Shanna Kelly's List: warsaw ghetto uprising

• Hitler   decided to liquidate the ghettos   and, within 18 months, had the more than two million Jews who’d   survived the ghettos deported to death   camps.
• Jewish “police”   in the Warsaw ghetto   to round up people for deportation
• Approximately 300,000 men, women,   and children were packed in cattle cars and transported to the Treblinka   death camp where they were murdered.
• This left a Jewish population of   between 55,000 and 60,000 in the ghetto.
• A group of mostly young people formed an organization called the Z.O.B.   (for the Polish name, Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, which means Jewish   Fighting Organization)
• The Z.O.B., led by 23-year-old   Mordecai Anielewicz, issued a proclamation calling for the Jewish   people to resist going to the railroad cars.
• Warsaw ghetto fighters fired upon   German troops as they tried to round up another group of ghetto inhabitants   for deportation.
• Fighters used a small supply of weapons that had been   smuggled into the ghetto. After a few days, the troops retreated. This   small victory inspired the ghetto fighters to prepare for future resistance.
• Jews spent the following   weeks training, acquiring weapons, and making plans to defend of the   ghetto.
• The ghetto fighters were warned of the timing of the   final deportation and the entire Jewish population went into hiding.
• morning of April 19, 1943, the Warsaw ghetto uprising began after   German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving   inhabitants.
• Seven hundred and fifty fighters armed with a handful of   pistols, 17 rifles, and Molotov cocktails faced more than 2,000 heavily   armed and well-trained German troops supported by tanks and flamethrowers.
• Jews held out against the overwhelming force for 27 days
• On May 8, the headquarters bunker of the ZOB at 18 Mila Street was captured
• Mordecai Anielewicz and a large number of his colleagues were killed   in the fighting, but several dozen fighters escaped through the sewers.
• On May 16, Stroop announced the fighting was over.   He said his forces had captured 56,065 Jews and announced that he was   going to blow up the Great Synagogue on Tlomack Street (which was outside   the ghetto) as a symbol of victory and of the fact that “the Jewish   quarter of Warsaw no longer exists.”
• Approximately 300 Germans and 7,000 Jews were killed   in the uprising, and another 7,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka.

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• April 19, 1943, an especially tragic day in the history of the Holocaust:
• he Nazis moved to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto. In a desperate last stand, the remaining Jewish inhabitants of the walled-in enclave began a hopeless month-long battle against the Nazis.
• It would end in the complete destruction of the ghetto.
• Moving to the ghetto was a ghastly experience; it was like moving to prison.
• In November 1941 the Nazis went so far as to institute the death penalty for any Jew found beyond the ghetto walls.
• Now they also removed telephone lines, censored mail and frequently confiscated incoming packages.
• more than 400,000 Jews were crowded inside its walls.
• Typically several families lived in one apartment. Unable to buy food on the open market, they had to rely on the Nazis to supply the ghetto,
• Germans made it their policy to keep the inhabitants on the verge of starvation.
• In 1941, typhus epidemics, which started in the synagogues and institutional buildings housing the homeless, decimated the ghetto.
• Matters were made worse when the sewage pipes froze and human excrement was dumped onto the street
• By the end of the year, disease had killed more than 43,000 people or ten percent of the ghetto population.
• set up workshops
• Jews employed in them were saved from the first deportations to the death centers.
• Nazis began transporting Jews in the summer of 1942.
• the head of the Jewish council committed suicide.
• It was thought the Germans would take no more than 60,000 people and it was agreed that resistance would simply hasten the end of the ghetto.
• mid-September, the Nazis actually deported more than 300,000 Jews from the ghetto.
• In January 1943 the Nazis surprised the Jewish fighters, by suddenly deporting 6500 Jews
• 3am on the morning of April 19, the Nazis surrounded the ghetto and the battle began.
• Between 2000 Germans armed with a tank, two armored cars, three light-anti-aircraft guns, one medium howitzer, heavy and light machine guns, flame throwers, rifles, pistols and grenades faced off against 700-750 Jewish resistance fighters. The Jews had managed to stockpile a few thousand grenades, as well as a few hundred rifles, revolvers and pistols. But they possessed only two or three light machine guns
• The Germans planned to clear the ghetto of 60,000 Jews in three days.
• heir commander Anielewicz articulated what this was in a letter to a friend shortly before his death. "My life's dream has been realized," he said. "I have lived to see Jewish defense in the ghetto rally its greatness and glory."
• "keep alive the remnants who have survived...so there will be some reserve for the future and witnesses to this crime." 
  

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• e Warsaw Ghetto originally contained almost 450,000 people
• By January of 1943,it was down to roughly 37,000 people.
• The rest had already been taken away to slave labor or death camps. Word got out that the Germans were going to finish off the ghetto, clean it out. Those half-starved, disease-weakened ghetto inhabitants decided to fight.
• convinced the Germans to let them build 631 air-raid shelters.
• Bombing was going on all around them, and the Germans needed their slave laborers so, to keep them safe from Allied bombings, the Germans had allowed them to do this. Now the people used those very shelters to fight against the Germans.
• There were over a thousand fighters, including children.
• but it actually took months and months of combing through the ruins and demolishing the destroyed buildings before the uprising was finally put down.

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• Following the Great Deportation during the summer of 1942,
• The awful truth of what had taken place, became  too apparent.
• Those who had been deported were dead, and those that remained faced  the same end.
• end of October 1942, a consultation was held at the Ha-Shomer Hazair  headquarters  at 61 Mila Street, and the ZOB had been consolidated and enlarged with  the addition of youth movements and splinter groups of underground political parties of all  persuasions from Zionists to Communists.
• A ZOB command was formed, made up of  representatives of the founding organisations and the combat groups. At this  October 1942 meeting on the agenda were two key subjects: the defence of the Warsaw  ghetto, and to teach the Jewish Police and workshop owners a lesson.
• The ZOB's first operations were directed against the Jewish Police
• Jozef Szerynski on  20 August 1942 by Yisrael Kanal, the first  person condemned to death by the ZOB was Jacob Lejkin
• who  as Szerynski’s deputy
• nd the group  that accepted the mission consisted of three members of the Ha-Shomer Hazair:  Margalit Landau and Mordechai Grobas  trailed Lejkin for some time,
• Towards evening on 29 October 1942 Lejkin was  shot to death while walking from  the police station to his home on Gesia Street. His aide,  Czaplinski, who was walking by his side, was injured.
• A group of fighters, led by  Mordechai Anielewicz,
• Eliyahu Rozanski and Margalit Landau  who were involved in the killing of Lejkin, fell in this battle,
• Anielewicz  was nearly killed after running out of ammunition.
• and that the Germans have managed to seize no more than 10% of the  ghetto population,
• The fighting organisations  used the few months they had left before the final liquidation to consolidate,  equip themselves, and prepare a plan for the defence of the ghetto.
• The ZOB now had 22 fighting squads, of 15 fighters each
• he network of bunkers in the ghetto was expanded, and a substantial part  of the ghetto population was kept busy at night digging the hideouts and  communication trenches under the ground
• Bunkers and  wooden bunks were installed in them, and air circulation was provided for,  as well as electricity and water supplies, food, and medicines to last for months.
• The final liquidation of the ghetto began on 19 April 1943, the eve of  Passover.
• consisted of 850 men  and 18 officers,
• central ghetto, which had a population of more than 30,000,  was completely empty, except for a handful of Judenrat members and a Jewish  police unit. No Jews could be rounded up for deportation, and the freight cars at  the Umschlagplatz had to remain empty.
• The magnitude of the hiding operation took  the Germans by surprise, as had the armed resistance.
• street battles took place in the ghetto
• ewish fighters had to abandon their positions and seek refuge in the bunkers.
• he ghetto was now one great burning torch,
• The temperatures in bunkers below burning houses  reached boiling point.
• Most of the food was spoiled by the devastating heat,  the people had to quench their thurst by drinking warm and stinking water.  One could hardly breathe or talk, being on the verge of going mad, but still the Jews  refused to surrender to the Germans.
• Under cover of darkness they tried to leave the burning bunkers. Everyone looked for a  bunker where conditions could be slightly better,
• In the second week of the uprising, the bunkers  were the main arena of resistance.
• In this fight, the Germans had to struggle for each  bunker.
• They used tear gas or poison gas, forcing the Jews out.
• In many  instances Jews kept firing as they emerged, and a number of women fighters threw  grenades, hidden in their clothes, after they had surrendered. The Germans made the  Jewish women remove their clothes, in order to lessen the chances of being killed  or wounded.
• the command bunker of the ZOB, which contained about 100 people,  was attacked by the Germans.
• The five exits were blocked, the main entrance was  broken open and canisters of poisonous gas were thrown inside. Arie Wilner and  Lolek Rotblat called on the fighters to take their own  lives rather than surrender to the Germans. Some of the fighters did indeed commit suicide,  while others were killed by the gas, some managed to escape.  Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the  revolt, fell at 18 Mila Street, along with many other brave fighters.
• Of the total  of 56,065 Jews who were seized, 22,000 were deportated to  Majdanek, 14,000 - 16,000 to  Poniatowa, 5,000 - 6,000 to  Trawniki, and 7,000 to Treblinka.  5,000-6,000 lost their lives in explosions and fires.
• the  figures of Jews exterminated, as well as reducing the casualty figures experienced by his forces, 16 killed and  85 wounded.
• n 1951, Stroop was tried in Warsaw. He was  sentenced to death for war crimes, and hanged.

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