An Eyewitness of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Today is not only the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, it is also the anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis. The Minutemen and the Jewish prisoners certainly had one thing in common: they believed freedom was worth dying for.
Amidst hellish conditions and regular killings, the Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto realized that they could either wait for the Nazis to massacre all of them or rise up and fight the tyrants. One of the very few who witnessed the uprising and lived to tell the tale was teenager Mary Berg (see Jewish Virtual Library). Her journal has since proved invaluable in providing an eyewitness account of those harrowing days before the Nazis crushed the courageous uprising and massacred tens of thousands. While the uprising did not succeed in a material sense, it has continued to inspire fighters for freedom and against antisemitism to this day.
One World provides excerpts from Berg’s diary. No matter what weapons — if any — they had to hand, the Jews fearlessly took on the Nazis. Men, women, and children battled together against the Nazis, beginning the eve of Passover (April 19 that year) and continuing for a month afterwards:
From every window and roof, from every ruined wall, the Nazis were met with a hail of bullets from automatic rifles. The signal for the fight was given by a group of young people who pelted the approaching German tanks with hand grenades. The Nazis returned after lunch with field artillery, and opened a barrage on Nowolipie, Bonifraterska, and Franciszkanska Streets. Then the pitched battle began…
The Jewish women took an active part in the fighting, hurling heavy stones and pouring boiling water on the attacking Germans. Such an embittered and unequal battle is unprecedented in history.
But the Nazis doubled down, determined to use any means necessary to suppress the rebellion and to kill the Jews. Mary remembered how the Nazis turned the bombarded ghetto into a literal fiery hell. Indeed, she believed the Nazis fought harder to conquer the ghetto than they had originally to conquer the entire city of Warsaw:
The streets of the ghetto were an inferno. Shrapnel burst in the air, and the hail of bullets was so dense that anyone who put his head out of a window was hit. The Germans used more firing power during the Battle of the Ghetto than during the siege of Warsaw. Nalewki, Nowolipie, Franciszkanska, Karmelicka, Smocza, Mila, Nizka, and Gesia Streets and Muranowski Square were completely destroyed. Not a single house remained in those streets. Even the bare walls of the burned houses were later blown up with dynamite. For many nights, the fire of the ghetto could be seen for miles around Warsaw. “When we left the Pawiak,” one of the newly arrived internees told us from a window of the Hotel Providence, “we saw an enormous mountain of fire and the houses on Dzielna Street shook from the explosions.”
Mary found herself staring at the intricate red wallpaper design in her bedroom and tracing in it streams of blood and flames, the blood of her people burning in the ghetto. She asked herself whether “Uncle Abie, Romek, and the others” had survived. Tragically, their fate seems lost to history. She ultimately made it to the United States, but very few inmates of the ghetto did.
Even the Germans were amazed at the heroic resistance put up by the defenders of the ghetto. They could not understand where these starved, exhausted people drew so much courage and strength from in their fight for the last citadel of Polish Jewry.
The Battle of the Ghetto lasted for five weeks. Its starved, exhausted defenders fought heroically against the powerful Nazi war machine. They did not wear uniforms, they had no ranks, they received no medals for their superhuman exploits. Their only distinction was death in the flames. All of them are Unknown Soldiers, heroes who have no equals.
The Warsaw Ghetto fighters perished, but their memory lives on, and always will among those who honor liberty lovers and combat antisemitism. As we see a new scourge of global antisemitism arise today, let us adopt the spirit of the men, women, and children who stood against murderous tyranny in the Warsaw Ghetto.