The first armed resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto

At half past seven on the morning of Monday 18 January 1943, units of the German police and SS entered the Warsaw Ghetto to deport several thousand people to Treblinka. Six months earlier, during the Great Deportation, such an entry had meant an obedient march to the Umschlagplatz for tens of thousands of Jews. This time things turned out differently. Most of the inhabitants hid in shelters prepared in advance, and at the corner of Niska and Zamenhofa streets a group of fighters of the Jewish Combat Organisation (ŻOB), led by Mordechai Anielewicz, opened fire on the escort of a column being driven to the loading square. It was the first organised armed resistance in the ghetto. The fighting and round-ups lasted four days; on 21 January the Germans called off the action and withdrew beyond the walls.

These events went down in history as the January action (also known as the “second liquidation action”) and, from the perspective of the Jewish fighters, as the “January self-defence”. Popular chronologies, including English-language ones, call 18 January the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. That is a simplification: the January clashes were the first armed action and a harbinger of the uprising, but the uprising itself broke out three months later, on 19 April 1943, when the Germans set about the final liquidation of the ghetto.

The ghetto after the Great Deportation

The ghetto, which the Germans had established in the autumn of 1940 and sealed in mid-November that year, was the largest in occupied Europe. In the summer of 1942, between 22 July and 21 September, at least 253,742 people were deported from it to the Treblinka extermination camp, and thousands more were killed on the spot. According to official figures, fewer than 36,000 registered workers remained, to whom must be added, by estimates, 20,000–25,000 “wild” people – those living in the ghetto without a residence permit. The district was cut down to a “central ghetto” around Miła, Zamenhofa and Gęsia streets and a few separate areas belonging to German enterprises, the so-called shops, in which Jews worked in return for ration cards.

In the autumn a fragile stability set in. The Germans announced that the “resettlement” was over, tolerated smuggling and the presence of “illegals”, and even allowed a new hospital to open on Gęsia Street. Few, however, believed it was the end. The Great Deportation had dispelled all illusions: it was now known that those deported were being killed. Anyone who could fled to the “Aryan side” or built hiding places in cellars and attics – something that, paradoxically, was helped by German permission to build air-raid shelters. The ghetto was now dominated by young people, often alone, who had lost their families. Among them grew a desire for revenge and the conviction that passivity no longer offered any chance of survival.

The underground unites

The Jewish Combat Organisation was founded on 28 July 1942, in the first week of the Great Deportation, on the initiative of the Zionist youth movements Hashomer Hatzair, Dror (PL) and Akiva. In the summer it was able to do almost nothing: it had a few pistols, and in September the Germans arrested or killed some of its leaders and seized its meagre arsenal. In the autumn the organisation was rebuilt. At the end of October, after long negotiations, it was joined by representatives of the Bund, Gordonia, Hanoar Hatzioni, both factions of Poale Zion and the communist Polish Workers’ Party (PPR). Political authority was assumed by the Jewish National Committee (PL), with which the Bund cooperated through a Coordinating Commission. Statutes were adopted on the night of 1 to 2 December 1942.

The commander of ŻOB was the 23-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz of Hashomer Hatzair. During the Great Deportation he had been in the Dąbrowa Basin organising self-defence groups, and he had not experienced the despondency that overcame many surviving Warsaw activists. His deputy was Yitzhak Zuckerman of Dror, and the command also included Hersz Berliński (Left Poale Zion), a representative of the Bund (in time Marek Edelman), Yochanan Morgenstern (Right Poale Zion) and Michał Rozenfeld (PPR). The liaison with the Polish underground was Arie Wilner (Izrael Chaim Wilner). By the end of 1942 ŻOB had, by estimates, at least 600 members, organised in several dozen combat groups.

The organisation adopted two aims: to defend the population against the next deportation and to punish collaborators. On 29 October 1942 its fighters shot Jakub Lejkin, the hated deputy commander of the Jewish Order Service (the ghetto police), on Gęsia Street, and on 29 November Izrael First, an official of the Judenrat and a Gestapo informer. The ŻOB leaders assumed that the Germans would not react as long as they themselves were not attacked.

At the same time a second armed organisation emerged, linked to the Revisionist Zionists and their youth movement Betar: the Jewish Military Organisation, renamed in January 1943 the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW). It was led by Paweł Frenkel and Leon Rodal. Talks on merging with ŻOB came to nothing: the two were divided by ideology, pre-war quarrels, and the questions of leadership and weapons. The two organisations did, however, agree on rules of cooperation.

The hardest problem was arms. On 11 November 1942 the commander of the Home Army (AK), General Stefan Rowecki (“Grot”), recognised the declaration of the Jewish National Committee and promised help with training and arms supplies. In December ŻOB received its first ten pistols from the AK, in poor condition and with little ammunition. Some weapons had been supplied earlier by the communist People’s Guard; the rest were bought on the “Aryan side” for enormous sums.

Himmler’s visit

The fate of what remained of the ghetto depended on the plans of the SS, which in the autumn of 1942 wanted to take full control of Jewish labour in the General Government and move it, together with the machinery, to its own enterprises in the Lublin region. On 9 January 1943 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler carried out an inspection in Warsaw and drove through the deserted streets of the ghetto. He was irritated to learn that some 40,000 Jews were still living there, many of them illegally, and that private German firms, led by Walther Többens’s large shop, were still producing for the Wehrmacht in the ghetto. The SS and Police Leader for the Warsaw District, SS-Oberführer Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg, promised the immediate deportation of 8,000 “illegals” to Treblinka.

In a letter to the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, sent – depending on the source – the same day or on 11 January, Himmler expressed his astonishment that his orders concerning the Jews were not being carried out, announced the deportation of 8,000 ghetto inhabitants “in the coming days” and ordered the shops and their workers to be moved to the Lublin region. He set 15 February 1943 as the date for the liquidation of the ghetto.

The opportunity soon came. From 15 to 17 January the SS and police carried out large street round-ups in Warsaw, in which more than ten thousand Poles were detained. Sammern-Frankenegg made use of the additional forces brought into the city. Polish underground sources spoke of 200 German policemen and 800 collaborators from Lithuanian and Latvian units supported by light tanks; the historian Israel Gutman considered these figures exaggerated. Among those assigned to the action was Theodor van Eupen, commandant of the Treblinka I penal labour camp.

From the beginning of January rumours of a new “resettlement” had been circulating in the ghetto. The underground knew that the Germans liked to begin their actions on Mondays and was particularly vigilant on those days. The round-ups on the Polish side, however, lulled this caution: many concluded that the Germans were busy elsewhere.

18 January

At 6.30 a.m. on Monday 18 January the placówkarze – labourers who went out to work beyond the walls – were stopped at the gates. At around 7.30 the Germans entered the ghetto and began surrounding buildings, as during the Great Deportation. This time few people obeyed the orders to assemble in the courtyards. People went down into shelters and hiding places, and many workers did not report to the shops. Even so, on the first day the Germans seized some 3,000 people: outside workers and those caught in the streets and in their flats.

ŻOB was taken by surprise. Most of the fighters were not quartered together, communications failed, and Edelman later recalled that of some 50 combat groups only five managed to go into action on their own initiative. Anielewicz made the decision to attack himself, without consulting the Committee or the command. Together with a group of comrades from Hashomer Hatzair who lived at 61 Miła Street, he mingled with a column being led to the Umschlagplatz. According to accounts, the fighters had a few pistols and grenades; the rest were crowbars and clubs. When the column reached the junction of Niska and Zamenhofa, at an agreed signal they opened fire on the escort. In the confusion several dozen people managed to escape. The Germans quickly returned fire and killed most of the attackers; three or four survived, among them Anielewicz, who reached the gateway of a nearby building and was hidden in a shelter. In reprisal the Germans set the building on fire.

There were clashes elsewhere as well. When the Germans entered the building at 58 Zamenhofa Street, members of Dror and Gordonia who lived there, under Zuckerman’s command, attacked them with pistols, grenades, crowbars and sulphuric acid; they killed or wounded two Germans and forced the rest to flee. Groups led by Eliezer Geller (PL) and Wilner fought at, among other places, 40 Zamenhofa, 34 Miła and 22 Franciszkańska, and in the area of the Schultz shop a group under Israel Kanal put up resistance. It is not certain whether ŻZW fighters joined the fighting in an organised way; some studies credit them with taking part in the clashes, while others find no evidence of it.

Four days

From the second day ŻOB avoided open combat, confining itself to ambushes and attempts to disarm individual soldiers and policemen. The Germans, surprised by the resistance, stopped venturing into attics and cellars, which made the round-ups less effective. At the same time they became even more brutal. In the streets they seized whoever they could, including people with valid work certificates; at least nine members of the Judenrat were shot or deported. Several dozen Bund members from Baruch Pelc’s group were killed at the Umschlagplatz after refusing to board the wagons; according to Edelman, van Eupen shot them himself. The hospital on Gęsia Street was surrounded on the very first morning: more than 300 patients, many of them suffering from typhus, were deported to Treblinka together with most of the staff, while the bedridden and newborn babies were shot in their beds. On 20 January the action was extended to the shop areas, though the workers of enterprises important to the Wehrmacht suffered relatively little. On 21 January, in revenge for their losses, the Germans shot dozens of people in the streets.

Unlike in the summer, the Germans this time made almost no use of the Jewish police, of whom few were left; its members were used at most as guides or human shields. After four days, considering their task accomplished, the Germans withdrew beyond the walls.

The toll

The exact figures are not known. According to Barbara Engelking, no more than 5,000 people were deported to Treblinka, and 1,171 were shot within the ghetto. Israel Gutman put the total number of those deported and killed at 4,500–5,000, citing among other things Polish reports that the Germans filled only half of the wagons provided. Other historians give 6,000 or 6,500 deported; the latter figure is also cited in the Stroop Report. The highest estimate, about 10,000 victims, including some 1,000 killed on the spot, was recorded by Emanuel Ringelblum. Among those murdered were members of the Oyneg Shabes archive: the social activist Yitzhak Giterman, the writer Gustawa Jarecka with her children, and very probably the teacher Abraham Lewin (PL), author of one of the most important diaries of the ghetto.

The fighters’ losses were heavy; Edelman estimated that ŻOB lost most of its original membership. How many Germans were killed is not known, as Sammern-Frankenegg probably did not report his losses to his superiors. The Polish underground press and Ringelblum wrote of several dozen dead, which is most likely an exaggeration; Barbara Engelking estimates German losses at about a dozen killed.

A turning point in the ghetto

The Germans’ aim had not been the complete liquidation of the ghetto but the deportation of 8,000 “illegals”, and they achieved it only in part. In the ghetto and on the “Aryan side”, however, it was widely believed that the fighters had forced the Germans to retreat. This psychological breakthrough was the most important result of the January days: it turned out that resistance, both armed and passive, was possible and could save lives. Zuckerman later wrote that “the January uprising made the outbreak of the April uprising possible”. The ghetto poet Władysław Szlengel described these events in his poem “Counterattack” (“Kontratak”).

From then on ŻOB held de facto power in the district. The decimated Judenrat confined itself to food supply, and its chairman, Marek Lichtenbaum, admitted to the Germans that he no longer had any influence over the population. Just over 80 men remained in the Jewish police. The Germans entered the ghetto rarely and only by day. Anielewicz’s authority became unquestioned, and ŻOB, until then, in Gutman’s words, a “loose federation of factions”, was transformed into a cohesive organisation. The command drew lessons from the street defeats: it was decided to fight from buildings, passages were knocked through between cellars and attics, and the fighters were permanently quartered together. The organisation raised money, including through compulsory “contributions” from the wealthy, bought weapons and eliminated informers. The ghetto population built bunkers with even greater zeal. By estimates, several thousand people – perhaps around 7,500 – escaped to the “Aryan side” between January and April.

The attitude of the Polish underground changed too. The fighting in the ghetto was widely reported in the clandestine press, from the AK’s Biuletyn Informacyjny to the papers of the socialists, the peasant movement and the communists, often with exaggeration. General Rowecki, until then sceptical about arming the Jews, agreed to a further delivery: at the end of January 50 pistols with ammunition, grenades and materials for incendiary bottles were smuggled into the ghetto. There is much to suggest that this was the last delivery of such size from AK stores; afterwards the Polish underground helped mainly with purchases of arms.

Place in the war

The January self-defence was the first armed resistance in the largest ghetto in occupied Europe. It was not the first such action anywhere: in the summer of 1942 Jews had taken up arms or set fire to their ghettos in, among other places, Nieśwież and Łachwa, in the former eastern lands of the Polish Republic. Warsaw, however, gave resistance an entirely different scale and resonance. It came a month after the Allies had publicly condemned the extermination of the Jews in their declaration of 17 December 1942, and in the weeks when the German Sixth Army was dying at Stalingrad. For the inhabitants of the ghetto, none of these events meant rescue.

The Germans did not abandon their plan. On 1 February 1943 the SS took over the Többens enterprises, and later Schultz’s as well, and on 16 February Himmler ordered the workers to be moved to camps in the Lublin region and the ghetto to be razed to the ground. Most Jews refused to leave voluntarily for Trawniki and Poniatowa, and ŻOB set fire to warehouses earmarked for removal. On 19 April 1943, on the eve of Passover, the Germans entered the ghetto to liquidate it once and for all. They met the prepared resistance of ŻOB and ŻZW. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which Jürgen Stroop took almost four weeks to suppress, burning building after building, became a symbol of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Its commander, Mordechai Anielewicz, died on 8 May 1943 in the bunker at 18 Miła Street. It was January that taught the fighters and the inhabitants of the ghetto that the Germans could be stopped, and that ensured that in April hardly anyone went to the Umschlagplatz of their own accord.