On 19th April 1943, smoke covered the skies over central Warsaw. The Nazi German occupying forces attempted to enter the Warsaw Ghetto to deport the last surviving members of the city’s Jewish population to the Majdanek and Treblinka death camps. But instead of surrendering to their will, the people of Warsaw Ghetto took up arms preferring to die on their own terms – with dignity. This is the story of the ghetto and its uprising.
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Before the outbreak of World War II, Poland was home to more than three million Jews – they accounted for 10% of the total population and a third of the population of the capital, Warsaw. At about 370,000, it was one of the most prominent Jewish communities in the world – only New York boasted a larger one. They were, and remain, a diverse minority, which could be found in all walks of life. Many Polish Jews inhabited the country’s remote villages and lived off their land. Others formed thriving communities in the cities, working in Poland’s factories and companies, or managing their own businesses. Some became wealthy industrialists, renowned artists and influential intellectuals.
Screenshot from Warsaw 1935
Pre-war Warsaw Caught on Film
When Poland lost its struggle against the Nazi German invasion in September 1939, the Nazi forces quickly began rounding up the Jewish population and forcing them into cordoned off districts known as ghettos. The Jews which were not immediately murdered or sent to concentration camps, found themselves sharing the same fate. They were forced to give up their previous life, their property and most of their belongings, and moved into the ghettoes in Poland’s biggest cities.
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest such district in the entire territory conquered by Nazi Germany – it is estimated that approximately 460,000 people were living in the ghetto in March 1941. More people were being brought into the district daily, yet total area in which the Jews were forced to live amounted to only 307 hectares. To put this in perspective, over a third of Warsaw’s population was living in only about 2% of the entire city.
Ghetto Diary - Drawings from the Underground Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto
Ghetto Diary - Drawings from the Underground Archives of the Warsaw Ghetto
Before the war, the area selected by the Germans for the ‘Jewish Residential District in Warsaw’, as it was officially called to avoid alarming representatives from other countries, was predominantly populated by Jews and it stretched right across the city’s centre. Today, you could walk from one of its ends (just north of the Palace of Science and Culture) to the other (in the Muranów district, near the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews) in about half an hour, enjoying some of the city’s most popular spots.
At first, the Nazis wanted to place the ghetto on the outskirts of the city, in the western parts of the Wola district, or in Grochów which was just across the river from the city centre. However, they quickly realised that displacing such a massive population would be a costly logistical nightmare. Even though Muranów and Nowolipki were by no means exclusively Jewish neighbourhoods, the minority was so prominent there, that it was easier to trap the Jews where they already were. Those who lived outside the district had little time to sell whatever property they had and try to secure a place within the confines of the ghetto.