Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Begins: Jews Fight Back Against the Nazis

German SS troops entered the Warsaw Ghetto on April 19, 1943, expecting to complete the final liquidation in three days. Instead, they walked into an ambush. Mordechai Anielewicz and roughly 750 Jewish fighters, armed with a handful of pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, opened fire from concealed positions in the buildings and bunkers of the ghetto. The Germans retreated in surprise. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest act of Jewish armed resistance during the Holocaust, had begun. The ghetto's population had already been reduced from 450,000 to roughly 50,000 through deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp, which had begun in July 1942. The remaining inhabitants, most of them young people who had survived the initial selections, knew that the deportations meant death. Reports from escapees had confirmed what the trains carried and where they went. The Jewish Combat Organization, known by its Polish acronym ZOB, had been organizing since the summer of 1942, acquiring weapons through the Polish underground at prices that reflected the desperation of the buyers. SS General Jurgen Stroop commanded the German operation, eventually deploying roughly 2,000 troops with tanks, artillery, and flamethrowers. When conventional tactics failed, Stroop ordered the ghetto burned building by building, systematically destroying the bunkers where fighters and civilians sheltered. The fighting continued for nearly a month, with Jewish resistance far outlasting the three days the Germans had planned. Stroop dynamited the Great Synagogue on May 16 and declared the ghetto pacified. An estimated 13,000 Jews died during the uprising, most burned alive in their bunkers or shot during the final days. Seven thousand survivors were sent to Treblinka. Anielewicz died in the command bunker on May 8, likely by suicide. The uprising did not save the ghetto or its people, but it shattered the image of Jewish passivity that the Nazis had cultivated and that postwar mythology sometimes reinforced. The fighters of the ZOB knew they could not win. They chose to die fighting rather than in gas chambers.