Waubonsee Community College

Resistance, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Israel Gutman

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-265) and index

mapsplatesillustrations

index present

non fiction

Resistance

bibliography

29548576

Israel Gutman

the Warsaw Ghetto uprising

On April 19, 1943, thousands of Nazi troops were given the order to remove all Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, a few square blocks sheltering the remnants of the half million or more Jewish citizens of Poland's capital, to the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz. They were to kill those who resisted. A few hundred of the trapped Jews, mostly teenagers, armed only with pistols, Molotov cocktails, and a few light machine guns, vowed to fight back. Resistance is the full story of the uprising and the events leading to it, told by a survivor of the battle who is now a world-renowned Israeli scholar of the Holocaust. Warsaw in the 1920s and 1930s was the home of Europe's largest and most vibrant Jewish community. It included the rich, the poor, and the middle class; casual assimilationists and ardent Zionists; representatives of the full spectrum of political and religious factions. Then came the German onslaught of ruthless violence against the Jews--isolation and starvation amid desperation and disease--then deportations. As the ghetto walls rose, hundreds of thousands were rounded up and sent to Treblinka. But resistance began to take shape, and when the final attack order came, the ghetto fighters stood ready. Includes excerpts from diaries, letters, and other documents of the period

The first weeks of war -- The Jews of Warsaw between the wars -- A new and different existence -- The ghetto is sealed -- The turning point -- Political parties and youth movements -- Deportation to death -- The establishment of the Jewish Fighting Organization -- Between the expulsion and January 1943 -- January 1943: the first instance of resistance -- The end