| Poland marks anniversary of ghetto uprising
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The monument in Warsaw on the site of the April 1943 uprising.
Photo: AFP Copyright 2006
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Government ministers and Jewish groups have marked the 63rd anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising by paying tribute to the heroes of a brave struggle against Poland’s WWII Nazi occupiers.
Some 150 people, including Defence Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and Culture Minister Kazimierz Ujazdowski, together with groups representing former Jewish fighters, gathered at a monument in Warsaw last Tuesday on the site of the April 1943 uprising.
The Jewish mourners’ prayer, the kaddish, was intoned, wreathes laid and candles lit at the foot of a memorial, now a residential part of the Polish capital, commemorating the heroes of the three-week uprising.
"The insurrection was not a fight for life but a fight for freedom and the right to die in dignity," said Rabbi Zelig Avrasin, from the Warsaw Jewish Community.
They preferred to die fighting
"This uprising had no sense from a military point of view. These people
were condemned to die anyway, but they preferred to die fighting," said Daniel Przemyslaw, 78, who attended the ceremony.
Przemyslaw managed to escape from the Warsaw ghetto in summer 1942, fleeing to the Soviet Union, where he joined the Polish army in exile.
"The uprising was a symbol of a struggle for a dignified death," he added.
The Warsaw ghetto uprising began on April 19, 1943, the eve of the Jewish Passover, when the Nazis tried to resume deportations to death camps of the last remaining Jews in the walled-off ghetto in the Polish capital.
The uprising, perhaps the most well known civilian uprising against the
Nazis, pitted heavily armed German troops against poorly armed citizens who chose to die fighting than to be murdered without being able to put up resistance to the Nazis’ "final solution".
Courageous battle
Although the battle lasted less than a month and ended in failure for
Warsaw’s Jews, it went down in history as one of the most courageous acts of WWII.
The Warsaw ghetto, set up by Poland’s Nazi occupiers to isolate the
thriving Jewish community in the capital, originally contained over 450,000 people.
But by January 1943, deportations, summary executions, starvation and disease had reduced it to just several tens of thousands.
After crushing the uprising, the Nazis razed the area to the ground.
Last surviving leader
The last surviving leader of the uprising, 83-year-old Marek Edelman, did not take part in Tuesday’s ceremonies.
"He will come Wednesday to collect his thoughts in solitude on the very day the fighting started," Piotr Kadlcik, president of the association of Jewish religious communities in Poland, told Agence France Presse.
Few visible remnants of the ghetto remain today, as it was razed after the uprising and much of the rest of Warsaw was destroyed by the Nazis at the end of the war.
Nazi Germany exterminated six million of Europe’s 11 million Jews in the Holocaust, half of them from Poland, which was home to Europe’s biggest Jewish community before the war.
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