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IN THE WARSAW
WILLIAM
GHETTO
ZUKERMAN
THE
REVOLT
IN
THE
would leave daily for the torture chambers, execution, and cemeteries.
With the Nazi invasion of Russia the
violence and bestiality of the Nazi extermination of the Jews reached its highest
point and greatest magnitude. The summers of 1941 and '42 saw the largest mass
massacres of the Jews in Poland, the Baltic
States, White Russia, Galicia, and the
occupied Ukraine ever known in history.
It is now well established that more than
two and a half million Jews have been
murdered and tortured in a manner which
makes the mind reel at the mere contemplation of it.
The Warsaw Ghetto, with which we are
concerned here, very early became the
center of this extermination system. It
was made the dumping ground for most
of the Jewish deportees from western Europe and from smaller provincial towns
in Poland on the way to their extermination. At one time last year the Warsaw
Ghetto had more than 600,000 Jews
crowded into a slum district fit perhaps for
50,000 human beings. The place was
surrounded with a big wall. The entrances were guarded by armed sentries.
For sneaking out from the Ghetto for a few
hours to beg for food, Jewish children
were known to have been shot on the spot
upon their return.: Non-Jews who were
caught smuggling in food for their Jewish
friends met with a similar fate. Inside
the wall the congestion was so great that
people slept in the cemetery, in mausoleums, on the graves; starvation was rampant and the epidemics at one time reached
such heights that they threatened to spread
to the quarters of the " Herrenuolk" and
further dumping from abroad was stopped.
The young and strong people were put to
slave labor; the older and the weaker were
daily removed to "unknown destinations."
These daily executions, together with
the deaths from starvation and epidemics,
had reduced the population of the Warsaw
Ghetto from over 600,000 to 35,000 last
April. The Jews who remained were the
strongest, the youngest, and the most
skillful, whom the Nazis needed for work
in their war factories. They were mostly
Socialists and members of various Jewish
labor organizations, particularly of the
popular Jewish "Bund," a labor organiza-
WARSAW
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entire Ghetto is in flames; those who were
not burned alive are being slaughtered
by the Nazis en masse. . . . A thousand
Nazis have been killed and many Nazi
military factories and ammunition dumps
have been destroyed."
It was not until May 25th that the official Polish Telegraphic Agency reported
that "The heroic battle in the Warsaw
Ghetto is now almost at end, except for
some isolated points.' ...
In some parts
of the Ghetto one can still hear isolated
explosions. Some thousands of Jews still
remain in the Ghetto cellars, but these
too are being annihilated one after the
other ....
"
,
In the Nazis' phrase, the Ghetto was
"liquidated."
After more than a month's
fighting the desperate revolt of the most
helpless slaves of Nazism came to an end.
The Polish government' in London estimates that the number of Nazis killed
in the battle was twelve hundred.
The
number of Jews killed will probably never
be ascertained. But it is known that in
April there were still thirty-five thousand
Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Now there
are only a few thousand hiding in the cellars of the ruined houses; a few thousand
more may have escaped. In other words,
approximately twenty to twenty-jive thousand
Jews had deliberately laid down their lives in
what cannot be describedotherwise than as a collective mass suicide in order to avenge their
wrongs, to proclaim their rights, and to
demonstrate to the world that Hitler could
destroy theirbodies, but not their human
dignity. Nothing so stupendous, tragic,
and proudly defiant has happened in
modern history.
The full significance of the event will
probably not be clear until after the war,
but a few significant results stand out even
now from the smoldering ruins of what
was once the greatest Jewish community
in Europe. To begin with, the revolt
in the Ghetto was the first open resistance
on a large scale which any of the oppressed
nations in Europe had given to the Nazis
in this war. Previously the civilian resistance to Nazi tyranny in Europe had been
limited to Underground work and to
guerrilla warfare. The revolt introduced
a change which may well become a land-
THE
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IN
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