Today, April 19, marks the anniversary of one of the most heroic acts of modern historic memory'the armed uprising by the doomed Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. With but a few pistols, an occasional rifle and homemade bombs on that day in 1943, the trapped, walled-in partisans of that Nazi-imposed Jewish enclave took their final stand against several thousand heavily armed soldiers of Hitler's Wehrmacht, dispatched to annihilate every man, woman and child.
The Jewish sector of Poland's capital had already become a living hell. The systematic brutalization, disease, malnutrition, starvation and unrestrained deadly terror of the Gestapo, SS troops and their quislings wreaked day-to-day havoc on those remaining within the ghetto's walls, those not yet deported for slave labor or extermination in the gas chambers at Treblinka.
Earlier that January, a handful of lightly armed Jewish fighters, determined to die on their feet rather than on their knees, stunned the Nazi establishment when they fought back, opening fire on their murderers. German regulars were seen running in panicked retreat from the ghetto's streets, terrified by the sight and the specter of Jews fighting back'Jews with guns. The impossible had happened; the myth of Nazi invincibility had been shattered.
The German force returned that April under the command of the SS General Jurgen Stroop. Determined to estore order"" over those propagandistically described as nothing more than ""a bunch of terrorists,"" Stroop decided to present Hitler with a gift by launching a final ghetto assault on April 19, the day before the Fuhrer's birthday. The significance of the day was not lost on the trapped Jewish partisans as they looked to mark their own commemoration on that, the first day of Passover.
The Jews of Warsaw learned on the evening of April 18 that plans for their destruction were about to be put into effect. The commander of the Jewish resistance, Mordecai Anielewicz, issued the order for all those unable to fight to take shelter in bunkers constructed for the purpose.
Backed by artillery, a well-armed German force of 2,100 entered the ghetto the next morning. An estimated force of 1,200 men and women, starting with only 17 rifles, maybe 500 pistols, some grenades and petrol bombs, met their would-be killers head up in a door-to-door, building-to-building fight to the death that lasted, not one or two days as expected by the Nazi command, but well into mid-May. While a few who were able to escape through the sewers survived to tell the story, those remaining met death by summary execution, flamethrower, poison gas or the martyr's suicide. The resistance came to a halt only when the entire ghetto, every structure, was razed.
Dubbed ""terrorists"" by their oppressors, the out-gunned partisans went to their often fiery graves with the Yiddish slogan of the united resistance on their lips, ""Nict vorgebben! Nict vorgessen!"" Never forgive! Never forget!
Those fighters did not die in vain. Not lost on those who understood the meaning, their slogan became a rallying cry, a battle cry for many who stepped up to join the universal fight against oppression and racism, against fascism in all its vile, ultra-nationalist forms. The history and significance, the origin of that slogan, the memory of those who fought against all odds rather than die enslaved behind Warsaw's ghetto walls 59 years ago, should not be lost to anyone struggling for peace with justice today.
