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—— ON THIS DAY ——
MAY 16, 1943
Warsaw, Nazi-occupied Poland
83 years ago
The Stroop Report — the most famous single photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Jewish residents of the ghetto, hands raised, being led away by armed SS soldiers. The boy in the center has never been identified.
On April 19, 1943, approximately 750 Jewish fighters — armed with handguns, rifles, homemade bombs, and a handful of machine guns obtained through the Polish resistance — launched an uprising against the German deportation of the remaining residents of the Warsaw Ghetto. The SS had expected to clear the ghetto in three days. The uprising lasted twenty-eight days. On May 16, 1943, SS General Jürgen Stroop declared the ghetto pacified and detonated the Great Synagogue of Warsaw as a symbolic close to the operation.
The Warsaw Ghetto had once held 400,000 Jews. The mass deportations to Treblinka in the summer and fall of 1942 had reduced that number to approximately 55,000. The survivors had received word of what was happening at Treblinka. When the SS arrived for the final deportation on April 19 — Passover — they were met by fighters who had spent months preparing fortified bunkers and stockpiling whatever weapons they could obtain. The Germans were driven back. They did not expect resistance. They had never expected resistance.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Another image from the Stroop Report — SS troops escort ghetto residents following the final suppression of the uprising, May 1943.
The uprising was led by Mordecai Anielewicz, twenty-three years old, who commanded the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB). The fighters knew they could not win militarily against the SS; their goal was to die on their own terms, fighting, rather than on the Germans' terms, in a gas chamber. Anielewicz died in his bunker at Mila 18 on May 8; most of the surviving fighters escaped through the sewer system. The last resistance was suppressed on May 16.
Stroop compiled a detailed report on the suppression of the uprising — illustrated with photographs taken by his soldiers — which was bound in leather and presented to Heinrich Himmler as a trophy. The report, titled 'There Is No Longer a Jewish Warsaw,' documented the operation in meticulous bureaucratic detail. It was used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Stroop was executed in 1951. The photographs he collected — including the image of the boy with his hands raised — became among the most reproduced images of the Holocaust.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of the founding acts of Israeli national identity and a touchstone of Jewish memory of the Holocaust worldwide. Its significance is as much symbolic as military: it demonstrated that resistance was possible even in the most extreme conditions of Nazi oppression. Yad Vashem — Israel's Holocaust memorial and museum — was established in part to honor the memory of the uprising. April 19 is observed as Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising refuted the postwar caricature of Jewish passivity in the face of genocide. The fighters knew they could not win militarily. They chose to fight anyway, to die with dignity and on their own terms. The uprising was the largest act of Jewish armed resistance during the Holocaust, and far from the only one.
The Stroop Report is one of the most revealing self-incriminating documents produced by the Nazi regime. Compiled by the man who suppressed the uprising as a trophy for Himmler, it preserved the evidence of its own atrocities in meticulous detail. The reports submitted by perpetrators to their superiors have proven invaluable in establishing the historical record and the legal record at Nuremberg.
The anonymous boy in the Stroop Report photograph has become one of the most recognizable faces of the Holocaust. Researchers have spent decades trying to identify him. His name has never been definitively established. He represents, without a name, every child of the Warsaw Ghetto.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On May 16, 1943, the SS detonated a synagogue in Warsaw to mark the end of the largest Jewish armed uprising of the Holocaust. The uprising had lasted twenty-eight days. The fighters knew from the beginning they could not win. They fought anyway. The photograph their enemy took is one of the defining images of the twentieth century.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts. I have been a witness to the magnificent, heroic fighting of Jewish men in battle."
— Mordecai Anielewicz, commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in his last letter, written from the bunker at Mila 18, May 1943
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Mordecai Anielewicz and the Jewish Combat Organization, the Stroop Report, and the place of the uprising in the history of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust?
