Resistance (32 page)

The ZOB did not prepare for withdrawal, and hence the strategy lacked a basic component of an ordinary battle plan. This was not accidental. Fighters planned to fight and fall in the streets and the neighborhoods. At their first meeting, according to Henryk Wolinski, "Jurek," or Arieh Wilner, the fighting organization's emissary, said, "We do not wish to save our lives. None of us will come out of this alive. We want to save the honor of mankind."

Unlike the Jewish fighting organization in Vilna (FPO), which planned an escape route after the fighting in order to continue the struggle, the ZOB refused every option for rescue and survival. Nor did the organization participate in preparing bunkers for its members, or tunnels leading to the "Aryan" side. In these respects, its concepts differed from those of the ZZW (the Jewish Fighting Union), although the lack of documentation makes it difficult to determine what its plans were.

During the three months that preceded the fighting and the great rebellion, the Germans focused their efforts on removing equipment from the factories and transferring workers. In their desire to achieve these aims in a reasonable and calm atmosphere,
they reduced their intervention in the internal affairs of the ghetto. When the German authorities approached the Judenrat and urged them to act firmly, Marc Lichtenbaum, who had replaced Czerniakow as its leader, stated that he was unable to do so, as the real power rested in other hands. And indeed, despite the regulations concerning secrecy, the Jewish Fighting Organization was the actual ruler of the ghetto.

T
HE ANNIHILATION
of the last remnant of the Warsaw Jewish community was not unexpected. On the day in April preceding the final "action," information reached the ghetto from the Aryan side of the city. Police sources reported that an assault on the ghetto was imminent.

The Nazis launched the attack on Monday, April 19, 1943—the eve of Passover. Although the Jews feared that catastrophe was approaching and unavoidable, they did not forgo their traditional holiday preparations. Passover was still Passover even in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943.

On Sunday night, the Jewish Fighting Organization ordered the guards at the posts overlooking the ghetto gates to be particularly vigilant, and after midnight messengers of the organization began alerting the residents. This time, there was less confusion than during the January action. Everyone seemed to know what to do. They took the bundles they had prepared for this emergency and descended into the bunkers. One survivor recalled:

 

It was a sleepless night for the Jews. We packed possessions, linen, bedclothes, food and took everything down to the bunkers. There was an enormous amount of movement in the courtyards and streets on that moonlit night. [Passover occurs at the full moon.]

 

A fighter from a ZOB squad in the central ghetto recounted the fighters' preparations:

 

Standby orders were given in the evening, and passwords were changed. Now we knew the Germans were preparing for an action in the ghetto. All the fighters were given the same password: "Jan-Warsaw." We started to fortify the posts. The entrance gate was barred by an overturned wagon with its wheels facing upward. We took out cupboards and other pieces of heavy furniture from the apartment and placed them in the entrance way. The windows were shored up with sand-bags. People dispersed to their various posts.

 

Aaron Carmi, from the ZOB unit attached to the workshops, wrote:

 

Movement beyond the wall became easier to discern. We saw that the Germans were passing along the wall and were being assigned to their posts. A vehicle carrying soldiers would stop from time to time, at intervals of approximately 50 meters, and some soldiers would get out, and then the vehicle would proceed to the next stop. Eliezer [Eliezer Geller, commander of the sector] would then turn up and check the guards. We were ordered to increase the number of guards and await orders.

 

Marek Edelman, the commander of the brushmaking sector, reported that information reached them at 2:00
A.M.
and "we immediately alerted all the fighters' groups, and at 2:15, that is, after 15 minutes, they took up their fighting positions."

The commander of the SS and police in the Warsaw district, Oberführer von Sammern-Frankenegg, had not reported that he anticipated opposition. Von Sammern was evidently unwilling to admit that a Jewish force had sprung up under his nose and was making it difficult to execute the mission assigned to him. His reports and instructions dispatched after the events in January, and between January and April, make no mention of possible opposition in the ghetto. The reports from that period made by the governor of the region, Dr. Ludwig Fischer, also do not mention any opposition or tension in the ghetto. Yet von Sammern obviously expected a confrontation, for he had assembled a larger concentration of police and army troops than had been used in earlier anti-Jewish missions, even in the massive expulsions of July 1942. Still, he was unaware of the scope of the opposition he would confront.

Himmler apparently had little confidence in von Sammern and sent SS General Jürgen Stroop as a reinforcement to Warsaw. Before coming to Warsaw, Stroop had been in charge of SS and police security in the district of Galicia, where he had earned a reputation for establishing order in a harsh and violent manner against civilian populations and partisans. After the war, Stroop testified that he had been called to Cracow on April 17, where he was told by the senior commander of the SS and police in the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, to report to Warsaw and there von Sammern would tell him his assignment. In fact, after the first hours of the first day of the "action" Stroop took over the operation and von Sammern was dismissed. In reports sent to his superiors, Stroop refers to the action as a
Grossaktion
(a large operation). Even after the war, General Alfred Jodl, head of the Wehrmacht command staff, ridiculed Stroop as a braggart. Sitting on the defendant's bench at the war criminals trial in Nuremberg, Jodl bristled angrily at Stroop's description of the action, calling him an "arrogant SS pig" for boasting for seventy-five pages about his murderous assault on the Jews. As far as the great battle against the enemy was concerned, Jodl's report covered merely a few pages. His criticism came after the war. During the action itself, Jodl's superior and the supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, Field Marshal General Wilhelm Keitel, awarded Stroop the Iron Cross First Class for his execution of the "Murder Expedition," as Jodl accurately described it.

During the ghetto campaign, an average of 2,054 German soldiers and 36 officers a day were involved. These forces included an SS unit (an average of 381 soldiers daily) and units of the police, regular army, and supplementary troops (335 Ukrainians and camp guards). Their arms included 1,174 rifles, 135 submachine guns, 69 light machine guns, and 13 heavy guns, a cannon, a flamethrower, and three armored cars.

The term
military might
could hardly be used to describe the puny force that faced this powerful German fighting machine. Almost without exception, the courageous soldiers of the Jewish Fighting Organization and the Jewish Fighting Union were young people who had no military training whatsoever. According to estimates, there were 750 combatants in battle units, some 500 probably in the ranks of the ZOB, and 250 in the ZZW. The ZOB carried revolvers of various calibers and kinds. Every fighter had from ten to fifteen rounds of ammunition and four to five hand grenades, mostly homemade. The organization also had some 2,000 homemade Molotov cocktails, 10 rifles, and one or two submachine guns that had been taken from the Germans, along with an indeterminate supply of ammunition. The ZOB had mined the entrances to some key positions in the ghetto area.

The ZZW fighters also carried revolvers as personal weapons. The ZZW had a comparatively greater number of rifles and machine guns, including a light machine gun that was used during the fighting. Information is unavailable regarding any home production of arms within the ZZW.

When the German forces entered the central ghetto on April 19, the streets were empty. Most of the inhabitants were in their bunkers, with entrances sealed and camouflaged. There the ghetto's frightened people resolved to conduct their daily lives with the order and discipline needed to survive under such conditions. The entire quarter was like a ghost town. Meanwhile, the fighters awaited the enemy in well-fortified and camouflaged posts. As far as is known, the Judenrat was not in contact with those German officials in charge of the expulsion.

After the war, Stroop claimed that he had no contact with the people in the ghetto, but it is possible that Brandt of the Gestapo and Konrad of the
Werterfassung
(the SS enterprise that stored and classified movable Jewish property) had such connections. In his postwar trial, Konrad claimed that he had merely been a witness during the last expulsion and had not been involved. A unit of the Jewish Police was active during the invasion, but it dispersed immediately afterward and was not seen in the ghetto as an active unit thereafter. During the initial invasion, however, police members were used as hostages to screen the first attack of the fighters, but they had no part in executing the action itself.

At about 4:00
A.M.,
the German forces began moving in battle formation toward the ghetto. The fighters followed the Nazis' movements closely and with increasing tension. What they saw was recorded in their notes. Simha Ratajzer-Rotem, who was in the brushmakers' area, wrote:

 

At 4 in the morning, we saw a transport of Nazis moving toward the central ghetto on the Nalewki level. Some thousands were marching without end. After that, some tanks go by, armored vehicles, light cannons and hundreds of people of the SS units on bicycles. "They move as if they are going to war," I said to Zippora, a comrade on the post, and I suddenly felt how weak we were. What am I, and what is our strength against this armed and well-equipped army, against tanks and armored cars, and we merely have pistols and at best, hand grenades.

 

Tuvia Borzykowski, who was with the group that took part in the first battle, had a wholly different perspective in his book
Between Crumbling Walls:

 

At 6 in the morning the siege around the ghetto was already completed. The first units already marched on ghetto ground in the direction of Nalewki, approaching the triangle of Nalewki, Gesia and Franciszkanska. We did not wait for the enemy to be the first to start the slaughter, and from all our posts we showered a hail of bullets and hand-grenades and bombs. Well, our home-made efforts were not so disappointing; they went off as they should and did their work well, leaving many slain and wounded Germans on the streets.

It was our first confrontation, and the bursting bombs proclaimed and told everyone that the uprising has begun!...German companies separated into smaller groups. They clung to the walls, fearing to take away their wounded comrades lying about on the roads ... the first moments of shock passed and the German response was not long in coming. Under the open skies, they were exposed to our fire. As for us—the wall was our refuge and protection.

 

The fighter Haim Frymer was in one of four squads of the ZOB stationed at the corner of Zamenhof and Mila streets, the site of the major battle of that day:

 

At 6, a line of artillery soldiers entered. Part of the line turned in the direction of Wolinska Street and another part stayed on the spot, as if they were awaiting an order. Less than an hour passed when the Jewish police came through the gate. They lined up on either side of the street and were ordered to begin advancing along the street in our direction. I would pass on to Mordecai [Anielewicz] and Israel [Kanal] an account of everything that was happening through the fighter not far from me.

When the line of Jewish police reached our house, I asked how I should react: Should I attack or not? The answer was to wait, that the Germans would surely follow them, and they were most likely to be the target of our first fire, and that's the way it was: The order I received stated: When you can find the center of the line near the balcony, throw a hand-grenade at them and that will be the signal to begin the action ... the tremendous crash that took place within the line was an indication to start the action. Hand-grenades were thrown at the Germans from all sides, from all the posts on both sides of the street. Out of the sounds of blast and firing, we heard the sounds of the German
schmeisser
[nickname for the submachine gun] being used by one of the neighboring squads.

I, myself, remained on the balcony and fired on the confused and embarrassed Germans with my Mauser. From my balcony, I could see them in all their helplessness and their loss of control.

The air was full of wails and shouts. Many of them tried to run to the walls of the houses for cover but everything was barred and beyond that, death was pursuing them. In the noise, the fluster, and the cries of the wounded, we heard the astonished outcry of one of the Germans:
Juden haben Waffen! Juden haben Waffen
[The Jews have arms] ... The battle lasted for about half an hour. The Germans withdrew and there were many corpses and wounded in the street.

 

The Germans who entered the ghetto had been forced to engage in battles for which they were unprepared. Massive German forces had not intimidated the Jews. The Nazis would have to wage a long and stubborn battle. Jews behind the walls of the ghetto had routed Nazi soldiers, at least temporarily, and for a moment one heard the sound of freedom and expressions of vengeance. Flags flew from the roof of a house in Muranowska Street, which was held by the ZZW, a Jewish blue and white flag and the Polish national flag.