Resistance (29 page)

Area Unoccupied, Jews in Hiding

Area Resettled by Poles

Brushmakers' Shops

Ghetto Factory Area: Többens, K. G. Schultz, Rorich, Hoffmann, Schilling

Central Ghetto Factory Area, Többens

January 1943 Revolt

• Bunkers & Fighting Points April-May 1943 Revolt

•• Entrances, Gates to Ghetto

• Selected Features (Ghetto Public Institutions)

1. Jewish Council (Judenrat)
   
2. Jewish Police
   
3. Gesiowka-Jewish Prison
   
4. Pawiak Prison
   
5. Umschlagplatz
   (Assembly Point and Transfer Office)
   
6. Hiding Place of Ringelblum Archives
   
7. Czyste Hospital, Deportation Center
   
8. The Great Synagogue
   
9. Korczak Orphanage
   
10. Deportation Office
    (Befehlsstelle)
    
11. ZOB Headquarters
    
12. ZZW Headquarters
    
13. SS
    Werterfassung
    

 

Thus, members of the group entered the long line of hundreds concentrated on Mila Street, and at the corner of Zamenhof and Niska, near the transports, the signal was given and the battle began. Each Jewish fighter assaulted the nearest German. Even on a one-to-one basis, this was not a battle between equals. The Jews were armed with a few pistols and limited ammunition, while the Germans had semiautomatic rifles and ample ammunition.

The Jews had the momentary advantage of surprise and exploited it fully. After a few minutes, the Germans recovered from the shock of being attacked, and the initial forces were soon augmented by reserves. Most of the Jewish fighters fell in battle.

The battle was a decisive one. The hundreds of Jews who had been standing in the lines dispersed; the Germans saw that they were facing Jewish resistance, and the first Germans fell in the streets of the ghetto. At the same time, the Jews drew encouragement from the dust of the battle, and many ghetto dwellers adopted whatever means of passive resistance possible in the circumstances—that is, not to obey the German orders, to hide, and to evade deportation.

Two days after the battle, Berlinski wrote a few brief sentences on his meeting with Anielewicz in Mila Street:

 

Today I am again with the people of Hashomer. Mordecai showed me the weapons that were taken.... They had disarmed the Germans, taken their weapons, and already know how to use them. Mordecai described the battle on the corner of Zamenhof and Niska, when he and a group of those who were being pursued initiated the struggle. Some of the SS members were killed and wounded; others fled, leaving behind their caps and some weapons. Then the Germans set fire to the building where Mordecai and his group were concentrated. He managed to escape. I congratulate him on his victory.

 

Another group led by Yitzhak Zuckerman defended themselves from a house in Zamenhof Street. They had entrenched themselves in an apartment, and when the Germans entered to search, the fighters opened fire. The bravery of Zechariah Artstein and Hanoch Gutman in this attack was particularly notable. According to some of the participants, two Germans were wounded. At the end of this defensive action, in which a Jewish fighter was killed, the group retreated to a house on Muranowska Street. A conflict on a smaller scale also took place in the workshop district.

January 18 marked a turning point in the existence of the Jewish Fighting Organization. The Germans had anticipated a smooth and simple process, but they encountered opposition and paid for it with casualties. For the first time, the Jew was no longer seen as a submissive victim.

Moreover, from that day onward, the Germans refrained from searching the dwellings and from climbing up to attics and down to cellars. The ease with which they had taken Jews was a thing of the past, and as they witnessed, to their amazement, one could lose one's life not only on the battlefield at the front but also in the narrow lanes of the Warsaw ghetto.

One cannot wholly understand the change that took place in the Jewish public's attitude without appreciating the impression made by the events of January 1943. Jews were no longer passive; they could fight back. Yitzhak Zuckerman concluded that "the revolt in January is what made possible the April rebellion." Without the initiative taken in January, the subsequent widespread revolt three months later would not have occurred. The mute acceptance of their fate and the sense of hopelessness that accompanied the mass expulsions in the summer of 1942 gave way to more defiant attitudes. Evading the Germans proved possible. The crisis and frustration experienced by the fighters in September finally disappeared. When a company of fighters met in Mila Street after the battle, mourning for fallen friends did not diminish the sense of excitement and achievement in battle. They realized that their mission was no longer an impossible dream.

The Jewish Fighting Organization now appeared openly in the streets of the ghetto in January and freed those who were being led to the railway carriages, thus proving that its struggle was directed toward aiding all the persecuted Jews. On that day, the Jews in the ghetto and the Jewish Fighting Organization became blood brothers.

A Jewish poet living in the ghetto, who had previously contributed light verse for public entertainment in clubs and cafes, wrote a poem entitled "Counterattack" about the impact of the events of January. The following are a few lines from the poem:

 

Let us see, before the throat
Stifles the last cry of woe.
Their arrogant hands, their whip-holding fists
Hold our tense fear—fear of man.
From Niska, Mila and Muranow,
Like a bouquet of blood-flowers
The heart cries out from the gun-barrels
This is our spring—our counterattack.

 

The second expulsion, the January action, was over in four days. From the second day, the Germans were obliged to invest enormous effort in catching the Jews. They succeeded only in catching the sick and the feeble, or those they happened upon accidentally. During those four days, some 5,000—6,500 people were taken from the ghetto or murdered. Taking part in the action were some two hundred German police and eight hundred auxiliaries from the Ukraine and the Baltic states.

On the last day, there was mass slaughter. In a hail of bullets the Nazis murdered a thousand Jews in the streets of the ghetto in apparent retaliation for the fact that the ghetto was no longer silent and submissive. SS Senior Colonel Ferdinand von Sammern—Frankenegg, police commandant of the Warsaw district, evidently did not report to his superiors on the dead and wounded among his soldiers resulting from the resistance in the Warsaw ghetto.

There is no precise information on the German casualties during the January resistance. The Poles spoke of dozens, but this is certainly an exaggeration. At any rate, ambulances were heard racing in and out of the ghetto. One can assume that on the eve of the last action in April von Sammern did not dare to enlighten his superiors as to the true situation in the ghetto and was not eager to reveal the events of January and the existence of the armed Jewish force in the area under his supervision. The mere fact that the Jews were capable of fighting and that the Jewish people could be considered an active enemy rather than a subhuman group ready for extermination was perhaps beyond the Nazis' comprehension.

Notwithstanding the mass murders and the thousands hunted down in January, the Jews assumed that the Germans were deflected from carrying out their plans and forced to stop the action midway. Jewish resistance, they felt, had led to the failure of the mass expulsion and the withdrawal of German troops from the ghetto. This perception was also shared by the members of the military forces of the Polish underground. Neither Jews nor Poles had any reliable information stemming from German or other sources. The Jews responded to what was happening around them, and thus they assumed that the second expulsion would be total. After the Germans managed to uproot some 300,000 people in one concentrated sweep, it followed that during the second round they would complete the process by removing all the Jews of Warsaw.

Zivia Lubetkin, one of the veterans of the fighting organization, wrote in her memoirs: