The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: How 700 Fighters Defied the Nazis

The photograph is one of the most recognizable images of the twentieth century: a small boy, coat buttoned tight, hands raised above his head, surrounded by German soldiers with rifles. Behind him, more Jews file out with their arms up. The boy's face is turned slightly sideways. His expression is not quite fear — it is something beyond fear. It is the face of someone who has already understood everything.

This photograph was taken in May 1943 as SS General Jürgen Stroop documented his suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He was so proud of his work that he had the photographs bound into a leather album and presented it to Heinrich Himmler with the title: "The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More."

A World Enclosed

In October 1940, German authorities sealed off a section of Warsaw and forced the city's 375,000 Jews, plus Jews from surrounding towns, into roughly 1.3 square miles. By 1941, more than 400,000 people were crammed into an area that had previously housed 160,000. The official caloric ration for Jews was 184 calories per day — compared to 2,310 for German residents of Warsaw. Tens of thousands died of starvation and disease before mass deportations began.

Jewish community organizations — soup kitchens, clandestine schools, underground newspapers, the secret archive known as Oyneg Shabes — struggled to preserve life and human dignity. Children smuggled food through holes in the wall, risking execution. Writers kept diaries. Rabbis debated theology. People got married and had children, even as they starved.

The Great Deportation

On July 22, 1942 — the eve of the Jewish fast of Tisha B'Av — the Germans began the Grossaktion Warschau: mass deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp. In six weeks, more than 265,000 people were loaded onto cattle cars and murdered. By September, fewer than 60,000 Jews remained in a ghetto that had held nearly half a million.

Those who remained now knew what deportation meant. The hope that one might survive by cooperating — that hope had been burned away at Treblinka. What remained was the knowledge that death was coming regardless, and the question of how to meet it.

"We decided that rather than go like sheep to the slaughter, we should choose the path of resistance. We knew we were going to die, but we wanted to choose how."

— Zivia Lubetkin, ZOB commander, testimony

The Jewish Combat Organization

The Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB) — the Jewish Combat Organization — was formed in summer 1942 under the leadership of Mordechai Anielewicz, a 23-year-old from a poor Warsaw family who had been a Zionist youth leader. The ZOB united Jewish political factions that had been bitter rivals: Zionists and Bundists, the religious and the secular.

They had almost nothing. The Polish underground provided a small number of pistols, reluctantly. The fighters built improvised bombs from smuggled materials, acquired weapons through purchase and theft, and constructed a network of underground bunkers. They numbered approximately 700 fighters against a well-armed German force.

April 19, 1943: The Uprising Begins

The Germans chose April 19, 1943 — the eve of Passover, the Jewish festival of liberation from slavery — to begin the final liquidation of the ghetto. SS forces entered at dawn, expecting no resistance. They were met with gunfire from rooftops and bombs detonated beneath their formations. The Germans were driven back twice in the first hours.

The German commander reported to Himmler the action would be completed in three days. It took twenty-eight. German forces used tanks, artillery, flame-throwers, and poison gas. The fighters used pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails. When the Germans set the ghetto ablaze block by block, fighters moved through underground tunnels and sewers.

Anielewicz's Last Letter

On April 23, four days into the uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz smuggled out a letter — his last:

"What we have experienced cannot be described in words. We are aware of one thing only: what has happened has exceeded our dreams. The Germans ran twice from the ghetto. I feel that great things are happening and what we dared to do is of great, enormous importance."

— Mordechai Anielewicz, April 23, 1943

Anielewicz died on May 8, 1943, at the command bunker at Miła 18, when German forces flooded it with poison gas. He was 24 years old. On May 16, Stroop detonated the Great Synagogue of Warsaw and sent Himmler his telegram: "The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is no more."

A handful of fighters escaped through the sewers. Marek Edelman, one of the last surviving commanders, became a cardiologist and dissident in Poland and died in 2009 — the last living commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The boy in the photograph was never definitively identified. He represents more than one million Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust.