The little great uprising
Jerzy Halbersztadt, project director of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, reflects on the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April-May 1943 is one of the best-known worldwide events in the country's history. At a casual glance, this may seem strange, as the scale and timing of the uprising and the number of its participants and enemy losses are hardly impressive, especially when compared with the Warsaw Uprising of August-September 1944.
On April 19, 1943, several hundred Jewish combatants, perhaps 750, confronted the Germans, though half that figure is found in some sources. They engaged the enemy for more than 10 days. More than a year later 50,000 Polish combatants controlled large areas of the city for two months.
Human memory and the science of history are, however, characterized by the fact that with time proportions can change. Some events are remembered much more than the facts or numbers would suggest. It was no different even at the time when the ghetto fighting started. It must be kept in mind that this was the first act of open armed resistance in Warsaw since the siege of 1939. Just less than a month before the ghetto uprising, the "Szare Szeregi" - a resistance organization connected to the prewar boy scouts - organized the first armed action on the streets with the recapture of the prisoners near the Arsenal. It took just over 10 minutes. Soon after that German troops fought Jewish combatants for many days.
"The ghetto events have made a huge impression on the Warsaw population," wrote the underground newspaper Iskra (Spark) as early as April 20.
A few days later the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) bulletin Wolność (Freedom) of Kraków reported: "This is the second time that Warsaw has amazed the world (the first being the 1939 siege) ... In the fourth year of the Nazi occupation regular fighting has broken out. Polish citizens, Jews, have taken up arms ... and stood up to the Nazi butcher who used the cover of night to come to the ghetto with his murderous intention to further slaughter the Jews ... The defenders are fighting with exceptional devotion and self-denial."
A few days later General Władysław Sikorski, the prime minister of the government in exile, spoke from London to the occupied country: "The Jewish population, driven to despair, has put up heroic resistance. The fight has been going on since then. The sound of machine guns, bomb explosions and fires have brought there the population of Warsaw who, filled with terror, help the victims of this unprecedented barbarism wherever and however they can. I hereby thank my compatriots for their dignified reaction. I beg them to give all the help and protection they can to those who are being murdered. At the same time, I condemn all this cruelty in the face of the whole world, which has remained silent for too long."
Not all, however, were willing to give compassion, let alone to help the dying Jews, both here and elsewhere. Those high in the world merely made verbal protests and took no actual action that could at least slow down Hitler's murderous machinery. Regardless of this, the ghetto fighters knew they would die. It was, in professor Israel Gutman's words, a "fight without hope," not for victory, but to present the conquering murderers and the whole world with an act of defiance against the crime that was taking place. And that is how the world has come to remember it.
In the last 20-30 years, the postwar tiredness of the memory of the disaster has been replaced by increasingly intense research and thought on the experience of the Annihilation (or the Shoah). Though it was a Jewish experience, the world has gradually come to realize that the Annihilation (known in the world mostly as the Holocaust) was an extreme symptom of genocide, the worst disease of the 20th century. Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto defenders are two symbols of death and resistance, and they have both left a deep impression on human awareness across the globe.
And life? What is the symbol of life that had existed for centuries before the Holocaust and, in spite of all, has overcome the terror of World War II? It is not, after all, fighting for our lives but living that is now the lot of us all. It is difficult to express it all with one symbol. Life must be narrated - not with abstract or ideological aims in view, but simply because, deprived of the experience of the past, we would be unable to conceptualize and appreciate the contemporary world. People suffering from an atrophy of memory are even more susceptible to hate and hostility towards the "other." And there is no more prevalent symbol of "otherness" in this country than being a Jew.
The history of the Warsaw ghetto, as well as the earlier and later history of Polish Jews, will be told in the new museum that is to be set up in an extremely symbolic place, in front of the Heroes of the Ghetto Uprising monument. The exposition, will be based on laborious research that will entail the collection of all information available on more than 50,000 objects, which are currently kept in various private and public collections worldwide. Paintings, drawings, photos, documents, everyday objects - all this will allow a reconstruction of the picture of Jewish life at various stages of the country's history, as well as the relationship between Polish and Jewish cultures. It will be a very modern multimedia presentation, little resembling traditional museums.
The history of the Annihilation, although an important part of our plans, is not to be the focus of the exhibition. Not that the Holocaust is considered less important, but because there already exist places commemorating it in the country, such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. It is there that we want to direct our future visitors. We believe, however, that to understand what happened 60 years ago - if it is conceivable at all - it is necessary to show not only the mechanism of murdering people, but, first of all, who those people were. The picture of the development of Jewish life and culture and their relationships with the surrounding world, including the Polish world, is a necessary background, against which it is possible to see the terrors of World War II as something more than a glorified version of a horror movie.
The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is being created slowly and with considerable effort. We hope that, thanks to our museum, in the future the celebrations of the ghetto uprising's anniversary will consist of memories both of the participants' lives and deaths, and their continued presence among us.
