Title: 1943 - Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto

 

About: The largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe was liquidated, prompting a brave but futile armed resistance.  Any surviving Jews were ultimately 'resettled' to extermination camps.

 

As part of the Final Solution, the Nazis begun rounding up and imprisoning Jews within the walls of ghettos.  In Warsaw, over 400,000 Jews were trapped in squalid conditions, with tens of thousands dying of starvation and disease.

 

In July 1942, the Great Deportation Aktion began - within the period of two months, the Germans deported nearly 300,000 Ghetto residents to their deaths at the Treblinka extermination camp. Among those that remained, with nothing left to lose and increasingly aware of their futile situation, the idea of armed resistance against the Nazis was born.

 

When the final deportation aktion began on 19 April 1943, and the liquidation of the ghetto became inevitable, for almost a month the Jews fought for their lives, hopelessly outgunned. The Germans were surprised by the ferocity of the resistance, and soon switched tactics from rounding up the Jews to complete devastation of the ghetto. They burnt down apartment blocks, blew up cellars, and destroyed the streets, slowly forcing the Jews out of their hiding places and seizing the insurgents' positions.

 

There were Jews who reported for deportation out of despair or hunger, but most of the Jews remained in hiding, while the Jewish fighters continued their battle from the bunkers. When their hiding places were no longer defensible, the fighters would flee to other positions. Ultimately, many of them perished in the fires and smoke of the uprising. Others were murdered in the ghetto streets.

 

The remainder were sent to Treblinka, Majdanek, and other death camps. Only a few managed to escape to the Aryan side of Warsaw. The largest ghetto was transformed into a devastated wasteland, haunted by the ghosts of the Holocaust. 

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Decade: 1940s

Year: 1943

Region: Europe

Country: Poland + Germany

Conflict: World War II

Society: Race Relations

Society: Crime

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Type: Historical Event

Impact: 9

Artist: Jaroslaw Marcinek

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Group: Genesis

Number: 43/100

Price: 0.9 ETH

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