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On April 19, 1943, the first of two major uprisings against Nazi Germany began in Warsaw during WWII. The second uprising began on August 1, 1944.
After 29 days of fighting against German SS units that ended on May 16, about 13,000 Jews had lost their lives. This figure does not count those captured who would later die in concentration camps.
There were different Jewish political factions involved in the fighting. The Polish Home Army provided weapons support to include snipers who shot at SS guards outside the ghetto walls, a failed attempt to breach the walls so Jews could escape and to provide intelligence reports to fighters inside the ghetto.
The uprising was the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II. The Jews knew that victory was impossible and survival unlikely. Marek Edelman, the last surviving ŻOB commander who died in 2009, said their inspiration to fight was "not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths".
An unknown photographer took this photo of the capture of Jewish men, women and children during the uprising.
Discussion (16)
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The French love to talk of their Resistance. Look at Paris after the war, and look at postwar Warsaw. Not only did the Germans methodically blast it into rubble, but with Teutonic care, they numbered every single telephone exchange, every mailbox, and every single telephone pole in the city, just to make sure they got them all.
Daryl Cooper, who got royal treatment from Tucker Carlson last year, has aired claims that the Nazis didn't intend to kill all these Jews, Poles and Russians, but wartime logistics starved tens of millions of people to death. Cooper should go to Warsaw to see just how "inadvertent" it was.
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The end of the war helped the Maquis' recruitment enormously.
Patton, Eisenhower, and other Allied generals ordered film crews into the camps immediately after they were liberated because they knew there would be retards like Daryl Cooper one day.
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I came across something the other day that was trying to excuse what Russia did in the 1944 uprising, trying to say it's not accurate to say that the Russians, after egging on the resistance, waited in Praga on the east side of the Vistula while the Germans and Poles were killing each other. I don't know if that came from someone like Cooper, or from a legitimate historian. I didn't have time to follow up on it. I should have bookmarked it.
I hope to be in Warsaw again a month from now, but not long enough to visit any of those sites again (or some of those my wife and I missed in 2018). There are complications in getting my train tickets for the trip back to Warsaw a couple of weeks later, so I'll be getting a late start on my bicycle journey due to having to pick up those tickets at a place within easy walking distance of some of the ghetto wall remnants. If I had planned things slightly differently I would have been able to pick up my tickets at my hotel near the airport. From Warsaw I plan to ride to Lublin, where at the end of the war the infamous Lublin committee was poised to become Stalin's puppet government in Poland, and then I'll take an overnight FlixBus to Lutsk in Ukraine, from where I will resume the bicycle journey. I already bought bus tickets, but maybe should change them to give me an extra day. How well it might work will depend partly on the wind and the weather.
My wife and I will probably be in Warsaw again in September, and may have at least a couple of days there.
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The Russians did sit. They provided no artillery or air-to-ground support. They could have, but they did nothing. A Pole who would resist the Nazis might one day resist the Soviets. (And in fact, some did.)
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A lot of European cities have an Old Town, a visitor-friendly square or plaza in the center of the city that's still scaled down to charming, pre-modern proportions. Warsaw's is very nice, very handsome looking, a great place to walk around, take pictures, have a beer or a coffee. But it makes no pretense to being authentic; the Poles will be the first to tell you that it's a heartbroken reproduction.
There are some things in life that sound structured like jokes, but they were never meant to be remotely funny. The main synagogue in Warsaw is said to be "reconstructed", not "recreated" like the rest of the old center. Why? Because unlike the rest of Old Town, pounded into gravel, the synagogue was "reconstructed" from a mere splinter of wood and a torn theater ticket. On the surface, this is absurd, of course. The Poles know it like everyone else does. But the point they are making is: we agree that whatever its physical state, the synagogue never ceased to exist.
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