FIFTY years ago, on 19 April 1943, the Warsaw Jewish ghetto broke into revolt against the Nazis. Here ENZO TRAVERSO, a member of the LCR, the French section of the Fourth International, explains the background to the revolt and how it was defeated. AS THE WORLD'S attention was focused on the monumental struggle taking place between the Nazis and the Red Army on the Russian front, several hundred Jewich combatants rose in revolt against the Nazis in Warsaw. They were faced with the indifference of the entire world. Their struggle lasted for a month, until the total destruction of the ghetto by units of the SS and the Wehrmacht (German army).
The uprising did not aim at liberation from the Nazis, for the fighters understood that they had no possibility of stopping the Nazi murder machine. In the face of the power of the German army units which controlled the Polish capital their numbers and armaments were totally der. They had berween 500 and 700 fighters, each armed with a pistol and only ten ouncis, wo gether with several thousand Molotov cocktails To counter the enemy tanks they had onc, maybe two, old machine guns. Yet they resisted for a month, despite the daily toll of casualties.
As one of their leaders, Marek Edelman put it, they decided only choose the manner of the death"; they decided not to die in the gas chambers of Treblinka, but fighting the NaSo this was no national libcration struggle; the ghetto was not the Vietnamese jungle or the Cuban Sierra. It was a struggle to affirm Jewish dignity, or more simply human dignity in the face of extermination.
In Poland, until the second world war, the Jewish commu. nity numocco in milions, forming a sort of 'nation within a nation. They had their own language (Yiddish), their own literature. and an extremely nch intellectual and political life. But this community, under Nazi occupation, did not immediately form a resistance movement. Why not?
To answer that question you have to remember that the sitaation of the Jewish and Polish The Poles had been defeated and were subjoct to harsh rePicasson - much hersher than in occupied France. While their ineat no polacal cale was decimated, they were not menaced by genocide.
But the Jews were the victims of a process of total annihilation. Not only did they not have an army, but they could not even count on a covemment in exile how and when they could.
To understand the nature ark! the form of the insurrection we have to look at what was happening in the Warsaw ghetto. When the Nazis occupied in September 1939, there were 350,000 Jews in Warsaw, 30 per cent of the population.
The concentration of this mass of people into the ghetto but by cocrcive measures over a 194. UH city was divided into three sectors - German, Jewish and Polish - the Jewish sector being surrounded by a wall 18 kilometres long and 10 foet high.
The ghetto comprised 73 streets out of 1800 in the city. concentrating 30 percent of the population in a surface area of 2.4 per cent of the city.
According German sources, the population density was 128,000 inhabitants per kilometre - and more than nine Before the end of 1942, thanks to the arrival of Jews deported from the countryside and even from Germany, the numbers in the-ghetto increased to 450,000. In a two-ycar period 85,0 poopie in the queue paished from hunger, cold and sickness - above all typhoid.
In January 1940 Emmanuel Ringleblum noted with consternation that the death rate in the ghetto was around 170 people a day. In August 1941 he noted a
The Warsaw Ghetto Massive deportations were made ber 1942 10 ancel wun dry was reduced to three smal alces. Ve da de On April 19, 1943, German troops moved into the remaining ghetto to round up the last inhabitants and deport wy wwy io. sowy vow ihu Usel oneto was ofstroyco curious indifference to death, which doesn't make an impression on poople any more. In the streets, people pass by corpses with total indifference."
Adam Czerniakow, the president of the Judenrat - the Jewish ruling body established by the Nazis, wrose in his diary of silting at his desk listening to the wailing of hungry beggars in the street, Jan Karski, an ensoy ol the Polish government in exile who visited the gheito is 1942 wrote: "This wasn't a world.
This wasn't humanity. This was a sort of hell."
From December communication with the outside world was cut off. The postal closed, and not a single tram line connected the ghetto to the rest of the city: no Jew coul go out of the ghotto without permission.
The isolation from the outpress warca Poles to nave nothing to do witt the ghetto inhabitants, because of the danger of typboid.
Despite everything, life conThe Jews were the victims of a process of for them tinued in this half-world filled with corses, Various testimonies which we have describe the intense cultural activities, a political life no less lively, and even a vigorous nightlife.
wo thousand members of the Bund, the Jewish socialist assembled to commemorate the anniversary a Talmudic school was established attended by 700 pupils.
Dozens of underground journals were published in both Polich and Yiddish During the autumn of 1939 many leaders of the Jewish workers movement left Warsaw to become refugees overseas.
Some of them. like Simue Z.ygacioo mt, reranieo several wines to organise the resistance.
But the creation of the Judenrat by Nazis to administer the The concentration • Warsaw, the 500.00 ws, who accoumed 1 one-third of the population.
Wacu dise coromy
than 2.5% of the city Okopowa) Umschlagplatz Okopowa of the people. ghetto. end of 1942 only 50,000 poopie remained in the ghetto, many of them in hiding. And they knew that the deportations would be continued until the last Jew was sent to oblivion.
Combat
Breaking the attitude of resignation and passivity was not casy. It started first among the young, among whom were found the most determined. the most radical and the least exhausted. The Jewish Combat Organisation (OJC) was founded on the 28 July 1942, a week after the first round-up of deportces had taken place, by the leaders of three youth In the first: Mosi Wr AugS Sl they got their trom uic Pousa counmusts. tols and cight grenades. The five leaders of the OJC included Marek Edelman of the Bund. Michal Rejzenfeld of the Communists (PRP) and Herz. Berlinthe left Zionist organisation Poale Zion.
The right-wing Zionists, disciptes of the Zionist revisionist leader Wisdimir Jabotinski. ret fused to join the OJC and tional command. By the end of 1942 the OJC had 500 fighters, and the right-wing Zionists about half this number.
Assassination
The OJC started with sporadic actions. The chief of the Jewish police, Jacob Leijkin, was assassinated on 29 October. When Himmier ordered a second wave of deportations, starting on 18 January 1943, the OJC attacked German soldiers esCOrIS prisoners to the Umschlagplatz, taking them by surprise, killing several of them. The round-ups were delayed and interrupted.
In the following days acts of resistance continued. Workers in factorics called to present themselves for deportation reof the Judenrat collapsed in the ghetto, being replaced by that of the OJC. The population began to prepare for all-out resistance by buriding bunkers and shelteTs. were eliminated. Defence forces were stationed at strategic points and in unoccupied buildings. The insurrection was launched on 1y Apnl: the sheltc was immediately surrounded by Ine ss ano ucti ponice As they tried to enter the ghetto, the Jewish fighters responded with Molosov cocktails, driving them back. At the end oi three cays or tigaus. tic first attack by the Nazis had been driven back.
SS General Juergen Stroop. who rocorded the course of the confict daily in his diary, decided to destroy the ghetto. piece by piece.
The Jewish resistance was finally crushed on 8 May, when the leadership of the OJC found itself surrounded, gave the order to the combatants to commit suicide Among tose who refused to give himself up to the enemy alive was the main leader of the insurrection M. Anielewicz, just 22 years old. But a handiul of fighters, among them Marek Edelman, managed to escape to the "Ayrian" part of the city, and the next year participated in a generalisod uprising of the Polish resistance.
On 16 May, after ordering the desmiction of the main synagogue, situated outside the gaetto. ucheral siroop an nounced the end of the uprising. It had cost the Germans 16 dead and 85 wounded.
Tanks
To crush it, more than 2000 German troops had been mobilised, armed with tanks, cannon and flame-throwers.
The insurgents of the war saw ghetto were abandoned to their fate. They were not he ped by anyone and died in total isolation. Their fate poses once again the more general question of the abandonment of the Jews. and the indifference and silence SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 42 May 15 1993. Page 9 A Belsen survivor. In the summer of 1942 the removed 75 percent of the population of the oneto of the world about their massacre.
The tragic end of the revolt raises another question, the indifference of the international workers movement. With the exception of several duplicated Yiddish journals, distributed by activists in the French and Belgian resistance, the news of the insurrccaon, the test wue up rising against Nazi rule in Europe, evoked practically no ocho whatever in the insernational workers movement.
On 12 May 1943, after having received the news of the final crushing of the insurrection, the representative of the Bund in the Polish govemment in exile, Shmuel Zygielbojm, committed suicide. In a note he explained in the following words: "1 can no longer keep silent. I can no longer live when OUR I the survivors of the Polish Jewish people, whom I represent, are being anihilated.
"In the Warsaw ghetto, my comrades have fallen, arms in hand, during their final heroic momba. did not have the chanc: to die in the same fashion, alungside them. But I belong with them, even in their HISTORY graves. By my death, 1 demonagainst the apathy with which the world watches and accepts the massacre of the Jewish poople."
The historian Emmanuel Ringleblum, a participant in the revolt, later shot by the Nazis, wrote the following words: 'We have dealt the enemy a considcrable blow. We have exposed their satanic plan to exterminate Polish Jewry, a plan they wantod to carry out in silence."
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 42 May 15 1993. Page 10 BLOODE without socialist revolution.' BEATACKS CK AND WHITE 'There will be no socialist revolution without black liberation...there will be no black liberation blacks and whites before all blacks are united is simply unscientific.
Vanguard political forces of the white working class and of black people can be united in struggle on concrese issues many ways. In particular, the objective of building a multi-racial and multi-eth. nic revolutionary party is a correct one.
The question of whether black Americans will at some future point form themselves as a nation and launch a struggle for a separate state 1s not one which can be answered in advance. But in any tionalists or separatists, but have their Marxists argue that there is a specific and autonomous struggle for black libcration and that this requires black self organisation and the fight for black unity in struggle.
But this struggle can only find its successful conclusion in the destruction of capitalism; and this requires the building of a multi-racial and multi-ethnic revolutionary socialist party. Even if the conclusion is the formation of a separate black state. which is far from proved in advance, this is highly unlikely without