THE WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING

April 19, 2023 -Durt Fibo

This day marks the anniversary of despair, outrage, hope and a historical thrust for human freedom. On April 19^th, 1943, the jews who had been physically sealed off into a corner of Warsaw, commenced one of the earliest and most determined revolts against Nazi rule in Europe.

Nearly half a million jews were herded and held captive in just 1.3 square miles of Poland’s capital city, and enclosed therein to starve until they would no longer exist for the conquerors who considered themselves not only a superior race, but a higher stage of evolution. Their assumptions were, to them, self–evidently proven by the degree of inhumanity they achieved. By the morning of the revolt, deaths and deportations to death camps had reduced the ghetto to some 70 or 80 thousand people.

As evening came down (it was Passover), thousands of German troops and Nazi officials burst into the ghetto to remove and exterminate as many souls as they could find, and this became the moment when the jews admitted to themselves that there were no longer any orders or plans to end the internment with a single one of them left alive. Revolt was the sole alternative.

Fighting flooded the streets, roofs, cellars and sewers, as the frustrated Germans finally ordered the incineration of the resisters block-by-block. The destruction raged for 27 days. Despite have faced panzers, howitzers, flamethrowers, bombs and bullets in the confined space, some 56.000 inhabitants remained alive by the time the Germans ended the onslaught. Fifty-four percent of them were executed on the spot or packed off to extermination camps. The remaining survivors were sent to work camps.