|
|
April 25, 2003/Nisan 23 5763, Vol. 55, No. 35
Ghetto uprising attracts worldwide attention
RUTH E. GRUBER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
ROME - On April 19, 1943, heavily armed Nazi troops penetrated into the Warsaw Ghetto with a grim goal: the liquidation of the ghetto and the deportation of the last remnants of Warsaw's Jews - some 40,000 men, women and children.
The German forces were met by something un-expected: a fierce attack by some 750 young Jews fueled by desperation and armed with a few machine guns, homemade grenades and makeshift Molotov cocktails.
The battle between the scrappy Jewish fighters and the mighty Nazi army has been described as a contest between an ant and an elephant.
But the Jews held out for a month before the ghetto was finally overwhelmed and burned to the ground, leaving a handful of survivors and a lunar landscape of deva-station.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the uprising.
As they do every year, Poland's tiny Jewish community marked the anniversary with a small ceremony at the Ghetto Monument on the secular calendar date on which the uprising began.
The Polish government is hosting high-level official commemorations on April 29 and 30, to coincide with Yom Hashoah.
During the past 60 years, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has come to symbolize both the horrors of the Shoah and the struggle against Nazi tyranny.
"The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the first time in occupied Europe that civilians put up armed resistance against Nazi occupiers," says Marek Edel-man, 82, the only surviving commander of the revolt.
"We wanted to show that the Jews, who were considered subhuman, were people like any other," Edelman, a cardiologist and human-rights activist who still lives in Poland, told the Warsaw Voice newspaper last week.
"There was no talk about victory or avoiding exter-mination," he recalled. "It could only be about surviving with dignity, with arms in hand, for a few more days.
Poland's President Alek-sander Kwasniewski, Israel's President Moshe Katsav and other dignitaries, including the president of the European Jewish Congress, Michel Friedman, will take part in the ceremony later this month, and the last living participants in the uprising will receive high state honors.
Poland was home to 3.5 million Jews before World War II, and Warsaw was Europe's biggest Jewish city. The Nazis forced more than 500,000 Jews into the cramped ghetto in Warsaw's old Jewish quarter.
At least 3 million Polish Jews, including almost all of Warsaw's Jewish population, were killed in the Holocaust.
|
