All articles tagged with #warsaw ghetto uprising
CNN's Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash visited the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, where some of their relatives died in the Holocaust, while helping commemorate the 80th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The emotional trip was personal for both journalists.
Presidents, Holocaust survivors, and their descendants commemorated the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, with a sense that the responsibility for carrying on the memory of the Holocaust is passing from the witnesses to younger generations. Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said the lessons of his own country’s aggression hold a lesson as Russia’s attack on Ukraine has “destroyed the foundations of our European security order.” The anniversary honors the hundreds of young Jews who took up arms in Warsaw in 1943 against the overwhelming might of the Nazi German army.
On April 19, 1943, a group of Jews living inside the Nazi-created Warsaw Ghetto in Poland began an armed uprising against Hitler’s occupying forces. The monthlong fight represented the largest and most robust retaliation against SS troops who were systematically murdering millions of European Jews. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the largest uprising during World War II and inspired other resistance movements across German-occupied Europe. Around April 19, we observe the Days of Remembrance, commemorating the courage of those who took part in the uprising as well as all victims and survivors of the Holocaust.
The 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was commemorated by the presidents of Germany, Israel, and Poland, along with Holocaust survivors and their descendants. The uprising saw hundreds of young Jews take up arms against Nazi German forces in the Polish capital in 1943, with most being killed. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier asked for forgiveness and warned against indifference in the face of rising hatred and violence. The Polish government's policy of portraying the predominant response to the Holocaust as one in which Poles saved Jews has been a source of tensions with Israel.
Thousands of people, including Holocaust survivors, gathered at the former site of Auschwitz for the March of the Living, a yearly Holocaust remembrance march that falls this year on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. German forces established Auschwitz during World War II, and killed more than 1.1 million people there, most of them Jews but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and others. The March of the Living, which takes place each year on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, began at the gate and led to Birkenau, the large camp 3 kilometers (2 miles) away where Jews from across Europe were transported by train and murdered in gas chambers.
On April 19, 1943, Jewish fighters revolted against Nazi barbarism that had methodically undertaken the deportation and extermination of 400,000 Jews crowded into the Warsaw ghetto since July 1942. The act, as heroic as it was desperate, marked the end of the Warsaw ghetto. Three weeks after the final uprising, nothing remained of the ghetto and its inhabitants. Commemorations for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began as soon as the war ended and continue to this day.