Ukraine, A Nation At War Becoming a Military Power

"Ukraine is now capable of striking Crimea, threatening Russian supply lines."

"Ukraine is fighting. Ukraine is still suffering. Russian missiles have so long hit civilian targets that it is no longer even remarked that such were once recognized as war crimes."

"More sobering, while Ukraine fights on, it is not evident how the war might end. It is entirely possible that Ukraine may not lose, but still not win definitively."

Fr. Raymond J. De Souza, National Post 

Ukrainian infantry soldier in Donetsk trench. Reuters

 

When Russia first fully invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, Poland received almost two million fleeing Ukrainians. No refugee camps resulted. The Poles welcomed the refugees into their homes. A million such Ukrainian refugees are still left in Poland, sheltering themselves from constant Russian bombardment of missiles and drones over Ukraine's cities in the Kremlin's direct targeting of civilian populations, a noted war crime. 

 

More recently, a revival of Polish right-wing populism has arisen and with it hostility to Ukraine, shifting to viewing Russia's Vladimir Putin with a measure of tolerance. Memories are not dead in Poland to the reality of Ukrainian World War II alliances with Hitler's death squads, helpfully assisting in the murder of Poles and Jews through the auspices of the Waffen SS, where an SS battalion of Ukrainian volunteers was formed, during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. 

 

Nachtigall Battalion in 1941

Ukrainian auxiliaries were involved in the murder of Ukraine's Jews. Some of their leaders are still heralded as war heroes in Ukraine to the present day. Poles were their victims as well, while the Soviet military eventually became their liberators from the Nazi extermination project. Russia's President Putin has used that history to explain his full-scale invasion of Ukraine; 'liberating' it from the neo-Nazis still presumably governing the country from Kyiv.

 

Even the Trump administration's soft spot for Putin expressed by President Donald J. Trump has had its influence, which  tended to view Ukraine with suspicion and Russia with a degree of admiration. There has been a levelling off of President Trump's expressed fondness for President Putin now that Ukraine's resolute self-defence has finally put Russia's plans on the back foot. No one appears to have realized that the Russian territorial grab of 2014 when it annexed Crimea and incited rebellion in the Donbas would lead to a full-scale invasion.

 

February 28, 2026 joint strikes by U.S./Israel on Tehran, Iran.  Reuters

 

Ukraine now is recognized as an Eastern Europe military power, producing its own armaments even while it continues to rely on military aid from Europe and North America. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been welcomed as an adviser for the Gulf countries under attack by Iran in response to the U.S.-Israel 2026 aerial attacks. Ukraine's formidable counteroffensive while producing millions of advanced drones, has enabled it to hit Russian targets from Moscow right up to Siberia. 

 

Ukraine's fervent wish to become a member of NATO will be realized, post-war. There have been errors in judgement made by President Zelenskyy and he has been brought up short by public anger over them, as when his appointed defence minister and the chief of the Ukrainian military were at loggerheads, the former opting for a new approach in meeting the enemy, the latter wedded to the tried-and-true conventional responses with conventional weaponry. 

 

When given an ultimatum to make a choice, the president fired his popular defence minister only to face days of demonstrations by furious Ukrainians, forcing him to reverse his decision. And the war goes on.

 

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy meets with Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine. Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via REUTERS

 

Answering the Call to Patriotic Duty : World War II

Eva Konopacki . Ashley Fraser/Postmedia

"At my age, you remember  your younger years better than the present. My memories from that time [1944] are quite sharp."

"We were waiting for that day because our underground activities were all directed to that moment, when we throw out the Germans. I was Polish, and everyone was taking risks. Everyone was engaged, it was a national thing."

"The [commanding] officer thought it's so dangerous that he cannot order anyone to do it [make personal contact with trapped/besieged soldiers]. I knew this place very well. I was restless. I liked action so I just said, 'I'll go'."

"Death became our close companion."

"War, it marks you for life. But, when you put your life on the scale, you can be proud of that."

Eva Poninska Konopacki, 94, Ottawa resident, retired schoolteacher

This is a woman who has seen a lot, had unusual experiences at a time of high danger and stress, when survival was never assured, who chose to do her part to help her country surmount the most dreadful existential difficulties at a time of war and occupation. She emigrated to Canada ten years after her courageous participation in a peoples' struggle to free itself from German occupation during World War Two, moving to Montreal from Trinidad, where she lived for several years, teaching high school.

In Canada, she met her husband, Thaddeus Konopacki, himself a decorated veteran of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, whom she hadn't known in Poland, but found in Canada, post-war. While her husband was a professional architect, Eva Konopacki was a professional teacher. The couple had four daughters, whom their mother chose to raise as a housewife and mother. She returned to the teaching profession eventually and spent two decades teaching high school at the Ottawa Catholic School Board, while simultaneously mounting a career as an artist.

In 1944 however, as an 18-year-old she was herself a high school student, and simultaneously a soldier in the Polish Home Army -- the largest underground resistance movement in the country. An uprising against German occupying forces was launched on August 1, 1944 on instructions from the Polish government-in-exile, just as the Soviet Red Army was in the process of advancing toward Warsaw and the German military meant to stop their advance at the Vistula River on the outskirts of Warsaw.

Polish slave labour had been used to build defensive fortifications there, and it was the intention of the Warsaw Uprising to deny that opportunity to the Germans, and to impede the arrival of the Russians intending to bring communism under Soviet rule to Poland. The Home Army boasted 50,000 trained insurgents who were able to capture much of Warsaw in the first three days of the uprising, but in the end were no match for the reinforcements brought in by the German military even as planes and artillery units bombarded their positions backed by tanks and heavy machine guns, enabling the German forces to regain territory.

The Polish resistance dug trenches connecting buildings, and erected barricades against tank incursions while Russian forces restricted themselves to the Vistula River, prepared to wait out the insurgency against the German positions before involving themselves. While the Russians -- at that time part of the Allied response to the Axis forces they were once aligned with -- failed to offer air or ground support while fighting raged within Warsaw, the Allies themselves launched an airlift re-supplying the Polish resistance forces.

Based in Italy, the British-led Warsaw Airlift failed, as a reflection of the small payloads and the inaccuracy of the drop sites, where the aircraft flew long distances with no fighter support making the supply planes vulnerable to attack, resulting in over 300 Allied airmen perishing in the effort, Canadians included. For the resistance fighters, food and ammunition became scarce and the city was left without water or electricity. So many phone lines were damaged that Eva Konopacki's commanding officer decided on a course to use couriers in communication with other fighting units.

As a volunteer, Konopacki travelled through the war-torn city delivering messages, serving as a guide on nighttime missions to ammunition depots. Resistance fighters were using a fortified convent as a bulwark against German forces. By later September the convent came under assault, and an artillery shell collapsed a portion of the building and the communication line was severed. Eva Konopacki volunteered her services so that under fire she crawled through a tench to reach the convent's entrance, a gap in the foundation.

Eva Poninska Konopacki . Konopacki family photo

Within she found many dead and wounded soldiers. Returning to her commander she reported on the need for medical supplies and ammunition, and was again sent to deliver the message to those left in the convent to retreat. When she made her way back, she discovered what was left of the compound smoke-filled and silent. "I realized there was no one there". They had already retreated. She ventured toward another building adjacent, to discover two wounded soldiers in an abandoned coal cellar. Finding a stretcher and a nurse, they managed between them to evacuate the men to safety.

Eventually, the Home Army had no option but to surrender, laying down their arms on October 2. "We were terribly depressed, devastated", she recalled. Later, she was recognized for her part during the resistance and uprising, receiving the Silver Order of the Virtuiti Militari for "valour in the face of the enemy", induction. Up to 200,000 people were estimated to have died during the two-month uprising, most of them civilians. The city's 650,000 inhabitants were evicted and the Germans levelled what remained of Warsaw. By January 1945 the Soviets took possession of the empty ruins.

Single-Sex Notoriety in a Tiny Polish Town

"Some scientists have expressed interest in examining why only girls have been born here."
"I also have doctors calling me from all over the country with tips on how to conceive a boy."
"And if that [a diet rich in calcium] doesn't work, there is always the tried way of the Polish highlanders; if you want a boy, keep an axe under your marital bed."
"There has been so much talk about us in the media that for a minute there I was considering naming a street after the next boy born here."
"He will definitely get a very nice gift. And we will plant an oak and name it after him."
Rajmund Frischko, mayor, Cisek, Miejsce Odrzanskie, Poland

Miejsce Odrzanskie in Poland has seen 12 daughters born in the last nine years but no sons.  Credit: Kasia Strek/NYTNS / Redux / eyevine

The village of Miejsce Odrzanskie has a population of 272 people. The population has declined considerably, given that after World War Two there were 1,200 people living there. It is an agricultural village, a farming community where there is little doubt boys are valued to fill the traditional role of potential workers around the farm, though girls too are certainly capable of farmwork. The village is located  in the least populated province in the country.

And it is home to a strange anomaly where it has been ten years since a boy was born in the village overlooking the Oder River in southern Poland. However, in the years following, since the last baby boy was brought into the village, there were a dozen births, none of which were boys, all girls.  Poland itself became acquainted with the oddity when a local journalist realized that at a recent regional competition for young volunteer firefighters, the entire village team was comprised of girls.



That peculiarity was first locally, then regionally and finally saw publication in the national arena. A town where the fire brigade has 24 young women and eight men, while the youngest team of volunteers is comprised only of girls. Ever since, Mayor Zydziak has fielded inquiries coming from all directions, leaving him with the impression that the matter had become "a little crazy and out of hand". Just recently, four separate television crews appeared in the town with one road in and out, and 96 houses.

A retired doctor from central Poland had recently contacted the mayor, happy to offer a solution to the town's puzzling lack of boy babies. The doctor left Mayor Zydziak with the edifying scientific solution to the matter, informing him that a baby's sex was dependent on the type of diet a woman consumed while carrying. To give birth to a boy, a woman's diet must be high in calcium.

"It has been going on for several decades. I came to the village, took a local girl for my wife and we had two daughters. I would like to have a son but it's probably unrealistic."
"My neighbor also tried and has two daughters. I don't think women give birth to boys here."
Tomasz Golasz, head, volunteer fire brigade

"[The village’s mostly female youth fire brigade is hugely adept at winning competitions and making a big splash]. These girls live and breathe it."
"There is so much passion and determination. For two months before every competition, they come to train every day or every other day after school."
Village firefighter Tomasz Golasz

Meldujemy sie w Wieruszowie na I Międzynarodowej a II Ogólnopolskiej Olimpiadzie Dziecięcych Drużyn Pożarniczych

Threat to a Primeval Forest

"The bark beetle has been a part of the ecosystem for hundreds of years."
"This phenomenon is a natural adaptation to the new climate situation."
"All the time, there is a worry that they will start logging again."
Adam Bohdan, biologist, Wild Poland Foundation

"Poland will respect the verdict [of the EU’s highest court ruling in 2018 that logging in the UNESCO-protected Białowieża forest, permitted by the Polish government, is illegal]."
"The Białowieża forest is our national heritage. All the activities have been undertaken with its preservation in the best possible condition for present and future generations in mind."
Henryk Kowalczyk, Poland's environment minister

"Białowieża has beautiful powers to regenerate itself – if it is left alone."
"If you plant new trees in logged parts of the natural forest, you risk turning it into a managed wood, and we have more than enough of those in Poland."
Kasia Jagiełło, Greenpeace, Poland

"This is a huge victory for all defenders of Białowieża forest."
"Hundreds of people were heavily engaged in saving this unique, ancient woodland from unthinkable destruction."
James Thornton, chief executive, green law firm ClientEarth

The ECJ has ruled that Poland’s decision to allow logging in the primeval Białowieża forest is illegal. Photograph: Wojtek Radwanski/AFP/Getty Images

In Poland's Bialowieza woodland, about 1,425 square kilometers in size, extending into Belarus, the sound of Polish nobility and royalty calling to hounds once rang through the forest as they hunted the animals that still inhabit the area. Bison herds were reintroduced in the wake of the last one hunted in 1919. Now, the forest is the habitat of Europe's largest bison herd, an animal the Poles call 'wisent'.

In this natural setting, hundreds of bird species make their home, and the ambiance is filled with their distinctive songs.

The forest is treasured for its wild state, as the home of thousands of ancient trees, one of Europe's last remaining primeval forests. It is linked to an ecosystem fairly untouched from the time pf the last Ice Age, when glaciers receded, over ten thousand years ago. A year ago, the European Court of Justice ordered that logging in the forest come to an end, as a clear threat to the forest, deemed a United Nations World Heritage site.

Heavy machinery used by loggers to cut down thousands of the forest's ancient trees have left gaping spaces in the forest canopy. And on the forest floor, tracks of the logging equipment left their signature deep gouges, scarring the forest, the palpable signature of logging operations where none should have been permitted.

But loggers were given clear permission to proceed with logging by the country's governing Law and Justice party which chose to ignore the EU order to cease and desist initially, but changed tack when it faced a fine of about $124,000 (100,000 euros) for each day the directive was violated. Environmentalists are concerned now that Warsaw plans to increase the wood quota for hundreds of square kilometers outside the boundaries of the forest.

The forest is home to Europe's largest herd of nearly extinct bison   AFP

The protected part of the Bialowieza woodland had been left intact, unlike many of the Continent's other ancient forests, many of which were razed. Others of their kind were transformed into cultivated versions of the ancient forests they once were, to reflect intense control, imposing on the old growth forests that failed to be protected, a neat, nursery-like presence, quite unlike their natural state.

In its natural state, the forest floor is strewn with fallen trees, common to a climax forest, which enriches the humus of the forest floor by gradual decomposition where thousands of species of insects and fungi do their work, feeding on rotting foliage and branches to help ultimately produce new life from the nutrients absorbed by the forest floor, to nurture new growth.

"There is more life in a dead spruce than a living one", commented Rafal Kowalczyk, head of the Mammal Research Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences, recently touring Bialowieza Forest.



The latest pretext for government to once again permit logging in the ancient forest preserve, is the presence of the hairy little bark beetle. The male beetle bores into the spruce trees, and a chamber is created. When the male mates with several females, they deposit dozens of eggs in the chamber where the resulting larvae feed on the vascular tissue of the tree, which often dies.

An increase of the presence of the beetles has been brought about by climate change, with warmer winters failing to destroy many of the beetles, as occurred in the past. The infestation was seen to be devastating large tree tracts in the forest. Many environmental scientists felt the best course of action would be to allow nature to take its course.

The Polish government, however, ordered a large-scale logging campaign in 2016. New logging orders in the heritage forest impelled thousands of protesters to descend on the forest to form human blockades in hopes of stopping the logging machinery. The protests failed to convince the government of Poland to cease logging operations.

Only when the European Union stepped in to use its legal heft on a member state of the EU did the government back down, responding to threats of financial penalties should the logging not cease. Nature has stepped in as she always does, replacing new life in the absence of the oldt. The problem with the bark beetles is relevant enough, yet no easy solutions have presented themselves.

Author: Frédéric Demeuse

A Jewish festival in a town without Jews

By David Mazower BBC World Service

Of the 50,000 citizens in the Polish town of Kutno, not one is Jewish - yet it staged perhaps the most impressive concert of Jewish music I've ever heard. 

The performers were all children from schools in the town, the youngest no more than six or seven.
They belted out old hits in Yiddish and Hebrew with a fluency and stage presence that few adult performers could match.

The concert was the finale of an ambitious festival of Jewish culture that the town has held since 1993.

So why does it happen? The short answer is that my great-grandfather was born there.
There's a long answer too, but we'll come on to that.

My great-grandfather, Sholem Asch, was born in Kutno in 1880 in a one-storey wooden house teeming with children, and a yard full of livestock that his father traded.

He moved to Warsaw, then Paris and New York, and became one of the most famous Jewish writers of the 1920s and 30s. 

He left Kutno far behind, but the Jewish community he grew up in - with its beggars, traders, butchers, rabbis, prostitutes and assorted schemers and dreamers - all found a kind of immortality in his stories and plays.

That world was swept away in World War Two.
Kutno's experience was typical. In one day the entire Jewish community - 8,000 people - was marched at gunpoint to the grounds of a deserted factory at the edge of town.

They spent two years in filthy, overcrowded conditions, with many dying of disease, hunger and cold, before being murdered in gas vans at Chelmno death camp.

  

When the war ended, Kutno, like so many other towns and cities across Poland, essentially started over again, learning to function without its Jewish tailors, shoemakers, lawyers and merchants.
A town with a hole at its heart.

Asch's play God Of Vengeance, set in a brothel in Poland, is being performed in Yiddish in Warsaw

Polish attitudes to the country's Jewish past are complex. There's plenty of lingering anti-Semitism, a kind of kitsch theme park nostalgia, pride in Poles who saved Jews during the war, and guilt about those who collaborated.

To complicate the picture further, there is a deep-rooted conviction that Poles themselves are victims of a turbulent history.
But even that's not the whole story.

Sholem Asch (left), with the Russian writer Maxim Gorky in Moscow in the 1920s

Something else has emerged in the last 20 years: a growing number of Poles who feel profound loss about the Jewish nation that vanished from their midst.
I came across some of them strolling in Warsaw's vast Jewish cemetery.

They were buying brightly-coloured memorial lanterns to place on graves of people they had no personal connection with, but wanted to honour and remember.

As I stood in front of the large mausoleum to Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, a giant of Yiddish literature, I noticed a glamorous young couple peering at it.

She had thigh-high leather boots, bright red lipstick, an elegant cape.
He had cheekbones to rival Rudolf Nureyev, a natty silk scarf and a trendy beret.
"Do you know who's buried here?" I asked.

"We're Polish - so of course we know about Peretz," they said. "We just can't read the Yiddish words on the tomb."

That deep respect for a vanished culture has also resulted in a world-class museum that's just opened in the heart of Warsaw's former Jewish quarter.

A beautiful shimmering glass structure, it tells the bittersweet story of the Jews' long love affair with Poland with clear-eyed honesty and real flair.

Those same feelings of curiosity, loss and kinship led a handful of people in Kutno to start up a Jewish festival as Poland emerged from communism in the early 1990s.

As private cafes and general stores began to open up, the town announced its first Sholem Asch Festival, a sign that Kutno was looking west, and engaging with European culture.
The town has come a long way since then.

A reconstruction of a wooden synagogue in the new museum

Its new business park is attracting American, German and Chinese companies, and provides jobs for 6,000 locals.

The Sholem Asch Festival has also come a long way. It includes a literary competition on a Jewish theme that attracts hundreds of entries from all over Poland.

There's a local Jewish dance band, theatre performances, and new translations of my great-grandfather's works into Polish.

Poland's rediscovery of its Jewish past started in Warsaw and Krakow, places where Jewish communities re-emerged as the war ended.

It's now spread far beyond the big cities and is growing year by year.
It might not be a mass movement, but as Kutno shows, it's more than just a token effort.

And in a world where bitter sectarian conflicts grab most of the headlines, a Jewish festival in a town with no Jews is surely something worth celebrating.

 
More from the Magazine

David Mazower remembers more of his family including his cousin Paul. The family patriarch had given all his 10 children an identical watch. Nine of the watches disappeared over time. But at the age of 20, Paul had torn the inner cover off his watch and hidden it inside a window sill in his home in the Polish city of Lodz, before he was deported. He returned as a liberated survivor, persuaded the new occupants of his home to let him in, and retrieved the sliver of metal from its hiding place.

Restoring Spinal Cord Functionality

"We have now opened the door to a treatment of spinal cord injury that will get patients out of wheelchairs. Our goal now is to develop this first procedure to a point where it an be rolled out as a worldwide general approach."
"The observed wisdom is that the central nervous system cannot regenerate damaged connections. I've never believed that. What we're doing is repairing the motorway."
"This [procedure] opens the door, which I had always been knocking at -- to see that our nervous system has the ability to repair itself. This is the beginning of repair for spinal injuries -- including stroke."
"The idea that the nervous system can repair itself in rats and in one man -- there's no reason to restrict this to just the spinal cord. It opens the door to a future which is terrifyingly large. We've climbed two mountains and we are now at the foot of the (next) mountain. We have knowledge which could be of great value, we can't stop now."
Geoff Raisman, chairman, neural regeneration, University College London, Institute of Neurology, U.K. research team

"More work needs to be done. Proper trials are needed to really assess the efficacy of this and it hasn't been done. So, we shouldn't overhype it."
Dr. Wolfram Tetzlaff, director, International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries, University of British Columbia research centre

"This particular case showed practical results for one person and hopefully it moves to further trials so we can learn whether this technique holds promise to help others."
Rick Hansen, CEO, founder Rick Hansen Foundation/Rick Hansen Institute

Darek Fidyka has been able to walk again after receiving pioneering treatment which has repaired his severed spine. He is believed to be the first person in the world to recover from such chronic injuries

Darek Fidyka, 40, a Bulgarian fireman who was stabbed in the back, has been paralyzed from the chest down, since 2010. University College London doctors developed a procedure whose technique revolves around the use of olfactory ensheathing cells to be placed in the spinal cord, as a promising remedy for his injury. As the result of surgery he has undergone, his completely severed spinal cord has given indications of restorative function.

This man has been effectively turned from a paraplegic to someone whose future capability for independent locomotion looks promising. The technique, its implementation and the study that followed offers hope to the tens of thousands and more of people who each year suffer severe spinal cord injury that forever changes their lives, turning them into complete physical invalids, their body functions impacted beyond recovery.

Dr. Raisman, leader of the research team, discovered that the cells he used were capable of treating spinal injuries in rats, back in 1997. The procedure permits nerve cells endowing people with their sense of smell to grow anew when they are damaged. The resulting procedure, injecting those cells into Mr. Fidyka's spinal cord, took place in Poland, at the hands of surgeons attempting the technique for the very first time.

To prepare for the treatment, Mr. Fidyka had to undergo brain surgery to remove an olfactory bulb, responsible for the sense of smell. The bulb was placed for two weeks within a cell culture so that olfactory cells would be produced. Those cells were then injected into Mr. Fidyka's spinal cord together with four strips of nerve tissue harvested from his ankle.



The strips were responsible for forming a framework enabling the spinal nerve fibres to grow across it with the aid of the cells. This resulted, three months post-surgery, in Mr. Fidyka's left thigh muscle growing. When six months had elapsed, with the help of a physiotherapist and leg braces, Mr. Fidyka was starting to walk within the rehabilitation centre. There was improvement in his bladder sensation and sexual function.

The research study was published in the Cell Transplantation journal. The process had been funded by the UK Stem Cell Foundation and the Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation. University College London plans further patient studies, along with Wroclaw University Hospital.  Mr. Fidyka, who can now walk with the use of a walker stated from: "It's as if  you were born again", so clearly he sees the procedure as a life-saver.

But not everyone is quite so impressed. Dr. Tetzlaff, with a University of B.C. research centre specializing in spinal cord injury sounded a skeptical note when he said that people should not leap too enthusiastically to read too much into the new treatment which he does not recognize as yet as a real breakthrough. He points out that the patient, though having gained some movement capability, still cannot walk unaided.

He does concede, however, that the new treatment has the potential for incremental improvement to help those with catastrophic spinal cord injuries gain some renewal of motor skills. In Canada alone, it is estimated that 85,000 people are afflicted with spinal cord injuries, with an additional 4,300 new cases appearing every year, mostly due to sports or automobile mishaps.

Nazi Death Chambers

"The discovery of the gas chambers at Sobibor is a very important finding in Holocaust research. It is important to understand that there were no survivors from among the Jews who worked in the area of the gas chambers."
"Therefore, these findings are all that is left of those murdered there, and they open a window onto the day-to-day suffering of these people."
"The discovery of the exact location of the gas chambers at the Sobibior Camp is a discovery of the utmost importance in Holocaust research."
"Finding the exact size of the gas chambers will enable us to understand what their capacity was and from there we can determine a more precise estimation of the number of people killed at the Sobibor Camp."
Dr. David Silberklang, historian, senior researcher, Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust research

Sobibor death camp. (photo credit:REUTERS)

"We found earrings, gold wedding rings and a ring with the inscription, 'with this ring you are consecrated to me', in Hebrew letters."
"We also found a large Magen David [Star of David] and a coin dated 1927 from Palestine."
Yoram Haimi, archaeologist

"He used to wear a white coat to give the impression he was a physician."
"[He] announced to the Jews that they would be sent to work. But before this they would have to take baths and undergo disinfection ... After the Jews had entered the gas chambers, the Ukrainians closed the doors, the motor was switched on ... and after the gassing, the doors were opened and the corpses were removed."
former German officer giving testimony

"The extermination of people took place there; murder by smoke from an engine that killed everyone within 15 minutes in these gas chambers, in torment, shouting." 
"[Nazis bred geese there to drown out the cries from the gas chambers.]"
Polish archaeologist Wojciech Mazurek, involved in the excavation of Sobibor

Sobibor death camp was established by the Nazis during World War Two close to the village of Sobibor and its railway station in the eastern part of Poland, close by the Chelm-Wlodawa railway line, one of 16 forced labour camps established in the Lublin district; its purpose was to 'process' Jews. The camp was comprised of three integral portions: administration, barracks and gas chambers.

The chambers were brick buildings where carbon monoxide gas was released from fixtures in the ceiling to asphyxiate anyone who entered them, and many did. It is estimated that a quarter-million Jews were murdered at Sobibor. Not quite as efficient an operation as the more famous Auschwitz with its use of Zyklon B, but amazingly efficient, given that in little more than a space of a year a quarter-million Jews were killed there.

• 
  An eight-year archaeological dig has recently revealed the location of gas chambers under a road 

  at the Sobibor death camp, the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust research said this week. The Nazis forced Jewish slave laborers to build the camp, and then shot them dead when it was complete.  

  Reuters

When Jews arrived at the camp, they were greeted with the presence of a man wearing a white coat, according to the Holocaust Education and Archive Research Team relying on the testimony of a former Nazi German officer. A road that was mordantly named Himmelfahrsstrasse, [Road to Heaven], led to the gas chambers. People were persuaded that they were meant to enter the brick chambers for completely innocuous reasons, to shower. The shower heads they saw above in the ceilings emitted deadly gas, not cleansing water.

A quarter of a million men, women and children, were cleansed of life. The camp itself was not a large one, meant for transit dispatch; from life to death. Seventy years after its last use, the camp has been found, buried under an asphalt road. Beneath that road was discovered well-preserved gas chamber walls. The brick rows, stacked four-deep represented the exoskeleton of the four gas chambers promising a solution to the Nazi dilemma of slaughtering all the Jews they could round up, in occupied Europe.

An uprising on October 14, 1943, devised by a Jewish Soviet prisoner of war, Alexander Pechersky was mounted, with a plan to exact whatever vengeance escaping prisoners could manage: to kill as many Nazi guards as they possibly could, while in the process of escape. Several guards were killed, and hundreds of prisoners fled into the nearby woods, many tracked down and killed, but some managed to escape. The incident, however, led to the closing of the camp.

Of the 600 prisoners who made the attempt to escape their terrible fate at the hands of the Nazis, between one hundred and one-hundred and twenty survived. Of that number 60 survived the war. After the revolt in the camp, SS chief Henrich Himmler ordered that the camp be closed, and the Nazis made an effort to extinguish any sign that the camp had ever existed. The grounds were covered over, a farm put in place, trees and asphalt covering its former presence.

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.