THE WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING

On October 12 1940, only one year since the beginning of the Holocaust, the German army made 300,000 Jews move into the Warsaw Ghetto, a space where only 251,000 people had lived beforehand. The ghetto took up 2.4 % of the city’s land, and held 30 percent of the city’s population. The reason for this, of course, was Adolf Hitler. A few years before, Hitler became the leader of a political party known as the German Workers Party, or the Nazi party as the name was soon changed to. He and his allies eventually forced themselves to the top of the German government. This happened shortly after World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, so the German community was enraged and struggling because of the new rules put upon them by the treaty. Hitler noticed that the Germans were angry and had no way to vent their anger, so he decided to blame the Jews. He blamed them for the debt and economic struggle the Germans were having, he blamed them for not helping in the fight of World War I and he blamed them for the loss of World War I. This brought upon a great change in Germany and the countries around it and all the change was at the cost of the Jews. One of these changes was the moving all Jews into Ghettos, small towns blocked of by high cement walls and barbed wire. There were way too many people to fit in these Ghettos, and there was an abundance of disease and starvation all over, but nobody did anything, except the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

            Starting June 1942, the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had started being transported to the Treblinka death camp, where they were killed in gas chambers upon arrival. Eventually, word of the mass murder got back to the Warsaw Ghetto and a resistance organization called the Z.O.B. (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa) was formed to prevent any more deportations from the ghetto. A similar party known as the Z.Z.W. (Zidowski Zwiazek Woskowy) was made by the Revisionist party shortly after, and they soon joined forces to try to combat the thousands of Jews getting deported each month. In January 1943 the two forces resisted the next wave up for deportation. The rebels fired on the Germans as they tried to load the Jews into railroad cars to be transported to the killing center, and successfully made the Germans retreat after four days of fighting. They then began to prepare themselves for later engagements. Although in the long run the Germans took back the ghetto and killed all pockets of resistance one building at a time, they prolonged the life of many Jews, and made one of the very few circumstances where the Jews fought back against the German army. This was a brief history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.