by Lawrence Bush on January 21, 2012
The Jewish Fighting Organization of Warsaw (ZOB) issued the following proclamation about this date in 1943, following its first act of armed resistance (January 18th):
“On January 22 1943, six months will have elapsed since the start of the deportation from Warsaw. We all remember those harrowing days in which 300,000 of our brothers and sisters were transported to and brutally murdered in the Treblinka death camp.
“Six months of constant fear of death have passed without our knowing what the next day will bring. We received reports left and right about Jews being killed in the Generalgovernment [Polish territories under Nazi rule], Germany and other occupied countries. As we listened to these terrible tidings, we waited for our own turn to come — any day, any moment. Today we must realize that the Hitlerian murderers have let us live only to exploit our manpower, until the last drop of blood and sweat, until our last breath.
“We are slaves and when slaves no longer bring in profits they are killed. Each of us must ralize this, and always keep it in mind. Jewish masses, the hour is drawing near. You must be prepared to resist, not give yourself up to slaughter like sheep. Not a single Jew should go to the railroad cars. Those who are unable to put up active resistance should resist passively, meaning go into hiding.
“We have just received information from Lvov that the Jewish police there forcefully executed the deportation of 3,000 Jews. This will not be allowed to happen again in Warsaw. The assassination of Lejkin demonstrates that.
“Our slogan must be: All are ready to die as human beings.”
___________
“Encouraged by the results of resistance actions, the Jews in the ghetto plan and prepare a full-scale revolt. The fighting organization is unified, strategies are planned, underground bunkers and tunnels are built, and roof-top passages are constructed. The Jews of the Warsaw ghetto prepare to fight to the end.” —U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
by Lawrence Bush on October 23, 2011
Benjamin Meed (Miedzyrzecki), who helped to found the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in 1981 and led the organization until 2006, died on this date in that year at age 88. Meed was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto who was recruited to the underground by his future wife, Vladka (Fayge) Peltel, with whom he lived on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw while helping to smuggle out ghetto fighters and other Jews. In 1966 they founded the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization; fifteen years later, they helped convene the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, which attracted more than 10,000 survivors to Israel. Michael Berenbaum of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which Meed helped to found and advise, described Meed as “ward leader of the survivors . . . the one survivor who really had a constituency and could produce thousands, and tens of thousands, of survivors to events, to meetings, to gatherings, to reunions.” The Meeds also funded the Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, a searchable database at the Washington museum that has reunited hundreds of survivors.
“We now pass our torch onto our children and to their children and beyond. The torch of memory is precious. It can illuminate the world.” —Benjamin Meed
by Lawrence Bush on October 16, 2011
A Jewish partisan group led by Abba Kovner blew up two bridges and two train engines in the Vilna region on this date in 1943. “Jews formed armed resistance groups only after they realized there was no possible escape from the Nazis’ aim of total annihilation,” writes Shmuel Krakowski in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Kovner, a socialist Zionist leader, was one of the first to come to this realization: In the summer of 1941, while hiding in a convent near Vilna (the mother superior, Anna Borkowska, one of Yad Vashem’s “Righteous Among the Nations,” smuggled the resistance movement’s first hand grenades into the ghetto), Kovner wrote a clarion call of rebellion that anticipated the wholesale murder of his people: “Hitler is scheming to annihilate all of European Jewry. . . . It is true that we are weak and defenseless, but resistance is the only response to the enemy!” The original Yiddish manifesto, read aloud (alongside a Hebrew translation) in the Vilna Ghetto on December 31st, was entitled: “Lomir nit lozn zikh firn vi shof tsu der shkhite!” (“Let Us Not Be Taken Like Sheep to the Slaughter!”) Kovner survived the Holocaust and its aftermath to become a major literary figure in modern Israel.
“Useless: I try now to define who you were—
word shadows! Only your returning shadow
exists. My hands will never
touch you. Your coffin
never leaves my shoulders.” —Abba Kovner, from “That’s Not in the Heart”
by Lawrence Bush on September 1, 2011
On this date in 1942, the population of the ghetto of Lachva in Poland/Belorussia were informed that some farmers had been ordered by the Nazis to dig large pits outside the town, and that 150 German soldiers from an Einsatzgruppe mobile murder squad, along with 200 local auxiliaries, had surrounded the ghetto. The next day, Dov Lopatyn, a Zionist leader who headed the Lachva Judenrat, refused Nazi commands to organize the remaining 2,000 Jews for deportation. When the Nazis entered the ghetto, Lopatyn and the local youth underground led by Isaac Rochczyn led some 800 Jews, armed with axes, clubs, and Molotov cocktails, in an attack, one of the very earliest ghetto uprisings of the war. Some 100 Nazis were killed or wounded, while more than half of the Jewish population was either killed in the fighting or massacred in the pits. Ninety would survive the war. Lopatyn joined a communist partisan group and was killed by a landmine on February 21, 1944.
“Either we all live, or we all die.” —Dov Lopatyn
