Warsaw Uprising August 1–October 2, 19441164 passed through the Ghetto gates carelessly and with their usual arrogant swagger, singing bloodthirsty songs about murdering Jews.. In April
Trang 1Warsaw Uprising (August 1–October 2, 1944)
1164
passed through the Ghetto gates carelessly and with their usual arrogant swagger, singing bloodthirsty songs about murdering Jews In April and May, 1943, the ZOB organized fi ghters among the remaining 70,000 Jews to resist the fi nal sweep
of the Ghetto by German and Latvian units of the Waffen-SS, who were assisted by
some Polish police and supported by tanks Minimally armed ZOB fi ghters, mostly very young men and women, rose against their mass murderers in a desperate, hopeless, but symbolically hugely important resistance that started on April 19,
1943 The 600 or so active fi ghters of the ZOB, who had only one machine gun and
17 rifl es among them but lots of Molotov cocktails, infl icted signifi cant casualties
on about 2,000 SS who moved methodically into the Ghetto The ZOB fi ghters were joined by 400 more from the Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy (ZZW ), or “Jewish Military Union.” Fierce, merciless fi ghting continued for several weeks On May 8 the ZOB headquarters bunker located at Mila 18 fell to the SS In the end almost all members of the ZOB were killed, having themselves killed about 300 Germans
It is thought that fewer than 100 Jews survived the fi ghting or escaped subsequent deportation to Treblinka: about 14,000 were killed in the fi ghting, with the last 7,000 inhabitants of the Ghetto sent to the death camps The Warsaw uprising en-raged Hitler, though it was not the only one to occur in Jewish ghettos It became
a permanent symbol of resistance for Jewish people the world over, captured in the
fi ghting slogan “Never again!”
WARSAW UPRISING (AUGUST 1–OCTOBER 2, 1944) Forward elements
of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky ’s 1st Belorussian Front advanced north along the
east bank of the Vistula toward Warsaw in July 1944 On July 29, the Stavka ordered all offensive operations in eastern Poland to stop, while ordering new offensives into Rumania and the Baltic States Yet, on the same day, Red Army radio called upon the Polish Armia Krajowa or “Home Army” to rise in revolt and harry the Germans in advance of liberation—which the French Resistance would do in Paris
a few weeks later Acting on orders from “General Bor” (Tadeusz Komorowski), the Armia Krajowa seized most of Warsaw The Germans moved in reinforcements to systematically destroy Warsaw and crush resistance by thousands of lightly armed
Armia Krajowa fi ghters, men and women Special Schutzstaffel (SS) units of crimi-nals and non-German turncoats organized by Heinrich Himmler to man the
infa-mous and murderous “Dirlewanger” and “Kaminski” brigades Enthusiastic about receiving the appointment from his Führer, Himmler declared: “Warsaw will be liquidated.” Despite pleas from Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and from the Polish fi ghters in Warsaw and others serving with the Red Army, the So-viets remained on the east bank of the Vistula as the Germans defeated the Armia Krajowa and leveled the city For 63 days the Uprising continued, from August 1 to October 2 Some 200,000 Polish civilians died, many butchered by the SS
Waiting across the Vistula by the Red Army is often portrayed as a cynical betrayal of the fi rst order, and it smolders still in Polish national memory Polish and Western historians often blame Stalin for deliberately allowing elimination
of the only local force which might resist imposition of Moscow’s authority over Poland Russian historians have argued that the Red Army made several attempts