During the months of April and May 1943, a celebratory atmosphere took hold outside the Warsaw Ghetto’s walls. Children whirled around carousels, giddy crowds converged to holler at the explosive spectacle, and friends watched the pyrotechnics show from front-row rooftops. One onlooker described the streets of Warsaw as a “never-ending parade.”
Within the Ghetto walls, cries were not of laughter and wonder but of terror and anguish. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — the largest Jewish-led armed resistance to the Holocaust — prompted Nazi occupiers in Warsaw to raze the entire urban area. The open-air prison where 450,000 Jewish people had once dwelled suddenly ceased to exist.
Today the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is universally commended in Poland and around the world as a bold act of resistance, but this was far from the case when it occurred. In the streets of Warsaw, many non-Jewish Poles rejoiced as their neighbors burned.
On the eighty-second anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, another population is burning. Israel’s ongoing genocide has devastated Gaza, damaging or destroying over 90 percent of its housing, displacing nearly two million Palestinians, and killing over sixty thousand, including around eighteen thousand children. Israelis have mostly expressed support for this calamity in a rhetorical landscape shockingly reminiscent of Warsaw 1943.
For many Jews, including descendants of Holocaust survivors like myself, it is agonizing that this violence is committed under the false pretext of Jewish safety. Some have forgotten the lessons of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
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Auteur: Joseph Mogul
