The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Meaning of the Revolt in the First Year after the Uprising

On April 23, 1943, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) delivered news of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, relaying a report received in Stockholm the day before with the headline, “Nazis Start Mass-Execution of Warsaw Jews on Passover; Victims Broadcast S.O.S.” Within two weeks, observers were describing the events as “miraculous,” beginning the effort to identify the heroes of Warsaw. In less than two months, calls emerged to make April 19 an annual day to celebrate Jewish heroism. By the first anniversary after the uprising, Jewish communities organized solemn commemorations in New York, London, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere to recall the “Masada of Warsaw” as a “fortress of freedom.”

Through an examination of the ways in which the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was reported in April and May of 1943, and subsequently interpreted and commemorated in the first year after the revolt, we can begin to understand how and why the event was transformed into the defining symbol of Jewish resistance, Jewish sacrifice, and Jewish martyrdom during and after World War II. At the same time, representatives from the Jewish Labor Bund and the Zionist movement in the Yishuv disputed both the heroes of the revolt and its political and ideological significance. This article examines the rapid search for heroes, and the concomitant processes of politicization and mythologization of the uprising in the first year after the “battle of Warsaw’s Jews.” Collective memory of the uprising was shaped almost immediately in its aftermath, well before historical and fictional accounts of the uprising were written, and long before the date for Yom HaShoah ve-haGevurah (The Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism) was solidified on the Jewish calendar. By the first anniversary of the revolt, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was seized upon by Jewish communities around the world as evidence that Jews had joined the struggle against fascism, and utilized as a prism for memorializing the destruction of European Jewry. By 1945, when the identities of the Zionist heroes of the revolt became well-known, the uprising had been transformed into part of the struggle for the creation of the Jewish state.

Immediately after the war, Holocaust survivors in Europe continued the process begun in the first year after the revolt, setting Holocaust commemoration activities on April 19. The dates of the uprising have since been linked to annual Holocaust commemoration events in countries around the world. Israel’s Knesset selected the 27^th of Nisan as the date for Yom HaShoah ve-haGevurah in 1951 to correspond roughly with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.¹ The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has also 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. Nonetheless, during the war, the small band of Jewish fighters in the Warsaw ghetto, as well as the broad popular defiance of German edicts by the thousands of Jews in Warsaw who refused deportation orders in April 1943, had a major impact on both Jewish communities elsewhere in Eastern Europe and on German military procedures.² And, from the perspective of Jewish history, its significance has been tremendous, serving as the counterargument to the myth that the Jews of Europe had been “led like sheep to the slaughter.” Conversely, the emphasis put on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising reinforced the mistaken view that it represented the only case of armed Jewish resistance in Europe.

A recent flurry of literature on the subject reinforces a continuing fascination with the topic of Jewish resistance.³ A 2014 volume edited by Patrick Henry (and to which I am a contributor) on Jewish Resistance against the Nazis begins with a chapter titled, “The Myth of Jewish Passivity,” by Richard Middleton Kaplan, that explores the origins and enduring power of the stereotype of Jewish passivity, explaining that “one aim of our volume is to demonstrate definitively that Jews during the Holocaust did not go to their deaths passively like sheep.”⁴ The historical literature on the uprising itself tends to reinforce the view that...