Holocaust survivors, the Polish ambassador and local rabbis gathered at the Paris Holocaust memorial on Sunday evening for a ceremony held in memory of those who fought to the end of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The ceremony was a precurser to the official Yom Hashoah commemorations, which were to being on Monday evening with a ceremony the name reading ceremony of the French Jews killed in the war.
Participants stressed the importance of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising during WW2 and in global history. The kaddish prayer was recited by Rabbi Mevorah Zerbib and singer Talila sang a Yiddish song that has become the anthem of Jewish resistance.
|
Warsaw ghetto uprising monument
Photo: AFP Copyright 2006 |
Most of the thousands Jews who were forced to live squashed into a tiny section of the Polish capital were killed by the Nazis at death camps.
But as the German fascist army prepared to liquidate the ghetto in April 1943, a small band of impoverished Jews organised themselves and fought back in what has become known as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Although they stood firm and fought the Nazis for 27 days, in the end the Jews were unable to battle the might of the Nazi machine.
Unprecendented uprising
Henri Bulawko, the chair of the Auschwitz prisoners Union, who was supposed to preside the Sunday ceremony as in preceding years, was absent for the first time for health reasons.
Polish ambassador Jan Tombinski, the Israeli charge d’affaires Raphael Barak and the Israeli representative at Unesco David Kornbluth attended the commemoration.
At the time of the uprising there were only 70,000 Jews left in the ghetto, out of the 400,000 who were imprisoned there in 1940. About 300,000 were deported to death camps, mostly Treblinka. Others starved to death. It was the first uprising in Europe and it had great influence on the events that followed. Other uprisings were organized elsewhere, in the near-by Treblinka death camp for example, where 200 prisoners managed to escape and 64 survived.
“The Jews have a long memory of hardships and uprisings, but never was an uprising done in such terrible conditions,” said historian Larissa Kahn.
“The ghetto was freezing, there was no food and no gas or coal for heat. The Nazis even took away the fur coats from the ghetto. The Jews represented about one third of the Warsaw population but they were gathered in four percent of the city’s surface. It was a step before death, the prisoners weren’t considered as humans.
“The fighters knew from the first day they had no chance against the Nazis. They weren’t fighting for their lives but to save human dignity,” Kahn added.
Heroic leaders
Roger Cukierman, head of CRIF, French umbrella group of French Jewry's secular organisations, paid tribute to the ghetto residents who battled with the Germans
“These fighters wrote one of history’s most heroic pages. They guided the creation of the state of Israel,” Cukierman said. “They didn’t have any children but because of their sacrifice our children can live today in Israel and throughout the world.”
|
|
|
Mordechai Anilewicz, was the commander of the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organization) during the Warsaw ghetto uprising. |
Mordechaj Anielewicz, one of their leaders wrote in his last letter “My dream of Jewish self-defence has come true. We are not dying. We are surviving in the memory of the survivors.”
“They had no chance of surviving but they fought for dignity,” Cukierman, added. “They resisted longer than the Polish and the French armies.”
“Their battle for liberty is our pride. They show us that hope must always be kept.”