Remembering The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Andrew Roberts

Remembering The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Andrew Roberts

https://www.hoover.org/research/remembering-warsaw-ghetto-uprising?utm_source=hdr&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2019-01-09&utm_source=Hoover+Daily+Report&utm_campaign=bab307ddf7-HDR_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_21b1edff3c-bab307ddf7-72863337

ERxcerpt: Simcha Rotem, one of the last-known surviving fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April-May 1943, died in Jerusalem on December 23, 2018, aged 94. His death prompted a good deal of global coverage, since the story of the Ghetto Uprising—not to be confused with the Warsaw Home Army Uprising of August-October 1944—is an integral one to the story of Jewish resistance to the Nazis during the Second World War. Rotem’s nom de guerre was “Kazik,” and he was 19 years old when the SS moved into the Ghetto on April 19, 1943, choosing the eve of Passover with their unerring sense of blasphemy and desecration. Yet they were not prepared for what came next, when a people already terribly malnourished by three and a half years of wartime restrictions rose up and killed 16 German soldiers, wounding 200. Although the SS razed much of the Ghetto to the ground, the Jews continued their resistance for almost a month.