In the heart of modern Warsaw stands a monument that tells a story of extraordinary courage in the darkest of times. The Warsaw Ghetto Fighters Monument, located on the site of the former Jewish ghetto, pays tribute to the brave men and women who staged an armed revolt against their Nazi oppressors during the Holocaust. Though vastly outgunned and facing near-certain death, these Jewish resistance fighters chose to go down battling rather than submit to the gas chambers. Their heroic four-week stand in the spring of 1943, known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, remains one of the most significant acts of Jewish armed resistance during World War II.
Imprisonment and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto
The German occupiers established the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1940, forcibly concentrating over 400,000 Polish Jews into a walled-off area of just 1.3 square miles (3.4 km2). Conditions in the overcrowded ghetto were appalling, with an average of 7.2 people per room. Severe food shortages left the Jews perpetually starving; the Nazis deliberately allotted just 184 calories per Jew per day, compared to 2,613 for Germans. Forced labor, rampant disease, and lack of sanitation and medical care killed thousands. In 1941 alone, 43,239 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto died, nearly 10% of the population. [1]
In the summer of 1942, the Nazis launched mass deportations from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp. From July to September, about 265,000 Jews were taken from the Warsaw Ghetto and murdered in the gas chambers of Treblinka. Another 35,000 Jews were killed in the ghetto itself during the deportations. By the end of 1942, just 60,000 Jews remained in the ghetto, down from the initial 400,000. [2]
The Jewish Combat Organization and the Uprising
In response to the mass deportations, the Jewish Combat Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB) was formed in the ghetto in July 1942. Led by 23-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz, the ŻOB united various Jewish youth groups and political movements into an armed resistance force. Another resistance group, the Jewish Military Union (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, ŻZW), formed separately. In January 1943, the ŻOB and ŻZW obtained a small supply of weapons from the Polish Home Army, the resistance movement loyal to the Polish government-in-exile.[3]
When German SS and police units entered the ghetto on April 19, 1943, on the eve of Passover, to resume mass deportations, they were met with armed Jewish resistance. ŻOB and ŻZW fighters first attacked German columns with handguns, hand grenades and Molotov cocktails. After a few days of fighting, the Jewish fighters holed up in a network of bunkers and sewers underneath the ghetto and engaged in guerrilla-style warfare.
The Germans began systematically destroying the ghetto, block by block, blowing up buildings and smoking out the bunkers. On May 8, the Germans discovered a large bunker at 18 Miła Street, which served as the ŻOB‘s command post. In the brutal battle that followed, the bunker was destroyed and many resistance leaders killed, including Anielewicz. The fighting continued until May 16, when the Germans finally suppressed the uprising, blowing up the Great Synagogue of Warsaw as a symbolic act. About 7,000 Jews died fighting during the uprising, and another 7,000 were deported to Treblinka. The Germans captured an estimated 50,000 Jews who had been hiding in the ghetto and deported them to concentration camps.[4]
Creating a Monument to Heroism
After the war, Jewish organizations made plans to erect a monument in Warsaw to commemorate the ghetto fighters. In 1946, they organized an international design competition which attracted over 150 proposals from artists around the world. Prominent Jewish sculptor Nathan Rapoport‘s design was selected. Born in Warsaw but exiled to the Soviet Union during the war, Rapoport constructed the monument in his Paris studio.[5]
Rapoport‘s winning design featured two monumental stone structures facing each other across a small square. The western wall depicts the heroic ghetto fighters, men and women of all ages rising up together in defiance, some armed with rifles and Molotov cocktails. In the center of the sculpture is Mordecai Anielewicz, ŻOB commander, leading the charge. The eastern wall shows suffering Jews being led to their deaths, evoking the mass deportations to the death camps. In the center, a bronze sculpture portrays a group of resistance fighters emerging from a manhole, illustrating how they utilized the sewer system in their guerrilla battle.[6]
The monument is constructed from dark labradorite stone, material the Nazis had ironically planned to use for victory monuments celebrating their conquest of Europe. Standing 36 feet (11 meters) tall, its walls evoke both the barriers of the ghetto and the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the holiest prayer site in Judaism, linking the fighters‘ sacrifice to the Jewish people‘s ancient struggles.
Honoring the Fighters
The imposing monument was unveiled on April 19, 1948, the fifth anniversary of the uprising, in a public ceremony attended by Jewish survivors and Polish dignitaries. The Polish government donated the prestigious location in the heart of the former ghetto for the memorial.
"Today we are unveiling a monument to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto who perished in an unequal fight but won in the eyes of history and in the memory of humankind," declared Julian Tuwim, Polish Jewish poet, at the ceremony. "These heroes now have entered the pantheon of the Polish nation and the Jewish nation forever." [7]
The monument quickly became a site of pilgrimage and remembrance for Jews worldwide. On anniversaries of the uprising and at other times, official delegations and ordinary citizens laid wreaths and lit memorial candles at its base.
The most iconic moment in the monument‘s history came in December 1970, when West German Chancellor Willy Brandt paid an official visit to Poland in a historic act of post-war reconciliation. After laying a wreath at a memorial to victims of the Nazi occupation, Brandt spontaneously dropped to his knees before the Ghetto Fighters Monument in a gesture of penance and atonement. The image of the German leader kneeling humbly in the snow became an instant worldwide media sensation.
"Under the weight of recent history, I did what people do when words fail them," Brandt later wrote of his reasons for the gesture. "In the face of the history of Jewish suffering and the murdered of the Warsaw Ghetto, I commemorated the millions of murdered in the only way I could." [8]
A Living Memorial
Today, the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters Monument still stands on the hallowed ground of the former ghetto, directly across from the award-winning POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opened in 2013. Visiting this sacred space, one cannot help but be moved by the incredible bravery of the ghetto fighters who, knowing they were doomed, still chose to resist with every fiber of their being.
Krystyna Budnicka, who survived the uprising as a young girl hiding in the ghetto bunkers, reflected on its meaning: "We knew perfectly well that there was no chance of victory, because at that time the Germans had conquered all of Europe. But a person condemned to death has a choice either to die passively or to die actively. And that‘s what the members of the Jewish Combat Organization chose." [9]
In the 1944 official Passover Hagaddah of the Jewish Combat Organization, the rebels poignantly connected their armed struggle to the ancient Israelites‘ exodus from slavery in Egypt:
"The Jewish nation fought and won its Passover Battle. The chain of pogroms, acts of slaughter and deportations of the last ten years was met with an armed response. History will in the future devote one of its most beautiful pages to the glory of the Jewish fighters, to the organizers and participants in the Jewish Resistance Movement. The fighting which is still going on will be recorded as a heroic page in the history of Jewry."[10]
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ultimately failed to liberate the Jews or defeat the Nazis. But the courageous resistance of a relative handful of poorly armed, untrained ghetto youth against the might of the SS inspired Jews everywhere. It proved that the Nazis‘ intended victims would not all go quietly to the slaughter and that the spark of resistance could never be extinguished.
The stone and bronze figures of the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters Monument will forever stand in mute testimony to this unconquerable spirit in the face of unimaginable oppression and evil. They call out to us across the years to never forget and to fight against tyranny wherever it arises. In a world still plagued by antisemitism, racism and genocide, their defiant example is as relevant as ever. As we gaze upon their determined faces, we affirm: never again.