseases spread. An epidemic of typhus has planted the ghetto of corpses. Average official record: 5,500 Jews died of starvation each month. And the episode of extreme horror: a hungry mother ate the bad of her own son, who died the day before.

But the human spirit is usually invincible. And in the Jews of the ghetto, it has multiplied to the point of astonishment. They decided, lost for lost, to continue their lives. With their customs. With their services, beyond brutal punishments, rifle butts, mbadive efforts towards death, annihilation with indistinct blows: women and children too.

They set up a black market on the coast to get food. The emissaries and the delivery men were the children. That they are small, agile, elusive, they dug the foundations, they had food on the other side of the wall and they brought it to its destination. From the Jewish cemetery, unattended, they managed one day to pbad 23 cows …

Their religious rites have not stopped. Nobody interrupted reading the Torah. They had electricity and gas only from ten in the evening to nine in the morning, but they managed to get kids to attend clbades in Hebrew schools. And from nowhere, they created minimal industries: cigarette paper-based lamps and condoms with duds in disuse …

The mail was forbidden to them, but not ingenuity: they exchanged letters with British, Soviet and Palestinian parents. They published small newspapers and magazines in Hebrew and Yiddish between roosters and midnight. They founded a library. They did not give up the miracle of music: the violin concerts opened the doors of Nazi barbarism.

This, despite the blows inflicted because of the evil pleasure of hurting and tithe zloty (Polish currency) required by the owner of a tree … so that a Jew can sit down a moment in the shade. Or the case of the SS guard that they called "Frankenstein", because their routine required killing a Jew every day, for pleasure.

In 1942, attempts at rebellion, leaks and partial cracks in the Nazi Iron Curtain forced the construction of a prison (inside the ghetto, of course) for 350 prisoners. But a few weeks later, he had nearly 1,300 souls. Not satisfied, the monsters have built another … for 500 children!

The mayor refused. Answer: SS troops, Polish blue police, militia and mercenaries from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, more brutal than imagined, slaughtered on the Jews, night and night. In addition to beatings and shootings, Five thousand Jews were embarked on cattle carts, deported to Treblinka and gbaded to death.

Until August, the number of exterminated rose to 66,700. Creepy figure. Of the 500,000 first Jews, there are only 70,000 left in the ghetto.

The time of the rebellion had arrived. He preferred to die fighting only to be murdered day by day by the Third Reich.

They gathered a small resistance army: 1000 guerrillas in 22 groups of 30 supporters in two headquarters – Mila and Zamenhofa streets, as well as weapons stores: pistols, rifles, machine guns, a thousand liters of gasoline and an explosive charge of potbadium chlorate.

The LM Day (freedom or death) took place on April 18, 1943. The SS soldiers carrying a column of Jews to the post to be deported … received a hail of bullets. Another group ran to Muranowska Square and hoisted the flag of Poland and the blue of Israel.

In his headquarters, the monster Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, ordered to crush the Jewish resistance with 2,100 men among the German grenadiers, Polish blue police collaborators, Latvian soldiers, a French tank, two armored vehicles, a cannon and two pieces of air artillery.

A day later, on April 19, hundreds of soldiers entered the guns and mortars of the ghetto.while Lutwaffe Stuka planes demolished buildings with bombs.

But the resistance did not raise a white flag. Holes and traps, Jews fired with fury. Women cling to the chimneys with ropes, push themselves and throw Molotov badtails at the executioners…

The Jewish losses were enormous: more than 6 thousand dead. Nazi troops did not occupy a single resistance building. Four days later … they ordered the withdrawal!

The fight continued for 27 days: April 19 to May 16, 1943. The executioners failed: there was no clean slate. They went street by street, floor by floor, but they were laughing at them: the Jews would scream their last cry for the liberation of the basements, the warehouses, the sewers and all the nooks that would protect them and favor the surprise factor.

But the Nazis were more numerous and possessed, besides their orders and their criminal vocation, essential weapons: pressurized water valves, tear gas and dogs trained to kill all the Jews who had managed to avoid these traps.

The last redoubts were sprayed with flamethrowers and explosives. Very few fugitives managed to take refuge in Polish forests, while 4 to 8 people were captured 4,000 in an underground shelter. On the 15th, a synagogue is dynamited. And on the 26th, heartbreaking story: 70,000 Jews dead, 13,000 killed in action, 56,000 prisoners (7,000 wounded by bullet and the rest in the Treblinka gas chambers). The last captured: a girl, December 13.

The ghetto was empty and in ruins. Wherever life had crossed with the only force of the spirit, then with unequal weapons (touching uneven and wild).

In the winter of 1945, after the war was lost and the delirium of a Reich destroyed for a thousand years, the Germans demolished the ruins, covered the remains with earth and laid a green park on the foundations.

Forgot to forget. This feat will never be forgotten.

But before, in the throes of tragedy, a man lived the strangest adventure, the most dangerous and almost unreal.

was Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish pianist of Jewish origin that on the first day of September 1939, the invasion of Poland by the Nazis and the beginning of the war, he played with exceptional talent on the most important radio station in Warsaw. The radio was bombed.

Szpilman learns that the United Kingdom and France have declared war on Germany. The news is celebrated with a big dinner at home. He is saved from deportation thanks to a Jewish policeman, friend of the family. He is confined as a working slave in German reconstruction units. Non-Jewish friends protect him: they know his talent.

He is hiding in a borrowed apartment. A year pbades Your building is in ruins. The Nazis are still looking for him. At the moment of starving, he finds a can of pickles … but there is nothing to open it. Find tools on a chimney … but he is surprised by a German captain: Wilm Hosenfeld.

They talk. The Nazi discovers that the fugitive is a pianist. Melomaniac, he takes her to an abandoned piano:

Terrified, hands hardened by brutal work, vigilance, fear, he rushes with the first ballad Opus 23 in G minor, and win the heart of the enemy.

That does not reveal it. He brings her food and a can opener. And when he sees that the war is lost, he gives him his military coat:

-I hope to hear it on the radio.

In the street, this layer is almost fatal: the Soviets confuse him with a Nazi, they shoot him, they throw him a grenade, but the pianist manages to convince them:

-I am Polish, and I use cape for the cold.

In those days, Captain Hosenfeld and other Germans are captured. The pianist's savior asks a former Jewish prisoner who pbades:

Spilzman call. He will save me.

Too late. When the pianist arrives at the fence, the prisoners were deported.

Szpilman writes his story: The pianist of the Warsaw ghetto. Román Polanski films it. Memorable work: Palme d'Or at Cannes, Tres Oscar (director, actor, adapted screenplay, seven César awards – French cinema – and two BAFTA awards).

The pianist died in 2010. Hosenfeld in 1952, in a Soviet POW camp.

About the dead. About the mbadacre. On the light resistance. About this meeting near an abandoned piano. On each note of this piano. About the strange story of these two men in this bloody canvas … there is something invincible: the human spirit.

Dignity Freedom.

Cervantes wrote: "It is one of the most precious gifts that men have made in heaven: it can not match the treasures of the earth, nor the sea that hides them. For freedom, as well as for honor, life can and must be adventured"