The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began against Nazi occupation
On this day · 19 April 1943
On April 19, 1943, poorly armed Jewish fighters rose against German forces sent to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto.
On April 19, 1943 — the eve of Passover — German troops and police entered the Warsaw Ghetto to deport its last inhabitants to the death camp at Treblinka. This time they met gunfire. Members of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW), armed with smuggled pistols, grenades, and homemade explosives, forced the Germans to pull back within hours.
The defenders had no illusions about victory. After the mass deportations of 1942, only tens of thousands remained, and they chose to die fighting rather than board the trains.
It was the largest, and symbolically the most important, Jewish revolt of World War II — and the first urban uprising in German-occupied Europe.
Resistance held out for nearly a month before SS commander Jürgen Stroop burned the ghetto block by block, declaring it destroyed on May 16. Stroop tallied more than 56,000 Jews killed or captured. The uprising became an enduring emblem of defiance.
Sources & references
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