#1 2023-04-19 19:25:48
Resistance Is Not Futile:
On this day, 19 April 1943, the Warsaw ghetto uprising broke out in earnest when Jewish people fought back against Nazi attempts to deport them to the Treblinka extermination camp.
2000 German troops and police backed up with tanks entered the ghetto with the intention of removing the surviving residents, and were met by around 750 resistance fighters with a small number of smuggled small arms and some home-made Molotov cocktails. They forced the Germans to retreat and come back with reinforcements. After several days of failure to overcome the rebels, the Germans began burning down the entire ghetto one building at a time.
Despite this, the resistance managed to hold out against the onslaught for 27 days, killing around 300 Germans. While some fighters managed to escape through the sewers, 7000 Jewish people were killed and another 7000 eventually deported to Treblinka.
Pictured: Warsaw ghetto resistance fighters including Malka Zdrojewicz, right, who survived the death camps.
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#2 2023-04-19 19:41:26
Today in history, April 19, 1943, we remember the Jewish Uprising in Warsaw Ghetto, when organized Jewish resistance with the help of the Polish Underground resistance fought back against Nazi liquidation and second round of deportations of Jews in Warsaw. Crucial to the resistance along with the fighters and children who smuggled food and ammunition through the tunnel systems, were the women couriers and messengers. Women who could directly get through the Nazis blockades to pass information and weapons to various resistance groups. Many were found out, stripped and humiliated by having to run naked through the streets before they were shot. We should celebrate their courage as equal to the fighters.
Historian Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, founder of the Oneg Shabbat project chronicling the Warsaw Ghetto, which became the most important archive created during the Holocaust, mentioned in his writing that “… the story of the Jewish woman will be a glorious page in the history of Judaism during the present war.”
In May 1942 he wrote: “These heroic girls are in mortal danger every day. Without a murmur, without a moment of hesitation they accept and carry out the most dangerous missions. Nothing stands in their way.”
“Whenever friends form Vilna, Lublin or other cities had to be saved – they took it on themselves. How many times have they seen death eye to eye? How many times have they been arrested, how many times have they been searched?” he wrote.
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