Warsaw Ghetto Uprising anniversary commemorated
Sirens wailed across the Polish capital at noon on Monday to mark the 78th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Commemorations to mark the Uprising were overshadowed by the pandemic, which forced the traditional Daffodil Campaign, in which people wear yellow daffodil pins as an act of remembrance, to go online.
The Uprising broke out on April 19, 1943, as the final phase of the ghetto's liquidation by the Nazis was taking place.
The insurgency, which lasted until May 16, 1943 was a symbolic act as it had no chance of success. In an uneven, almost one-month-long struggle, the poorly-armed fighters of the Jewish Combat Organisation (ZOB) and the Jewish Military Union took on the might of the SS and Wehrmacht forces, the Security Police and their auxiliaries.
"They chose to die with arms in their hands, they did not agree to death in a concentration camp, in a gas chamber," said Andrzej Duda, the Polish president, after laying flowers at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw.
"They fought heroically, they fought like lions, they fought until the very end," Duda told reporters.
"They had no right to surrender, they could not surrender since they could not hope to be treated like prisoners of war, they could not count on international conventions protecting them," said the president. "They knew that a surrender to the Nazi Germans meant death."
Earlier, Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich said a prayer, and "Zog nit keyn mol," considered the anthem of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was sung as part of the ceremony.
"The truth about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising must be told," the rabbi told PAP. "This is our moral obligation."
"...we must not forget what happened then, and we must not forget the people who were murdered," he continued. "The evidence of their lives tells us that there are values in life, like freedom and human dignity, which have to be fought for until the very end, until the last breath."
Jaroslaw Sellin, the deputy culture minister, said the Uprsing was "the largest revolt of Jews against the Germans, who had been trying to murder the entire Jewish community of the occupied Europe."
Sellin said that it was necessary to remind everybody that the then Polish authorities in London (the Polish government-in-exile during World War Two - PAP) and their representation in Poland "were the only allied structure, which considered... the saving of Jews as one of its goals."
"This was the official position of the Polish state," Sellin added. "But, unfortunately, attempts are being made, especially in recent years, to make Poland co-responsible for the Holocaust."
"This is a terrible untruth and the official position of the then Polish authorities must be heard."
The Uprising, which cost the lives of about 6,000 insurgents, ended on May 8, 1943 when its then commander Mordechaj Anielewicz, together with a group of ZOB soldiers, committed suicide in a bunker at 18 Mila Street.
Just a handful of fighters managed to escape from the burning ghetto through the sewers. Among them was the last commander of the uprising, Marek Edelman.
What remained of the Warsaw ghetto was razed to the ground by German troops led by SS General Juergen Stroop, who, after having been tried in Poland for crimes against humanity, was hanged on March 6, 1952, in Warsaw's Rakowiecka St. prison.
The Warsaw ghetto was established on October 12, 1940. A German decree required all Polish Jews from Warsaw to move into a designated area which German authorities sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940.
At its peak, the ghetto's population reached over 400,000 Polish citizens of Jewish descent. The first wave of mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka death camp started on July 22 and lasted until September 12, 1942, claiming the lives of some 300,000 Polish Jews.