THE JT NEWS - VOICE OF JEWISH WASHINGTON
Viewpoint
May 2, 2008
RISING UP FROM THE UPRISING
Many thanks for the reproduction [April 18 issue, accompanying the article “The Long road to rescue – The battle for a modern-day exodus – from Hitler’s Europe,”by Dr. Rafael Medoff] of my drawing “Bar Mitzvah-Age Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto.”
As an artist working in old-fashioned traditional media like pen holders with metal points dipped in India ink (used for this drawing), it is dazzling that computers today enable the visual reproduction of an artwork whose original size is 108 inches in height, reducing it to five-and-three-quarter inches, with clarity, on newsprint, as readers saw in the last issue.
JTNews readers of student age — and everyone else — interested in Jewish, and World War II and Holocaust history may have noted the intriguing caption to the drawing which stated: “The drawing was drawn....to commemorate… the Warsaw uprising.”The Warsaw Uprising, also known as the General Uprising of Warsaw, was in the spring of 1944, a full year after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. At the seder I attended on April 19, with two American-Israelis and five Israelis among the attendees, no one (other than myself) was familiar with the extraordinary commemoration this Pesach offered us (which was my inspiration for submitting the drawing for publication).
Pesach in 1943 began on April 19; our Pesach just passed was a 65th anniversary. April 20 was Adolph Hitler’s birthday; the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto began on April 19 not only because it was one of the most important Jewish religious holidays, (which the Nazi high-command was well familiar with, especially in light of the work of the Nazi “Jewish specialist” Adolph Eichmann), but the liquidation was “a birthday present
for Hitler.”
The death knell of Warsaw Jewry was in a real sense a symbol not only of the death of Polish Jewry, the world’s largest in 1939 at the onset of World War II, but of the two thirds of European Jewry that was murdered. Aside from a handful of Warsaw ghetto prisoners who escaped into sewers, and perhaps a few hundred inmates who survived slave labor in concentration and death camps, almost all of the then-surviving 50,000 Jews still alive in the ghetto on April 19 were murdered by the end of May. Thousands died in the rubble of the ghetto’s buildings as the Nazis destroyed the ghetto, building by building.
Among the more remarkable aspects of the military history of World War II in Europe was that it took the Nazis more time to destroy the ghetto — six weeks — than it took the Nazi war machine to defeat trained armies such as France’s during the early years
of the war.
During the uprising, the ghetto was defended by perhaps 700 children, youth, young adults and adults, all starving civilians, armed with pistols, some rifles and Molotov cocktails. In addition to heavily armed Wehrmacht army soldiers, Ukrainian SS soldiers, and Polish police units, the Nazis used flamethrowers, and even bombed the ghetto from planes, in their attempt to defeat the “bandits and Jews” (in the words of Juergen Stroop, the Nazi general in charge of the liquidation in his daily communiqué to Berlin on the progress of their campaign to make Warsaw Judenrein — without Jews).
Stroop, indicted by a U.S. military court for war crimes for having ordered the execution of captured U.S. Army Air Corps officers, was hanged in 1951 in Poland for crimes against humanity. Stroop, like his more well-known colleague, the former United Nations secretary general and Austrian president Kurt Waldheim, was also involved in war crime atrocities against Jewish and non-Jewish partisans, and against Jews
at-large in Yugoslavia.
By the end of May, 1943, the Warsaw ghetto, itself a deadly concentration camp, was rubble. Remarkably, a handful of Jews continued to live in the rubble. And the Jews themselves, our people, what happened to them? In Elie Wiesel’s memoir From the Kingdom of Night: Memory, Wiesel asks: “Where are the Jews of Warsaw today?”
He replies that their ashes and bones are in the earth (unconsecrated) at the remains of
the Treblinka death camp in Poland.
When I walked through the plaza in 1984 and 1985 where the Warsaw Jewish district had been and what in 1940 became the ghetto, I had no idea that the bodies of thousands of Jews who died during the time of the uprising and liquidation of the ghetto lay under the pavement.
This Pesach just past offers us today a time for reflection and contemplation of those who perished. Let us use their memories to speak out on behalf of those worldwide who face ongoing grave risks to life and limb by war, from disease, lack of drinkable water, from lack of shelter and from war. According to a recent UNICEF report, most victims of today’s hot conflicts worldwide are children. Children are also forcibly conscripted as combatants in numerous conflicts.
According to the Guidelines for Educators of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., less than one-half of one-percent of European Christians did anything to assist those who tried to help Jews (and Roma, who were also systematically hunted down throughout Europe and targeted for death, like the Jews) or to assist those who tried to help Jews and Roma.
If we remain silent today about atrocities today, we lose all our moral right and authority to condemn, well after the fact, the millions of Catholic and Protestant Christians who enabled the Holocaust to happen. The Holocaust did not have to happen.
Akiva Kenny Segan
Seattle