The Warsaw Ghetto: 750 desperate for a revolt

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It had been established in 1940 but shortly after the occupation of Poland in 1939 the Nazis began to apply the discrimination in place in Germany also to the Jews of the country.

Soon in that area corresponding to 2.4% of the surface of the city, 30% of the urban population was amassed, almost half a million people, all of the Jewish faith, who were forbidden to leave the ghetto without authorization: a measure that was guaranteed by the construction of a wall 18 km long and 3 high.

Prevarications, deprivations, hardships, mistreatment, marked the first phase of that massive concentration of people. In 1941 there were about 2,000 deaths a month. An already apocalyptic situation, which had a new lethal boost after the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, when the Nazi planning of extermination expanded on a European scale and produced mass deportations also from Warsaw, at an average rate of 6,000 people every day , especially towards the nearby Treblinka concentration camp.

Heinrich Himmler

The intention was to completely empty the ghetto by the end of the year, but the goal of the operation was postponed to 1943. On January 18, a thousand soldiers under the command of Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg marched into the ghetto, now reduced to 70,000 inhabitants. To the surprise of the Nazi high hierarchies, the action produced signs of resistance to deportation, so that on February 16, 1943, Heinrich Himmler urged the completion of the liquidation of the ghetto: “That neighborhood must disappear from the face of the earth”.

The actual revolt, carried out by 750 desperate people, was the first and largest in Europe by the Jewish population. It broke out on April 19, the eve of the start of the Pessach festival and lasted until mid-May. “In the meantime, I’m trying to resist. What will happen next, only God knows. But no matter what happens, don’t be sad”: Moshe Ekhajzer’s letter to his daughters on the eve of the uprising is one of the numerous testimonies that the Israeli body for the memory of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, has placed on its website to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, identified as the main theme of the 2023 Remembrance Day initiatives.