POLAND
On Thursday 19 April, on the 64th anniversary of the revolt in the Warsaw ghetto, thousands of candles were lit in front of the monument commemorating the uprising; they recreated the pattern of streets that had existed here before the Nazi occupation. Poland’s head rabbi Michael Schudrich, paying tribute to the participants in the uprising, said “they were forced to choose between death and death”. “Those who fought wanted to have the chance of choosing how to die. They wanted to struggle to the end. And this struggle of theirs teaches us that the good cannot be silenced, that it must be expressed!”, said the rabbi. In 1939 a third of the residents of Warsaw, which comprised some 1.3 million inhabitants at the time, was of Jewish origin. The Nazis, who had occupied the Polish capital in late September 1939, created the ghetto in the autumn of 1940. Some 450,000 Jews were segregated in it. In the summer of 1942 the Nazis began the mass extermination of the inhabitants of the ghetto, forcibly transporting over 300,000 to the concentration camps and the gas ovens. Some 1000,000 people still remained in the ghetto. Not wishing passively to await extermination, deprived of food, medicine and other basic necessities, they decided to fight. The uprising began on 19 April 1943. The combatants, in small groups, managed to resist until 16 May against the armed power of the Wehrmacht, the SS and the auxiliary forces called up to complete the extermination and to raze the whole quarter to the ground.
