Please read Emeritus Professor of Education Henry Maitles article Human dignity and honour’: remembering the Warsaw Ghetto uprising
The Herald: April 21, 2025
‘Human Dignity and Honour’: remembering the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Henry Maitles, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of the West of Scotland
One month after the shameful meeting of the Israeli government sponsored far right gathering in Israel to ‘combat antisemitism’, an event that most Jews of all persuasions, considered grotesque, it is worth remembering that eighty-two years ago in April-May 1943 one of the most inspiring moments in world and Jewish history was unfolding. The Warsaw Ghetto Jewish Fighting Organisation (in Polish ZOB) announced to the world: ‘All of us will probably perish in the fight…it is a fight for our human dignity and honour, as well as yours’.
By Spring 1943, the massive overcrowding and drastic shortage of food, sanitation and medicines in the Warsaw Ghetto meant that there was a large death rate from disease and malnutrition. Nonetheless, the Jews were not dying fast enough and Nazis began clearing the residents to death camps; by early 1943, there were only some 60,000 left in the ghetto.
When the Nazis entered the ghetto in Spring 1943 for the final round up, ZOB resisted by force. ZOB was a mix of Zionist and Socialist organisations, with big differences in politics, their point of unity being that all Jews, regardless of their political outlook, would end in Auschwitz. ZOB was completely outnumbered and outgunned but held out against the German army for some 5 weeks. It tied down thousands of German troops, meaning they could neither be deployed in the war or used to hunt Jews. Goebbels (the Nazi propaganda chief) fumes in his diary about Jews fighting back and with captured German weapons! It was an inspiration understood by some of the leaders of the Polish resistance, one of whom commented that ‘the blood of the ghetto fighters was not shed in vain…it gave birth to an intensified struggle against the fascist invader’. By the middle of May, the Nazis decided to burn the ghetto to the ground to avoid further German casualties. Some survivors fled through the sewers; most were captured and killed.
The uprising was part of a radical Jewish tradition which included large numbers of young Jews joining left parties and antifascist groups, including the International Brigades to fight against fascism in Spain in the late 1930s; the cemetery and monument in Montjuic in Barcelona tells us that some 15% of the International Brigaders were Jewish (indeed 50% of the USA Abraham Lincoln Brigade), a hugely disproportionate number. This radical tradition preceded this and continued to the Ghetto. One of the great historical ironies is how a large proportion of the shock troops of the ethnic cleansing (Naqba) of the Palestinians in 1948 was carried out by this same tradition, recruited from the left kibbutz movement. Pre-world war 2 this tradition had been avowedly non Zionist. A mixture of the Holocaust and western immigration controls convinced many Jews that a homeland was necessary. The Palestinians became the victims of the Holocaust victims.
The ghetto fighters left us a universal message of humanism and hope in the face of barbarism. This is a message that we need to remember as we confront racism and fascism wherever and whenever it raises its head.
