The story as we hear it every year on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising goes something like this: the uprising was carried out by a small group of mostly young and strong men. One day, despair at the constant deportations and murders gave way to resistance, and they slowly took control of the ghetto. On 19 April 1943, they rose up, but, sadly, the heroes were vanquished. Today, we commemorate this glorious episode.
The real history shows a very different story, one that’s way more thrilling and inspiring than these conventionalities.
Jews have lived in Poland for more than 1,000 years and by the early 20th century were a significant proportion of the population. After Poland achieved independence in the years following World War One, however, a series of right-wing governments gradually excluded Jews and other ethnic minorities.
Right-wing general Józef Pilsudksi took over in a coup in 1926 and became increasingly authoritarian after 1930. After his death in 1936, antisemitism increased, with street thugs carrying out pogroms and government-sponsored discrimination. Polish fascists called for boycotts of Jewish businesses and attacked students at universities.
In response, Jews formed self-defence groups, and there were mass strikes and demonstrations in collaboration with the Polish Socialist Party. So by the start of World War Two, there was a seasoned movement already in existence. The Nazis weren’t the first fascists that Polish Jews encountered.
There is a myth that the Jews in Nazi-occupied countries went like lambs to the slaughter. But in fact, there were underground resistance movements in approximately 100 ghettos in Eastern Europe, and uprisings in 50. There were also uprisings in three extermination camps and eighteen forced labour camps. Up to 30,000 Jewish partisans fought in approximately 50 partisan groups, and about 10,000 people survived in family camps in the forest. The underground organisations scattered throughout Poland kept in touch via a network of couriers, most of whom were women.
When the Nazis invaded in 1939, there were about 375,000 Jews living in Warsaw, almost a third of the population. At the end of 1941, the Nazis forced them into a ghetto only 2.5 percent of the area of the city.
Why did the Nazis establish such ghettos? A core component of genocide is the dehumanisation of the population to be destroyed, and a core component of that is the separation of the people into enclaves away from mainstream society, where they can be more easily controlled, manipulated and degraded. Genocide isn’t a single or short-lived act but a process, and this initial segregation and dehumanisation are a critical part of that.
The diary Chaim Kaplan wrote about life in the ghetto, Scroll of agony: the Warsaw diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, recognised the process. “We are segregated and separated from the world”, he wrote, “driven out of the society of the human race”.
The dehumanisation in the ghetto was relentless: the massive overcrowding, the disease, the humiliations of entry and exit, the killings, the round-ups and transports. Perhaps the most telling example is food. Many photos show children dying of starvation in the streets. In fact, so little food was allowed in legally that 80 percent of the food consumed came in from smuggling.
Jan Karski, a Polish underground activist, visited the ghetto secretly. He said, “Everything there seemed polluted by death, the stench of rotting corpses, filth and decay”. And Marek Edelman, in his famous book The Ghetto Fights, emphasised the psychological torture:
“The Jews, beaten, stepped upon, slaughtered without the slightest cause, lived in constant fear. There was only one punishment for failure to obey regulations—death—while careful obedience ... did not protect against a thousand and one fantastic degradations.”
Formation of the Jewish Fighting Organisation
The Nazis finally decided on what came to be called the Final Solution at the Wannsee conference in January 1942. But this was only the last step: actions had been going on for at least two years and had roots much further back.
There were enormous problems for the Jews in organising resistance to the Nazis. The fact that the ghettos were filled with all sorts of non-combatants like children, ill people and elderly people made things very difficult. But there was also the political problem—that the traditional leadership of the communities, and the Jewish Councils, which were set up by the Nazis, were very conservative. They refused to recognise the process of genocide. They preferred to believe that if only Jews cooperated and were useful, the Nazis would allow them to live.
Nor did the leaders of most of the leftist parties recognise what was happening. It was the youth groups that first saw the reality and called for armed resistance. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to achieve agreement.
By July 1942, maybe 100,000 Jews in Warsaw had already died. Then the Germans rounded up and deported another quarter of a million in a mass deportation known as the Grosse Aktion (Great Action).
By October, with only about 60,000 people left in the ghetto, there was no more denying what was happening. A coalition of several socialist-Zionist groups, the Jewish Labor Bund and the communists formed the Jewish Fighting Organisation (JFO) under the leadership of Mordechai Anielewicz. Others in the leadership included Yitzhak Zuckerman (second in command), Zivia Lubetkin and Marek Edelman.
Armed resistance required arms, which proved extremely difficult to obtain. Everything had to be smuggled in or manufactured illegally on the spot. The JFO also carried out military training.
Little uprising
When 1,000 Germans marched into the ghetto on 18 January 1943, intending to round up more people for deportation, a company of 40 men and women fought back. These 40 people had only four pistols and four hand grenades plus iron pipes, sticks and light globes filled with sulphuric acid.
This was a real David and Goliath situation. Amazingly, the Germans were forced to retreat after four days, with fewer Jewish deaths and far fewer deportations than expected. This encounter was the first street fighting in occupied Poland. Marek Edelman recounted:
“For the first time German plans were frustrated. For the first time the halo of omnipotence and invincibility was torn from the Germans’ heads. For the first time the Jew in the street realised that it was possible to do something against the Germans’ will and power ... [It was] a psychological turning point.”
This event is known as “the little uprising”. What happened next is in some ways at least as important as the events in April but is less well known. Warsaw wasn’t the only city where there was resistance, but most other underground organisations didn’t have enough popular support for an uprising. Warsaw was different. The JFO took effective control of the ghetto, which enabled them to organise and lead the uprising of the entire remaining ghetto population.
According to Lubetkin, “We became the undisputed authority ... The Jews no longer sought the advice of the [Jewish Council] nor did they heed its orders”. And, according to Marek Edelman, the JFO “was the only force and the only authority recognized by public opinion”.
First, they executed the Jewish police and Nazi spies. Then they took over all aspects of ghetto life. One great necessity was raising money to smuggle supplies. The JFO took all the money from the Jewish Council and imposed taxes on rich people. They even set up jails for people who didn’t comply. As Edelman says, “everybody had to pay either voluntarily or forcibly”. They also robbed banks. The most urgent need was weapons. They obtained some firearms from the Polish underground army and set up workshops to make bombs and Molotov cocktails.
The rest of the population also prepared by building defensive bunkers. This is critical—almost the entire remaining population planned resistance. This city-wide revolt shows up the lie in mainstream accounts about a “small band of rebels”.
The uprising
The Germans attacked on 19 April 1943. The JFO had 500 fighters organised in 22 fighting groups, approximately a third women. Most were under 25, with ages ranging from 13 to 40. They had one pistol each, and a total of 200 Molotov cocktails, ten rifles and a couple of submachine guns.
The German side consisted of more than 2,000 soldiers with heavy weapons, including artillery, mine throwers and machine guns. With their overwhelming military superiority, they anticipated an action of only three days. But the Nazi commander, General Stroop, reported after a week: “The resistance put up by the Jews and bandits could be broken only by relentlessly using all our force and energy by day and night”.
None were more surprised than the defenders themselves. They also expected to last no more than a few days. But almost everyone was still alive! Expecting to die, they hadn’t planned any escape routes or survival plans.
On 23 April, the JFO published an appeal to the Poles. This little-known but amazing and moving statement stands with any resistance struggle proclamation in the world:
“Poles, citizens, soldiers of freedom! Through the din of German cannons, destroying the homes of our mothers, wives and children; through the noise of their machine-guns, seized by us in the fight against the cowardly German police and SS men; through the smoke of the Ghetto, that was set on fire, and the blood of its mercilessly killed defenders, we, the slaves of the Ghetto, convey heartfelt greetings to you ...
“Every doorstep in the Ghetto has become a stronghold and shall remain a fortress until the end! All of us will probably perish in the fight, but we shall never surrender! We, as well as you, are burning with the desire to punish the enemy for all his crimes, with a desire for vengeance. It is a fight for our freedom, as well as yours; for our human dignity and national honour, as well as yours! We shall avenge the gory deeds of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec and Majdanek!
“Long live the fraternity of blood and weapons in a fighting Poland!
Long live freedom!”
There are many stories of heroism and bravery. Stroop gives an amazing account of the women fighters:
“Agile as acrobats, shooting with a pistol in each hand ... dangerous in hand-to-hand contact ... when a woman like this was caught, she appeared scared as a rabbit, thoroughly despairing, and suddenly, when a group of our men was nearby, she pulled out a grenade hidden in her skirt or in her pants and threw it at them with a string of curses on her lips.”
Defeating the uprising took six weeks and, even then, as Edelman writes, the insurgents “were beaten by the flames, not the Germans”.
Organised resistance was over by the end of April, but localised resistance continued until June and possibly even later. The ghetto uprising was a military failure. But as Anielewicz noted in his last letter, “what took place exceeded all expectations. In our opposition to the Germans we did more than our strength allowed”. Looking back on these events, second in command Yitzhak Zuckerman commented:
“I don’t think there is any need to analyse the uprising in military terms ... [N]o one doubted how it was likely to turn out ... The really important things were ... in the force shown by Jewish youths ... to rise up against their destroyers and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising.”
At least 7,000 Jews died in the conflict. Only a few managed to escape through the sewers, including Edelman. The Germans captured approximately 42,000 people. The ghetto itself was reduced to rubble.
Who is the true inheritor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?
The uprising had an enormous impact throughout Poland and around the world, and it continues to be commemorated today.
Everyone wants to own this history—from right-wing world leaders to Zionists to mainstream politicians. But what the insurgents in the Warsaw Ghetto represent is not something that Zionists or governments today want to promote. Those reactionaries absolutely aren’t, in any sense, the inheritors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The fighters of the JFO were seasoned activists and members of organisations with a history of struggle. And they were socialists—a word that doesn’t pass the lips of the speakers at the mainstream commemorations.
We can take an answer to who really are the political inheritors of the uprising from the verses of a song written by Jewish poet Hirsh Glick to commemorate it:
Never say that there is only death for you,
Though leaden skies may be concealing days of blue,
Because the hour we have hungered for is near;
Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble—we are here!
We’ll have the morning sun to set our day aglow,
And all our yesterdays shall vanish with the foe;
And if the time is long before the sun appears,
Then let this song go like a signal through the years.
“Let this song go like a signal through the years”—that is what this article is doing, keeping the memory of the real event alive, to prevent it being instrumentalised by conservative and right-wing forces.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising doesn’t belong to the scum of right-wing politicians, Zionists, the ruling class and the imperialists. The uprising is Jewish history but not just that. Above all, it’s socialist history.
Once again, the drums of war are beating. Amid the death and destruction, however, resistance remains. The uprising belongs to all socialists who, amid the carnage, continue organising and fighting for a better world—“Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble—We are here!”
