The Warsaw Ghetto and armed resistance (1943)

The Warsaw Ghetto, established by the Nazi authorities in 1940, was the largest of the Jewish ghettos in occupied Europe: up to 400,000 people were crammed into it under conditions of appalling overcrowding, famine, and epidemic disease. Beginning in the summer of 1942, the great deportation to the Treblinka extermination center emptied the ghetto of the majority of its inhabitants. Faced with the prospect of total annihilation, resistance organizations were formed, principally the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB), led by Mordechai Anielewicz, and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW). When the Germans undertook the final liquidation on April 19, 1943, the Jewish fighters, lightly armed, launched an uprising that held the German forces in check for nearly a month before being crushed in flames and ruins. The first large-scale urban uprising in occupied Europe, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has become a universal symbol of human resistance in the face of extermination.

Sources & resources

• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan
• Jewish Virtual Library ↗