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17. Jewish Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto - Avinoam Patt
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393 Avinoam Patt 17 Jewish Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943–May 16, 1943), the largest mass revolt in a major city in German-occupied Europe, is the defining symbol of Jewish resistance to Nazi oppression during World War II. Immediately after the war, Holocaust survivors in Europe seized upon the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as the basis for Holocaust commemoration activities and the dates of the uprising have since been linked to annual Holocaust commemoration events in countries around the world. Israel’s Knesset selected the 27th of Nisan as the date for Yom HaShoah ve-haGevruah (The Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism) in 1953 to correspond roughly with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.1 The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has occupied a central place in the history of the Holocaust and of World War II; as a military encounter, its significance may seem relatively minor, resulting in a small number of German dead and wounded over the course of the one month that the Jewish resistance fighters managed to battle German forces in the ghetto. Nonetheless, during the war, the small band of Jewish fighters in the Warsaw ghetto had a major impact on Jewish communities elsewhere in Eastern Europe and on German procedures in the aftermath of the uprising as well.2 From the perspective of Jewish history, its significance has been tremendous, representing perhaps the most well-known Jewish response to Nazi persecution during the war, serving both as the coun1 . The date was selected by the Knesset on April 12, 1951, and became law on August 19, 1953. The actual starting date of the uprising (14th of Nisan) was problematic as it was also the eve of Passover. Therefore, the 27th of Nisan, when the uprising was still going on, was selected by the Knesset to take place eight days before Israel’s Independence Day (on the 5th of Iyyar). 2. Gerhard Weinberg, “The Final Solution and the War in 1943,” in Revolt Amid the Darkness (Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1993), 6. 394 Avinoam Patt terargument to the myth that the Jews of Europe had been “led like sheep to the slaughter” and conversely, reinforcing the mistaken view that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising represented the only case of armed Jewish resistance in Europe (explicitly given the lie by the other essays in this volume). If anything, the final resort to armed resistance taken by the rebels in the Warsaw ghetto symbolized the transition from those prior resistance activities that had been attempted to sanctify life in the ghetto, activities included in Yehuda Bauer’s definition of “amidah,” to a realization that the Nazi plan was to eliminate all Jews and that armed resistance signified a means by which Jews might not only take a measure of revenge, but more importantly, die with honor.3 The rebellion in the Warsaw ghetto was the last chapter written by the Jews in the ghetto (save for those Jews who managed to survive in hiding after the uprising), but it was not the only chapter written by the Jews of Warsaw during the war, nor would it serve us well to read the history of Jewish life in occupied Warsaw as one long prelude to the finale that was the revolt. As Ben Zion Dinur wrote in 1953, “the chapter of the Holocaust and heroism is not only a story of life and death, murder and uprising; it also concerns the daily life of the Jews in the ghettos, of Jewish life in all the countries of Europe from the day the Nazis seized power.”4 According to historian David Engel, Dinur argued for a broader reading of Jewish resistance against the Nazis, not only in the form of armed resistance, but through the documentation of German crimes under the Occupation and the dedication to continuing Jewish life under all circumstances . Therefore to understand fully the significance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and armed Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto, this resistance must be understood in the context of broader underground activity in the ghetto, which eventually laid the groundwork for the organization of armed resistance, largely by the leaders of youth movements in the ghettos, who had been engaged in many of the other forms of underground activity before the scope of the Nazi plan for the genocide of the Jews was fully realized. While much can be written about the afterlife of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, its...