In Warsaw, Poland, in April and May of 1943, the remaining population of 50,000 in the city’s Jewish ghetto rose up in defiance against the Nazis and held off the surrounding German troops for a month. Even though the Jews were enormously — beyond enormously — outnumbered and outgunned, and they knew their struggle was ultimately hopeless, they fought valiantly nonetheless. An estimated 13,000 Jews died in the uprising, half of them burned alive or suffocated. The rest were deported to their deaths. The uprising came after more than a quarter-million Jews had been sent from the ghetto to Treblinka in the summer of 1942, where they perished.
Quote: “April 19, 1943, was the first day of the Jewish holiday of Passover and also the eve of Hitler’s birthday, German General Jürgen Stroop arrived in Warsaw ready to wipe out all opposition within a single day as a birthday gift to his Führer. Stroop had 2,100 soldiers with 13 heavy machine guns, 69 handheld machine guns, 135 submachine guns, several howitzers, and 1,358 rifles. The approximately 750 Jewish resisters had two submachine guns, a handful of rifles, and homemade explosives. But the resisters were able to fight off Stroop’s soldiers for the first few days, and they were able to hold out under siege for four weeks.”
Sources: Wikipedia, facinghistory.org
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Photo: Yad Vashem
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