Thirteen Heroic Jewish Lives

MORDECHAI ANIELEWICZ HISTORICAL CONTEXT The horrific deportations from Warsaw, which started July 22, 1942, continued until mid-September 1942. In all, some 350,000 Jews of Warsaw were sent to their death at Treblinka. The Jews were packed into cattle cars which had been treated with lye causing many of them to suffocate from the fumes and overcrowding. A few prisoners sensed their fate and pried open the floor boards or doors and managed to fall out of the fast moving freight trains. Some of the escapees made their way back to Warsaw to warn others. Even then, many were unable to accept the dreadful reality. By the time the Nazis and their allies completed their slaughter, approximately 50,000 “productive” Jews remained alive in the Warsaw Ghetto working under impossible conditions. Most of these Jews began to think about their eventual doom. A young twenty-four year old, Mordechai Anielewicz, wanted to change the inevitable ending. He did not want the Jews to go like sheep to their slaughter. (A phrase uttered by Emmanuel Ringelbloom who was the chief archivist of the Warsaw Ghetto) Seldom has any Jewish or non-Jewish individual ever been memorialized the way Mordechai Anielewicz has been. Two large statues of a robust, larger than life Mordechai Anielewicz have been built. (The marble for these two statues was requisitioned from a stockpile gathered by the Germans for a memorial to Nazi soldiers.) One of these statues stands just outside of Yad Vashem, (in Jerusalem) which is the Israeli state memorial to the Holocaust. The duplicate statue stands near Mila 18, the site of the headquarters of the Jewish uprising in Warsaw. A kibbutz in the Negev in the south of Israel was named Yad Mordechai after Anielewicz. Ironically, this kibbutz played a key role in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence as its residents held off much of the Egyptian army and prevented its northward advance. Mordechai Anielewicz has been portrayed in countless movies, plays, books and dramas about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. He has captured the imagination of the public at large and has become the symbol of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and WWII. THE STORY OF MORDECHAI ANIELEWICZ Mordechai Anielewicz was born in 1919 in Wyszkow, Poland to a working class family. He attended a Hebrew academic secondary school and became a Zionist while he learned Hebrew. Initially Mordechai joined Betar which was the youth group of the right wing Zionist organization founded by Jabotinsky. Perhaps driven by the socialist leanings of his poor parents, he joined Hashomer Hatzair, a far left Zionist organization. As WWII broke out on September 1, 1939, Poland became divided into German and Russian zones. Following the partition of Poland, Mordechai Anielewicz and his followers fled to the Eastern Zone under Russian occupation. Mordechai made his way to Rumania where he tried to organize an escape route to Palestine for Jewish refugees. By this time British Mandate Palestine was under blockade and it was very difficult for any Jews to be saved. (See the same author’s book, Blockade) The Soviet Secret Police, the NKVD, soon arrested Mordechai for his Zionist activities. Following his release from the Soviet jail, Mordechai made his way to Vilna which was also under Soviet control. Once the Nazis invaded Russia in June, 1941, their diabolical intentions to exterminate the Jews was clear. Mordechai decided that armed resistance was the only course of action and he courageously made his way back to Warsaw with his girlfriend Mira Fuchrer. When Mordechai arrived in Warsaw in the fall of 1942, the slaughter of the Jews at Treblinka had paused and he decided to form a resistance group called ZOB. Under the guise of a concert, 500 members of the Jewish underground met with Mordechai to coordinate their activities. The Jews of Warsaw were an extremely diverse community. Those who were not deported were split into three main groups: 1. The Bundists (Jewish Socialists) 2. The Zionists (divided into numerous factions – one, the Right Wing Revisionists, refused to cooperate with the other groups) 3. The Communists Despite the horrors of the deportations, these groups, consisting mainly of young people, were determined to resist and not go quietly. The remaining Jews in Warsaw were now bereft of most of their pre-war leadership. Many leaders were dead and others fled to the East to seek safety in the Russian controlled areas. A few had managed to reach British Mandate Palestine. Mordechai regretted not starting a resistance organization much earlier. By October 1942, a month after the deportations to Treblinka had ceased, the ZOB was formed and almost all of the diverse groups joined. The purpose was to defend the lives of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Mordechai, of the left wing Hashomer Hatzair, was appointed the supreme commander and was responsible for the organization. ZOB included all of the Jewish organizations within the Ghetto with the exception of the Revisionists who would not join ZOB for political reasons. Initially ZOB attacked the commanders of the Jewish Order Police who had cooperated with the Nazis during the transport to Treblinka. Several leaders were shot in the streets of the Ghetto by designated members of the ZOB. The resistance group’s major concern was to kill the Jewish police so that a fifth column would be eliminated from the underground. It was also felt that these accused Jews deserved punishment for the terrible crimes and collaboration that they had committed against their fellow Jews. Jacob Letkin and Josef Szerynski, two collaborators, were assassinated and their pictures and crimes were posted throughout the Ghetto. The Ghetto’s Jews rallied behind the brave leaders of the underground showing their appreciation that these traitors had been eliminated. Mordechai told the populace of the Ghetto that they would resist and that they must be ready to die as human beings. The “die was cast” and the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were prepared to fight.