Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Fighting to the Last Drop of Blood Against Hitler’s Death Machine

Between October and November 1940, shortly after Nazi troops crushed Poland – September 1939 – and showed the claws and jaws of World War II – 60 to 80 million dead -, all the Jews of Warsaw, the capital, and other areas, were confined to what would become the Warsaw ghetto. Right in the center and on the already invisible ruins of a similar ghetto, but from the Middle Ages.

Between its four-meter-high gray walls, raised at full steam, 300,000 Jews were trapped in an 8-square-kilometer rectangle, which would reach 500,000 at the height of the war..

The evil prison was a crossing point: from there, in an incessant net, the detainees would be transported in wagons until their death in the death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek.

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

Forced from their homes with sticks and deprived of all freedom, they had to endure mockery and humiliation: from the top of a road, cruel and stupid tourists photographed them like animals in a zoo.

Hunger soon twisted their stomachs in pain. In addition to the overcrowding (72 inhabitants per 10 square meter room), while the soldiers of the German army and the SS consumed 2130 calories per day …, Jews barely 920 grams of bread, 295 grams of sugar, 103 grams of jam and 60 grams of fat… per week!

A potato, a fish, a bite of meat, a fruit, a handful of vegetables that managed to escape the fence was an unforgettable feast.

Of course, diseases are spread. A typhus epidemic littered the ghetto with corpses. Average official record: 5,500 Jews die of hunger each month. And the extreme horror episode: a starving mother ate the buttock of her own son, who died the day before.

But the human spirit is generally invincible. And among the Jews of the ghetto, it multiplied to the point of astonishment. They have decided, lost for lost, to continue with their lives. With their customs. With their professions, beyond brutal punishments, rifle butts, mass leading to death, annihilation with indiscriminate blows: also women and children.

They set up a black market on the banks to get food. The emissaries and distributors were the children. That, small, nimble, elusive, they dug the foundation, got food on the other side of the wall, and took it to its destination. From the Jewish cemetery, unattended, 23 cows managed to pass …

Their religious rites have not ceased. No one interrupted the Torah reading. They only had electricity and gas from ten at night to nine in the morning, but they managed to get the children to attend classes in Hebrew schools. And out of nowhere, they imagined minimal industries: cigarette paper lamps, condoms with disused lollipops …

Mail was forbidden to them, but no ingenuity: they exchanged letters with British, Soviet and Palestinian parents. They published small newspapers and magazines in Hebrew and Yiddish between the roosters and midnight. They founded a library. They did not give up the miracle of music: the violin concerts opened the doors to Nazi barbarism.

This, despite the beatings for pleasure, for the perverse pleasure of hurting, and the tithe in zloty (the Polish currency) that the owner of a tree demanded … so that a Jew could sit down for a while. The shadow . Or eThe case of the SS guard who called himself “Frankestein”, because his routine required killing a Jew every day, just for fun.

In 1942, rebellion attempts, leaks and partial cracks in the Nazi Iron Curtain forced the construction of a prison (inside the ghetto, of course) for 350 prisoners. But within a few weeks, it was packed with nearly 1,300 souls. Not satisfied, the monsters built another … for 500 children

Initiated the biggest crime against humanity (The Final Solution – End All Jewish People in Europe, July 22, 1942) – SS General Herman Höffle ordered the emptying of the Warsaw ghetto “for resettlement”: synonymous with certain death in the fields.

The mayor refused. Answer: SS troops, Polish Blue Police, militiamen and mercenaries from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia fell on the Jews, in horde and at night, more brutal than anything imagined. In addition to the beatings and shootings, 5,000 Jews were loaded into cattle cars, deported to Treblinka and gassed to death.

Until the beginning of August, the exterminated numbered 66,700. Terrifying figure. Of the original 500,000 Jews, only 70,000 remained in the ghetto.

The hour of rebellion had come. It was rather to die fighting than to be killed day by day by the Third Reich.

They gathered a bit resistance army: 1000 guerrillas in 22 groups of 30 partisans in two headquarters – Streets Mila and Zamenhofa -, no more warehouses of weapons: pistols, rifles, machine guns, a thousand liters of gasoline and an explosive charge of potassium chlorate.

The LM (Liberty or Death) day was April 18, 1943. The SS soldiers who led a column of Jews to the station to be deported… were covered in bullets. Another group ran to Muranowska Square and hoisted the Polish flag and the Israeli blue flag.

At your seat, the monster Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, ordered to crush the Jewish resistance with 2,100 men between German grenadiers, Polish collaborators of the blue police, Latvian soldiers, a French tank, two armored vehicles, a cannon and two pieces of aerial artillery.

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

But the resistance did not raise a white flag. Holes and traps the Jews fired with fury. Some women tied themselves with ropes to chimneys, propelled themselves and threw Molotov cocktails at the executioners…

The Jewish losses were enormous: more than 6 thousand dead. Nazi troops failed to occupy a single resistance building. Four days later … they ordered a withdrawal!

The fight lasted 27 days: from April 19 to May 16, 1943. The executioners fail: there was no sweeping. They walked street by street, floor by floor, but they didn’t care:The Jews would give their last cry of liberating the basements, cellars, sewers and every corner that would keep them safe and in favor of the surprise factor.

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

The last redoubts were pulverized with flamethrowers and explosives. Very few fugitives managed to take refuge in the Polish forests, while between the 4th and the 8th, 4000 were captured in an underground shelter. On the 15th, a synagogue exploded. And the 26th, heartbreaking story: 70,000 Jews killed, 13,000 killed in action, 56,000 prisoners (7,000 killed on the spot and the rest killed in the gas chambers of Treblinka). The last captured: a girl, December 13.

The ghetto remained empty and in rubble. Where life had made its way with the only force of the spirit, then with unequal weapons (unequal and courageous poignant).

In the winter of 1945, already lost the war and shattered the delirium of a Reich for a thousand years, the Germans demolished the ruins, covered these remains of earth, and on the foundations they built a green park.

Useless forgetfulness. The feat will never be forgotten.

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