Linda Jacobs Altman - The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Striking a Blow Against the Nazis

You must be prepared to resist, not to give yourselves up like sheep to slaughter.

Jewish resistance leader Mordechai Anielewicz delivered these words in an open letter to the Warsaw ghetto, calling on all Jews to fight back against the Nazis. It was a battle the Jews could not hope to win, but they decided not to go quietly to certain death. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, beginning World War II, the Nazis quickly destroyed Jewish life. After stripping Jews of all their rights, the Nazis forced them into a ghetto surrounded by brick walls. After more than three years of starvation, disease, and death, the Jewish people decided to resist. When the Nazis came to destroy the ghetto, the Jewish fighters were ready to strike back. Author Linda Jacobs Altman chronicles this brave and heroic story from the Holocaust.

About the Author

Linda Jacobs Altman specializes in writing about history, social issues, and multicultural subjects for young people. She has written many books about the Holocaust for Enslow Publishers, Inc.

In the city of Warsaw, Poland, in April 1943, about two hundred Jewish partisans prepared for a battle they could never hope to win. These fighters, mostly young and untrained, were beyond caring about winning or losing. The German occupational forces had imprisoned them in a disease-ridden ghetto, behind an eleven-foot wall made of brick and barbed wire. Thousands of Jews had already starved to death or fallen victim to epidemic disease. Tens of thousands had been sent away in boxcars, never to be seen again.

German soldiers force a group of Jews captured during the Warsaw ghetto uprising to march to the assembly point for deportation in May 1943. The fighting between the German soldiers and the Jewish resistance lasted for twenty-eight days.

The Germans had combat-trained soldiers and a huge arsenal of weapons. The partisans had only the expectation of death, the determination to go down fighting, and a certain element of surprise; the last thing the Germans would expect was a fight from a ragtag band of untrained rebels.

The first Germans through the gate of the ghetto walked into a firestorm of bullets and bombs. Jewish insurgents shot from the windows of surrounding buildings. They raced over the rooftops, flinging grenades and firebombs into the chaotic street below. The Germans fell back in confusion. Against all odds, the battle they never expected was both real and deadly.

The fighting would last for twenty-eight days, and, in that time, would touch every life in the ghetto: resistance fighters and their allies, Jews who had feared provoking the Nazis, the starving masses who were too far gone to care. It touched the Nazis as well, giving them a hard lesson about fighting an enemy with nothing left to lose. The experiences of all these people not only tell the story of the uprising, but also put a human face on one of the most inhuman periods in history.

The roots of the Warsaw ghetto uprising can be traced back to the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, when World War II began. Just twenty-seven days later, the victorious German army marched into the city of Warsaw and established a military government. The occupation would be harsh, especially for a Jewish community that numbered more than 350,000.

German dictator Adolf Hitler regarded Jews as evil and dangerous. He claimed that they threatened the superior Aryan race, as he called the German people. He blamed Jews and other subhuman groups for Germanys woes, from the loss of World War I to the punitive treaty imposed by the victors, and the crumbling economy that plagued Germany during the Great Depression of the 1930s. To combat this threat, the Nazis forced Jews to the fringes of society and later tried to destroy them altogether.

By the time Nazi forces invaded Poland, German Jews had already suffered terribly under Hitlers rule. They had lost their jobs, their homes, and their businesses. In November 1935, they lost their German citizenship. Polish Jews could expect more of the same. Less than a week after the fall of Warsaw, the German military government established a Judenrat, or Jewish council, to carry out their orders in the Jewish community. A long list of repressive measures soon followed. Jews had to identify themselves with armbands bearing the six-pointed Star of David. They had to identify their businesses with Jewish owned signs in the windows. More regulations followed: Jews could not hold government jobs, employ Gentiles (non-Jews) in their homes and businesses, or even ride on trains without special permission. Jewish males between the ages of sixteen and sixty had to register for forced labor and work for the Nazis without payment.

A troupe of carnival actors march in an antisemitic parade mocking Jewish life in Germany. The float in the parade shows a burning synagogue. Jews in Germany suffered terribly under the rule of Adolf Hitler, and Polish Jews suffered the same fate after Germanys invasion on September 1, 1939.

Jews in Warsaw were forced to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David to identify themselves.

The hardest blow came in October 1940: all Jews in Warsaw had to leave their homes and move into a shabby neighborhood of pockmarked streets and bleak tenements. From every part of the city, Jewish families came, laden with whatever belongings they could carry. They crowded into substandard apartments, often without sanitary facilities or heat.

In November, the Germans closed off the ghetto with a brick wall more than eleven feet high, topped with barbed wire and broken glass. Behind the wall, Jewish life entered a new and deadly phase. The Germans turned the ghetto into a death trap, with starvation rations and poor sanitation. They used it as a source of slave labor. Thousands of Jews died from overwork, starvation, and epidemic disease. By the summer of 1942, the Germans were packing Jews into boxcars like cordwood and transporting them to unknown destinations.

Confusion and despair gripped the people of the ghetto. Some held on to fading hopes of better times to come. Others gave up and merely suffered in silence. Still others decided to fight back. They did not expect to win, but they vowed to make the Nazis pay dearly for every Jewish life lost in that grim place behind the wall.

The Nazis forced all of Warsaws Jews to move into the ghetto in October 1940. During the Holocaust, the Nazis established at least one thousand ghettos for Jews, mostly in Eastern Europe. This map shows some of the major ghettos in German-occupied Europe.

Adam Czerniakow was born in Warsaw on November 30, 1880. As the son of a prosperous family, he received a good education and became an industrial engineer. It was not a spectacular life, but it was a good one: satisfying work, a wife and child, and social standing in the Jewish community. Then came September 1, 1939, and the German invasion of Poland.