The burning of the Warsaw Ghetto

On Thursday 22 April 1943 a red glow visible from all over the city hung over the northern district of Warsaw. Three days after the ghetto uprising broke out on the eve of Passover, SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop stopped storming one centre of resistance after another and began burning the ghetto block by block. The fire was meant to drive people out of their hiding places and deprive the fighters of positions that could not be taken without losses. People jumped from burning buildings straight into the Germans’ gunsights, died in the flames or suffocated in cellars. Even so, the fighting did not end. It merely changed its character: from the defence of streets and gateways it turned into several weeks of scattered resistance from bunkers, cellars and ruins.

After three days of fighting

The Germans had entered the ghetto on 19 April to deport its last inhabitants – by their reckoning several tens of thousands of people – within a few days. After the January self-defence hardly anyone reported voluntarily to the Umschlagplatz. On the first day fire from fighters of the Jewish Combat Organisation on Nalewki Street and at the corner of Zamenhofa and Gęsia Streets forced the Germans to retreat, while on Muranowski Square (PL) the Jewish Military Union held out. That same day Stroop replaced the previous commander of the operation and brought into the ghetto a light gun, armoured cars, sappers and flamethrowers.

On 20 and 21 April the fighting took place above all in the brushmakers’ workshop, a complex of workshops bounded by Świętojerska (PL), Wałowa, Franciszkańska and Bonifraterska Streets, defended by ŻOB fighters under Marek Edelman, and around Miła Street and Muranowski Square. The Germans were taking losses, and an operation meant to last three days was dragging on. At the same time thousands of workers were being taken from the Többens and Schultz workshops to labour camps in the Lublin region, and people who had not reported to the Umschlagplatz were being dragged out of cellars and shelters. Stroop reported daily on the number of Jews “seized”, but he also knew that most of the inhabitants had not come out of hiding.

Fire instead of assault

The Germans set fire to the first blocks of buildings as early as 20 and 21 April, when they failed to take the brushmakers’ workshop. From 22 April fire became the main method of the whole operation. Water, electricity and gas in the ghetto had already been cut off. SS and police units would enter a block and search it, and if they met resistance or could not find the people in hiding, they set it alight – with flamethrowers, petrol bombs and bundles of straw in the stairwells. Wehrmacht sappers blew up cellars and bunkers. Smoke candles were thrown into the sewers, through which some people tried to escape or move between blocks, and the manholes and outlets were walled up or blown in.

The best-known description of these scenes comes from the perpetrator himself. In his daily report of 22 April (some editions attribute the passage to the report of the previous day), Stroop wrote that setting fire to a block had brought the Jews hiding under the roofs and in the cellars to the windows and outer walls of the buildings during the night: “In masses – whole families – the Jews, already engulfed in flames, jumped from the windows or tried to let themselves down on sheets tied together. Care was taken that these and the other Jews were liquidated at once.” In the same report he complained that some of the “bandits and Jews” could not be caught in the sewers, because flooding them had failed and smoke candles and creosote had had no effect. Photographs from these days, captioned by the Germans “smoking out Jews and bandits”, went into the album attached to the later Stroop Report.

On 23 April Heinrich Himmler, dissatisfied with the pace of the operation, passed on through the Higher SS and Police Leader in Kraków an order that the “combing out” of the ghetto be completed “with the greatest severity and relentless tenacity”. Stroop later wrote in his final report that in response he decided to destroy the entire district by setting fire to every block, including the buildings attached to the armaments works. He also repeated that it was not unusual for people to stay in burning buildings until the last moment and then throw mattresses into the street and jump from the upper floors, only to crawl with broken bones to buildings that were not yet on fire. Years later Marek Edelman said that the fighters had been defeated by the flames, not by the Germans.

The end of the fighting on Muranowski Square

The Jewish Military Union held out longest in open battle. The organisation, linked to the Revisionist movement and Betar and commanded by Paweł Frenkel, had its headquarters and arms store in the building at 7/9 Muranowska Street (PL). From the first day of the uprising two flags flew over one of the buildings on Muranowski Square: the Polish flag and a blue-and-white one. They were visible from the “Aryan” side, and for many Varsovians they became a sign that a real battle was being fought in the ghetto. According to accounts collected after the war, the Germans took them down only after several days of fighting, and Stroop is said to have recounted later how much importance he had attached to removing them.

On 22 April a group of ŻZW fighters made its way to Muranowski Square from the burning brushmakers’ workshop. Soon, however, under fire and amid burning buildings, the Union ceased to defend the square. Its fighters left the ghetto through an underground passage from the Muranowska Street area to the “Aryan” side or fought their way out in smaller groups. Some were killed in the fighting in the ghetto and by its walls. A group that tried to reach the forests near Otwock was discovered by the Germans in Michalin and mostly wiped out. Frenkel and a dozen or so of his men hid in a flat on Grzybowska Street. There, betrayed to the Germans, they were killed fighting – according to the most commonly given version, in June 1943.

The history of the ŻZW is the least well documented part of the uprising. Almost none of its members survived the war, and after 1945 many legends grew up around the Union: of dozens of Polish soldiers fighting on Muranowski Square, of tunnels through which large consignments of weapons were supposed to have flowed, of commanders whose existence cannot be confirmed. The historians Dariusz Libionka and Laurence Weinbaum have shown that many of these stories, including the figure of “Dawid Apfelbaum”, are later fabrications. What is certain is that the ŻZW fought fiercely during the first days of the uprising, that its resistance on Muranowski Square was among the heaviest clashes in the ghetto, and that after 22 April it practically ceased to exist as an organised armed force in the ghetto. Estimates of its strength vary widely, usually between 150 and 400 people.

Fighting from the bunkers

The Jewish Combat Organisation could no longer defend the streets either. Its groups, with their commander Mordechai Anielewicz, went down into the bunkers that the ghetto’s inhabitants had prepared in the summer and winter: cellars with hidden entrances, supplied with water, food and sometimes electricity. From there the fighters went out on night sorties, attacked German patrols and moved between blocks through attics, holes in walls and ruins. Their main centre was on Miła and Franciszkańska Streets. Alongside them tens of thousands of civilians hid in the bunkers, many of whom also resisted when the Germans discovered their hiding places.

On 23 April Anielewicz wrote to Yitzhak Zuckerman, the ŻOB’s representative on the “Aryan” side, a letter that became the most frequently quoted document of the uprising. He wrote that something had happened that surpassed the fighters’ boldest dreams, that the Germans had twice fled the ghetto, and that the last wish of his life had been fulfilled: Jewish self-defence had become a fact. He had no illusions about the outcome of the struggle and asked for help in saving those who would survive. On the same day the ŻOB issued an appeal to the people of Warsaw, distributed on the other side of the wall. It began with the words “Poles, citizens, soldiers of Freedom!” and ended with the slogan “For our freedom and yours”.

Also on 23 April Stroop cancelled all existing passes to the ghetto. Anyone found without a new permit in the area of the “former Jewish residential district” was to be shot. The streets around the walls became a front-line zone.

Beyond the wall

The Polish underground knew of the uprising from its first hours. As early as 19 April a Home Army unit under Captain Józef Pszenny (“Chwacki”) tried unsuccessfully to blow a hole in the ghetto wall on Bonifraterska Street. On 23 April a group under Major Jerzy Lewiński made an unsuccessful attempt to breach the wall at the corner of Okopowa and Pawia Streets. After that the Warsaw Kedyw (the Home Army’s sabotage and diversion command) changed its method: according to its report for April, from 24 April its patrols fired daily on German posts by the ghetto, inflicting losses on “several” Germans each day. The communist People’s Guard carried out its own actions by the walls. All these operations were minor compared with Stroop’s forces and could not change the outcome of the fighting. The Home Army had earlier passed only a small quantity of weapons into the ghetto, and the dispute over whether the underground could have done more continues to this day.

For most of Warsaw’s inhabitants the uprising was a spectacle watched from beyond the wall. People gathered in the streets and on balconies, looked at the smoke and listened to the shooting. Reactions varied: from sympathy, admiration and help for escapees – given among others by the Council to Aid Jews, “Żegota” – to indifference, and also blackmail and denunciation by the szmalcownicy (blackmailers who preyed on Jews in hiding). Part of the Polish underground press wrote of the fighters’ heroism; part kept its distance.

25 April 1943 was Easter Sunday. On Krasiński Square, right by the wall of the burning ghetto, a fairground merry-go-round was turning. This scene – laughter and music on one side, fire and screams on the other – was described that same year by Czesław Miłosz in the poem “Campo di Fiori”, which compares it with the crowd in Rome that watched Giordano Bruno burn at the stake and then went back to its business. The poem circulated in clandestine publications and became one of the most important Polish texts about the Holocaust. More than forty years later Jan Błoński made it the starting point of his celebrated essay “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto (PL)” (1987), which opened a debate in Poland about attitudes towards the Holocaust.

In the ghetto itself Easter changed nothing. In his report of 25 April Stroop wrote that if the previous night a glow had hung over the former ghetto, that evening “an enormous sea of flames” could be seen. According to him, the number of people dragged out of hiding and deported had passed 27,000. People were led out of the bunkers poisoned by smoke, stunned by explosions, often already unconscious. Many were shot on the spot; the rest were driven to the Umschlagplatz.

Where the transports went

Trains from the Umschlagplatz were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp, to Majdanek and to the labour camps at Trawniki and Poniatowa, to which the Többens and Schultz workshops had been moved since February. According to Stroop’s final report, 6,929 people were sent to Treblinka. Most of those who ended up in the camps of the Lublin region lived only until November 1943: on 3 and 4 November, in Operation Harvest Festival (Aktion Erntefest), the Germans shot about 42,000 Jews at Majdanek, Trawniki and Poniatowa.

The last weeks

The claim that after 22 April only a handful were still fighting is true only of the ŻZW and of open battle in the streets. ŻOB fighters and armed civilians in the bunkers resisted for almost three more weeks, and individual groups for much longer. On 8 May the Germans discovered the bunker under the building at 18 Miła Street, where the ŻOB command was sheltering. After gas was pumped in, about a hundred fighters died there, in combat or by their own hand, among them Mordechai Anielewicz. On 10 May several dozen survivors, including Marek Edelman and Zivia Lubetkin, were led through the sewers to Prosta Street, from where a lorry took them to the forests near Łomianki. The evacuation was organised by Simcha Rotem (“Kazik”) with the help of Polish sewer workers.

On 12 May Szmul Zygielbojm, the Bund’s representative on the National Council of the Polish government-in-exile, took his own life in London – the same man who a year earlier had publicised in the West the Bund Report on the extermination of Polish Jews. In his farewell letters he wrote that he could not live and remain silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry were being murdered, and that his death was to be a protest against the world’s passivity. Among the dashed hopes was the Bermuda Conference, which, in the very days when the ghetto was burning, ended without any decisions capable of bringing real help to the Jews of occupied Europe.

At 8.15 p.m. on 16 May Stroop personally blew up the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street, which stood outside the ghetto boundaries. With this symbolic act he ended the “Grossaktion” and reported: “Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr!” (“The Jewish residential district in Warsaw no longer exists!”). In his final report he stated that 56,065 Jews had been “seized”, of whom about 7,000 had been killed within the ghetto and 6,929 sent to Treblinka. A further 5,000–6,000 were said to have died in explosions and fires. He put his own losses at 16 killed and several dozen wounded. Historians regard both figures as unreliable: Israel Gutman, himself a participant in the uprising, estimated that in April there were at most about 40,000 people in the ghetto, and German losses were probably higher than stated. The Germans went on demolishing the ruins of the district for many months, and in the summer of 1943 they set up on part of the site the KL Warschau concentration camp, known as Gęsiówka.

Its place in the war

The burning of the Warsaw Ghetto was one of the last acts in the liquidation of the great ghettos of the General Government, following the liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto in March 1943. In the spring and summer of that year the Germans liquidated further ghettos, among them those in Białystok and Lwów. In August the Jews of the Białystok Ghetto resisted, and prisoners rose in revolt at Treblinka (2 August) and Sobibór (14 October). The example of Warsaw was well known to those who took part. The choice of fire as a method showed that the aim was no longer even to deport people to the camps, but the physical annihilation of the entire district together with those inhabitants who could not be dragged out of their hiding places.

The uprising had no chance of victory, and no one in the ghetto expected one. It is regarded as the first urban uprising in occupied Europe and the largest armed Jewish revolt of the Holocaust: a few hundred poorly armed fighters and thousands of civilians in hiding resisted Stroop’s forces for almost four weeks. Thanks to Stroop’s own report, which after the war served as evidence at the Nuremberg trial, and to the accounts of survivors, the world learned what those days had been like. The fire of 22 April 1943 turned the ghetto into a sea of rubble, but the struggle fought there became an enduring symbol of Jewish resistance and one of the reference points of Polish and Jewish memory of the war.