Courage and Conviction

"We knew that the end would be the same for everyone. The thought of waging an uprising was dictated by our determination. We wanted to choose the kind of death we would die. But to this day I have doubts as to whether we had the right to carry out the uprising and shorten the lives of people by a day, a week, or two weeks. No one gave us that right and I have to live with my doubts."
Simha 'Kazik" Rotem, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising survivor

Without that act of selfless defiance, sacrificing lives that were already destined for certain death in a killing machine that was so malign and focused that it shared space, time and resources with a war being fought on a multitude of fronts, the dignity of European Jewry might never have been rescued from the too-readily-assumed notion that Jews were complacently accepting of their own annihilation.

People felt helpless and hopeless, herded into confined areas in an act of disconnection from society. They had already suffered the indignities and inhumanity of being forced away from non-Jewish enclaves, forced to surrender their aspirations for the future, their employment, their pride, their good names in the storm of propaganda and slander that besmirched their reputations. They stifled and feared under the designation of human detritus.

Abandoned, living in a solitude of desperation, starvation, ill-health and general privation, it is not difficult to lose confidence in who and what you represent. Not sub-human, but a people proud of their heritage and their great contributions to the world of human affairs through the arts and sciences, producing individuals whose rare genius served humanity not merely the Jews themselves, yet they were ostracized, reviled and ultimately slaughtered.

Facing the reality that the Warsaw Ghetto had already been drained of the majority of its inhabitants 70 years ago, shipped off in bulk on cattlecars to the death camps, what remained of the half-million Jews originally incarcerated there had among them 750 young and determined Jews who conspired among themselves to secure what few arms they could smuggle through underground connections into the ghetto, and to mount a last-moment insurrection.

They were defeated, as was inevitable, given the odds; the German military machine against a rag-tag group of would-be survivors of mass annihilation. But despite their defeat they restored a measure of pride that civilians plucked out of their lives of normalcy and portrayed as unworthy to share life with others in presumably civilized countries, could and would fight back, not go gently into that dark maw of planned death.

Jews historically demonstrated they could and would defend themselves, and those who took part in the ghetto uprising did just that. They knew that whoever remained yet in the ghetto was destined for death, themselves included. They had little to lose in making their last stand. And what they did inspired world Jewry to accept the mantra and the determination to never again permit themselves to be placed in a situation of existential extinguishment of the Jewish spirit, presence and right to life.

Poland, in steadfastly refusing to allow itself to be identified with the Nazi death machine, insisting that Auschwitz and other death camps be named German death camps, not Polish death camps, has come full circle in paying homage to the Jewish fighters who in their desperation to survive death rose against their oppressors. The ceremony taking place at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, led by Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski honoured those ghetto fighters.

Simha Rotem lived to tell the tale, and he lived to stand beside representatives from Poland, Israel and other countries in paying homage to him, and to the courage and determination of all those who fought for the survival of European Jews.