The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on April 19, 1943, when German forces entered the ghetto to begin the final liquidation. What they expected to be a routine operation -- rounding up the remaining 30,000 Jews and deporting them to camps -- became instead the largest single act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. And at the center of it was a 23-year-old man named Mordechai Anielewicz.
Anielewicz was born in 1919 in Węgrów, Poland, the son of a Hebrew teacher. He was a member of Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist Zionist youth movement, and he had been organizing Jewish self-defense groups in Warsaw since 1939. When the Nazis created the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940 -- sealing 450,000 Jews into an area less than 1.3 square miles -- Anielewicz had already been planning for the confrontation he knew was coming.
On April 19, 1943, when the Germans entered the ghetto with tanks and infantry, Anielewicz commanded approximately 750 fighters armed with pistols, smuggled rifles, and homemade explosives. The Germans, who expected no resistance, suffered heavy casualties in the first days of the assault. The fighters used the ghetto's narrow streets, rooftops, and the extensive tunnel system beneath the streets to conduct guerrilla warfare. They held out for nearly a month.
Anielewicz's last message, written on May 8, 1943, to Yitzhak Zuckerman, his friend and deputy who had escaped the ghetto before the final days, is one of the most haunting documents of the Holocaust: "I have been witness to the magnificent defiance of the Jewish fighters. The dream of my life has come true. I have lived to see Jewish resistance in the ghetto in all its greatness and glory." Anielewicz and approximately 100 fighters were trapped in the command bunker at 18 Mila Street when it was discovered and burned by the Germans. He was 23 years old.
But the story of Anielewicz's world did not end with his death. It continued in the person of thousands of survivors who carried his memory with them. And one of the most remarkable of those survivors was a woman named Paula Szpringer, who had been in the bunker with Anielewicz on May 8, had somehow escaped before the final fire, survived the war, and lived to the age of 87. In interviews conducted in the 1990s, she described Anielewicz as "the bravest man I ever knew, and the most calm. Even at the end, when the bunker was burning, he was calm."