THE REVOLT

IN THE WARSAW

WILLIAM

the future chronicler of our

period ponders over the momentous events of this war he will come
across an incident which passed almost unnoticed by us at the time of its occurrence,
but which will arrest his attention as one
of the significant events of our time. This
little-known incident is the Revolt in the
Warsaw Jewish Ghetto, which broke out
on April 19th of this year and was kept up
for more than a month by an act of self.
sacrifice which has no rival even in this
most terrible and most heroic of all wars.
HEN

To understand the background of this

event we must remind ourselves that the
extermination of the Jews in Europe has
been the avowed aim of the Nazi movement ever since its inception. Hitler
stated it emphatically in Mein Kampf and
repeated it in almost everyone of his important speeches, though no one took the
threat seriously; the idea of physically
exterminating nearly five million people
in Europe in the twentieth century sounded
so fantastically mad that no one believed
at first that even the Nazis were capable of
such a thing. The fact is that prior to the
war the Nazis themselves did not think of
the extermination theory as a practical
possibility. But after the Nazi conquest of
Poland they went to work systematically
to deport Jews from all parts of Europe
into a few big centers in Poland-away
from their homes, from their non-] ewish

GHETTO

ZUKERMAN

friends and neighbors who could protect

them-and to cram them into "ghettos,"
which in reality were large Nazi concentration camps of the most horrible sort.
In these ghettos the congestion, the unsanitary conditions, the state of semi-starvation, the hard forced labor, the constantly
raging epidemics, and the lack of medical
care of any kind brought an appalling
harvest of death. The death rate in the
Warsaw Ghetto, for instance, was seventeen' hundred per cent higher than normal.
But even this did not suffice for the
Nazis. Very soon afterward violence of
the most brutal and barbaric kind was
introduced into the new ghettos as a
means of accelerating the process of annihilation. Every day military trucks would
come to the ghettos and take away hundreds of Jews, usually the older and
weaker who could no longer work, as well
as women and children, to some "unknown destination." That destination
was either the execution field where hundreds were shot en masse, or camps like the
Oswiantzem and Treblinka which were
fitted out with gas and electric chambers
and with special "destruction commissions" and where as many as seven thousand people were often burned, poisoned,
or otherwise exterminated in one day.
Thousands of deported Jews would arrive
at the ghettos daily from various points
in western Europe, and other thousands

THE

REVOLT

IN

THE

would leave daily for the torture chambers, execution, and cemeteries.
With the Nazi invasion of Russia the
violence and bestiality of the Nazi extermination of the Jews reached its highest
point and greatest magnitude. The summers of 1941 and '42 saw the largest mass
massacres of the Jews in Poland, the Baltic
States, White Russia, Galicia, and the
occupied Ukraine ever known in history.
It is now well established that more than
two and a half million Jews have been
murdered and tortured in a manner which
makes the mind reel at the mere contemplation of it.
The Warsaw Ghetto, with which we are
concerned here, very early became the
center of this extermination system. It
was made the dumping ground for most
of the Jewish deportees from western Europe and from smaller provincial towns
in Poland on the way to their extermination. At one time last year the Warsaw
Ghetto had more than 600,000 Jews
crowded into a slum district fit perhaps for
50,000 human beings. The place was
surrounded with a big wall. The entrances were guarded by armed sentries.
For sneaking out from the Ghetto for a few
hours to beg for food, Jewish children
were known to have been shot on the spot
upon their return.: Non-Jews who were
caught smuggling in food for their Jewish
friends met with a similar fate. Inside
the wall the congestion was so great that
people slept in the cemetery, in mausoleums, on the graves; starvation was rampant and the epidemics at one time reached
such heights that they threatened to spread
to the quarters of the " Herrenuolk" and
further dumping from abroad was stopped.
The young and strong people were put to
slave labor; the older and the weaker were
daily removed to "unknown destinations."
These daily executions, together with
the deaths from starvation and epidemics,
had reduced the population of the Warsaw
Ghetto from over 600,000 to 35,000 last
April. The Jews who remained were the
strongest, the youngest, and the most
skillful, whom the Nazis needed for work
in their war factories. They were mostly
Socialists and members of various Jewish
labor organizations, particularly of the
popular Jewish "Bund," a labor organiza-

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353

tion with a long tradition of revolutionary

struggle against Tzaristic tyranny. Most
of them had had a long experience in
underground revolutionary work and had
conducted a strong and widespread antiNazi activity in Poland ever since the Nazi
mvasion.
As far back as August, 1942, the more
impatient of them had been pressing for
open resistance. In January of this year
there were hunger strikes in the Ghetto
which resulted in bloody clashes with
the Nazis. The Nazi governor of Warsaw, Dr. Fischer, announced in March of
this year that he was going to "liquidate"
the Ghetto because of the trouble that it was
giving the Nazis. For months the underground publications of the Ghetto were
filled with appeals and pleas to the world,
to the Polish government-in-exile, and to
their friends in the United States to supply them with arms. These people no
longer cared whether they would be able
to survive open combat with a military
force like that of the Nazis. They had
nothing to lose any more. They knew
that they were doomed men anyhow.
They were dominated by only one desire:
to spring at the throat of the hated enemy
and at the same time to vindicate their
own dignity as Jews and as human beings.
They were waiting only for arms and for
an opportunity to use them.
II
opportunity came on April 19th.
It is now certain that the Polish Underground movement and also the Polish
"exile" government in London, which
had previously denied arms to the Warsaw Jews, finally yielded to their pleas and
supplied them with a fair amount of ammunition of all kinds, including even a
number of machine guns.
When at four o'clock on the morning of
April 19th a detachment of the Gestapo
and Storm Troopers came to the Ghetto
with armored cars and light tanks to remove, as usual, a number of Jews for execution, they were met with a volley of
shots from machine guns which practically
decimated the entire detachment. The
shocked Nazis summoned help. A few
more 8.8. detachments, reinforced by

HE

354

HARPER'S

Lithuanian Quislings, arrived. They too

were met in the same manner. According to a' description of the event given by
the late Polish Prime Minister, General
Wladyslaw Sikorski, on the B.B.C. on May
2nd, the Jews had barricaded themselves
in the big tenement houses of the Ghetto
and were defending every house, every
room, every corner; they were fighting desperately with every weapon they could
lay hold of, from machine guns to iron
bars and pieces of furniture, or their bare
hands. Above their barricades and fortifications the defenders flew the flags of
the United Nations. The Ghetto had exploded. One of the most unusual revolts
in modern times-was on.
To the surprise of the Nazis and everyone else, the resistance of the Ghetto was
not broken in a few hours, or even days.
Seventeen days after the first shot was
fired by the Ghetto defenders they were
still fighting and holding their positions.
"The Warsaw Ghetto has been transformed into a miniature Stalingrad," the
Polish Underground radio station, "Swit"
(which was in constant touch with the
defenders throughout the fighting), reported on the seventeenth day of the fight.
The Nazis used tanks, armored cars, artillery, and airplanes, but they could not
break the defenders. Hidden in the ruins
of their huge tenements or in the cellars,
they kept up their sniping and continued
to take a heavy toll of the Nazis. On the
twentieth day the Germans flew airplanes
over the Ghetto and threw incendiary
bombs on the houses; at the same time
they cut off the water supply to prevent the
Jews from putting out the fires. The entire Ghetto was soon in flames. Hundreds
of Jews were burned alive. But the fight
still went on.
On May 11th, twenty-two days after
the outbreak of the revolt, the Polish Underground radio reported to the Polish
National Council in London: "The heroic
resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto is still
continuing. A number of strongly defended positions are still being held. The
fighting Jewish groups are showing great
courage and military efficiency....
The
Nazis are using artillery and flame-throwers; they are blowing up houses, together
with their defenders, with mines. The

MAGAZINE
entire Ghetto is in flames; those who were
not burned alive are being slaughtered
by the Nazis en masse. . . . A thousand
Nazis have been killed and many Nazi
military factories and ammunition dumps
have been destroyed."
It was not until May 25th that the official Polish Telegraphic Agency reported
that "The heroic battle in the Warsaw
Ghetto is now almost at end, except for
some isolated points.' ...
In some parts
of the Ghetto one can still hear isolated
explosions. Some thousands of Jews still
remain in the Ghetto cellars, but these
too are being annihilated one after the
other ....
"
,
In the Nazis' phrase, the Ghetto was
"liquidated."
After more than a month's
fighting the desperate revolt of the most
helpless slaves of Nazism came to an end.
The Polish government' in London estimates that the number of Nazis killed
in the battle was twelve hundred.
The
number of Jews killed will probably never
be ascertained. But it is known that in
April there were still thirty-five thousand
Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Now there
are only a few thousand hiding in the cellars of the ruined houses; a few thousand
more may have escaped. In other words,
approximately twenty to twenty-jive thousand
Jews had deliberately laid down their lives in
what cannot be describedotherwise than as a collective mass suicide in order to avenge their
wrongs, to proclaim their rights, and to
demonstrate to the world that Hitler could
destroy theirbodies, but not their human
dignity. Nothing so stupendous, tragic,
and proudly defiant has happened in
modern history.
The full significance of the event will
probably not be clear until after the war,
but a few significant results stand out even
now from the smoldering ruins of what
was once the greatest Jewish community
in Europe. To begin with, the revolt
in the Ghetto was the first open resistance
on a large scale which any of the oppressed
nations in Europe had given to the Nazis
in this war. Previously the civilian resistance to Nazi tyranny in Europe had been
limited to Underground work and to
guerrilla warfare. The revolt introduced
a change which may well become a land-

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IN

THE

mark in the history of this great struggle.

It announced to the world that the Underground was passing; the hour of open resistance to Nazism had struck. If the
Jews could fight in the open for over a
month, other people could and would do
the same. There are indications already
that the event had a marked effect throughout eastern Europe and that Nazi brutalities there will no longer go unopposed.
The effect of the revolt on the democracies outside Hitler's "Festung Europa" is
more important still. The Western world
had considered' the Jews as the most helpless victims of Nazism and they had been
treated with pity and sympathy, but with
little consideration and, one fears, with
little respect. Little was known of the
magnificent resistance to Nazism which
the Jews in Europe had offered ever since
the outbreak of the war in the Underground
movements and in the guerrilla fighting
in all countries. The revolt in Warsaw
brought this fact out into the open; it
broke the anonymity of the Jews as active
fighters of Nazism. As the British press
was the first to admit, the Jews now have a
new and different kind of claim for consideration, a claim not of passive victims
but of active allies and partners who have
fought the common enemy.

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355

Most important of all is the effect of the

event on the Jews themselves. The heroic
men and women who died on the barricades of Warsaw belonged to a section
of Jews who heldthat their home was in
the countries where they had been born,
had worked, and had contributed to
wealth and culture. They passionately
resented the claim of Hitler and other
anti-Semites that the Jews were aliens
everywhere and that the solution of the
Jewish problem lay in the removal of the
Jews from their present homes to a national home or state of their own. To
them the future of the European Jews,
after the war, lay in Europe, in the homes
which they had loved and fought for.
They always opposed the various plans
made by their charitable brothers overseas
for their evacuation after the war. By
their heroic death they proclaimed again
this faith, not in words but in an unforgettable act.
Finally the event was an act of spiritual
significance for the Jews, an act of revival
of the self-respect and dignity of a terribly
persecuted and humiliated people. A
people that can die as did the last twentyfive thousand Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto
has nothing to fear from Hitler and need
not despair of its future.