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THE WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING WASN’T ALWAYS CELEBRATED  
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Joseph Mogul
April 19, 2025
Jacobin
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_ The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began 82 years ago today, is now
hailed as a bold act of Jewish resistance against the Nazis. But at
the time, many Poles watched — or cheered — as the ghetto burned.
The parallels with Gaza are hard to ignore. _

Polish Jews captured by Germans during the suppression of the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising., Wikimedia Commons

 

During the months of April and May 1943, a celebratory atmosphere took
hold outside the Warsaw Ghetto’s walls. Children whirled around
carousels, giddy crowds converged to holler at the explosive
spectacle, and friends watched the pyrotechnics show from front-row
rooftops. One onlooker described the streets of Warsaw as a
“never-ending parade.”

 

Within the Ghetto walls, cries were not of laughter and wonder but of
terror and anguish. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — the largest
Jewish-led armed resistance to the Holocaust — prompted Nazi
occupiers in Warsaw to raze the entire urban area. The open-air prison
where 450,000 Jewish people had once dwelled suddenly ceased to exist.

Today the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is universally commended in Poland
and around the world as a bold act of resistance, but this was far
from the case when it occurred. In the streets of Warsaw, many
non-Jewish Poles rejoiced as their neighbors burned.

On the eighty-second anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,
another population is burning. Israel’s ongoing genocide has
devastated Gaza, damaging or destroying over 90 percent of its
housing, displacing nearly two million
[[link removed].] Palestinians,
and killing over sixty thousand
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including around eighteen thousand children. Israelis have
mostly expressed support [[link removed]] for
this calamity in a rhetorical landscape shockingly reminiscent of
Warsaw 1943.

For many Jews, including descendants of Holocaust survivors like
myself, it is agonizing that this violence is committed under the
false pretext of Jewish safety. Some have forgotten the lessons of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The Uprising

In October 1940, about one year after invading Poland, Nazi Germany
established a ghetto in the Jewish sector of Warsaw, erecting an
eighteen-kilometer wall to separate Jewish from Catholic Poles. Within
the walls, Jews suffered from starvation rations, deteriorating
sanitation infrastructure, and squalid living conditions. Between 1940
and 1942, eighty-three thousand died of starvation and disease.

In July 1942, the Nazis ramped up the pace of genocide, relocating
265,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp over
the course of three months. When people in the Ghetto discovered that
“relocation” was a euphemism for murder, Jewish militants, many of
whom belonged to socialist political organizations
[[link removed]],
founded the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) to coordinate an armed
resistance.

A second round of deportations, begun on April 19, 1943, the day
before Passover, sparked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Approximately 650
Jewish fighters, most of whom were untrained, staged their defense
against over two thousand Nazi soldiers backed by tanks and heavy
artillery. On the first day of the uprising, insurgents pelted two
Nazi tanks with Molotov cocktails, successfully destroying one of
them. The uprising, which leveraged guerrilla tactics to strike
unexpecting Nazi forces with grenades and pistol fire before
retreating to hideouts, lasted twenty-seven days.

The Nazis responded by razing the entire Warsaw Ghetto, destroying
buildings block by block until there was nowhere left for fighters to
coordinate their resistance. By May 16, 1943, with the bombing of the
Great Synagogue, every building in the Jewish sector of Warsaw had
been destroyed, and all captives were deported to death camps.

When not regarded with indifference, the destruction of the ghetto was
considered a spectacle for onlookers to enjoy.

Today the city of Warsaw is strewn with plaques and monuments to the
Holocaust. Preserved fragments of the ghetto wall mark the boundaries
where it once stood; the POLIN Museum tells the thousand-year history
of Polish Jews; and a commemorative grave marks the exact location
where uprising commanders took their own lives, refusing to die at the
hands of their enemies. The countless memorials scattered across
Warsaw today celebrate the uprising, but the Polish reaction to the
Jewish resistance when it occurred was distinct.

A Sinister Spectacle

Firsthand accounts collected
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a POLIN Museum exhibit titled _Around Us a Sea of Fire_, many of
which come from Jewish Poles hiding outside the Ghetto, piece together
a vivid picture of how non-Jewish Warsaw reacted to the Nazis quelling
the uprising. Overwhelmingly, at least in public, the destruction of
the Warsaw Ghetto, when not regarded with indifference, was considered
a spectacle for onlookers to enjoy.

Henryk Rudnicki, witnessing the destruction of the Ghetto, wrote,

The first thing to catch my attention were the merry-go-rounds, jammed
with people. Yes, the carousels were spinning round in the thick
clouds of smoke from the tenement houses burning next to them. Few
metres away people are being burnt alive, but the show must go on. The
crowds, bubbling with excitement, rushed from all corners of the city
to watch the burning quarter.

Part of this attitude was apathy toward the suffering of Jews.
Aleksandra Sołowiejczyk-Guter, a Jewish woman hiding in Warsaw, wrote
in her diary that “the vast majority responded to the fighting in
the ghetto as if they were responding to a struggle of a faraway,
unknown tribe on another hemisphere.” Perhaps this false sense of
distance came from a sense of relief that it wasn’t they who were
targeted. But attributing the celebratory atmosphere to mere apathy is
insufficient. Sołowiejczyk-Guter writes, “Alas, there were some
Poles who, having hitherto resented the Jews for allowing themselves
to be led like lambs to slaughter, now resented them for defending
themselves.”

 

This resentment revealed itself in the form of antisemitic disdain,
which was present in prewar Polish society
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frequently expressed by the Roman Catholic Church and Polish
nationalists.

Bluma Altmed, a Polish Jew disguised as a Gentile outside the ghetto,
recalled a conversation with a Catholic woman who was upset with
Jewish resistance fighters for disturbing her sleep: “I have a
constant headache because I can’t sleep in such conditions. All
night long, I hear machine guns. . . . The explosions and shootings
never end. What are those Yids thinking, anyway? They have to die, one
way or the other. The least they could do is to give up.”

The streets were rife with familiar antisemitic tropes. Emanuel
Ringleblum, who founded a clandestine organization in the Warsaw
Ghetto that provided a meticulous record of events in German-occupied
Poland, documented public statements like “Little Yids are burning
alive, but Big Yids are in power in America and they will rule us once
the war has ended” and “Jews have been sucking our blood.”
Prominent among these stereotypes were the comparisons of Jews to bed
bugs, vermin, rats, and cannibals.

Not everybody reacted with such vitriol. Many non-Jewish Poles
privately expressed empathy for Jews in the Ghetto. Some families even
took great risk in helping Jews escape the ghetto and hide in the
non-Jewish sector of Warsaw. Later in the war, Jewish survivors and
non-Jewish Poles joined forces in a subsequent citywide uprising
against the Nazis. But at the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,
solidarity and compassion were mostly contained to the privacy of
homes. In the streets, dehumanization reigned supreme.

Decades of Dehumanization

As Israel continues its onslaught on Gaza, indiscriminately killing
men, women, and children, many are appalled by the indifference or
support from Israeli society. An October 2024 poll 
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Israeli Jews either think the war in Gaza should continue or feel
indifferent. Among those who think the war should end, only 6 percent
cite “great cost in human life” as the primary motivator; instead,
the majority are concerned with the twenty-four remaining Israeli
hostages in Gaza. Furthermore, despite ample documentation of war
crimes and the International Criminal Court’s issuing of a warrant
for the arrest of Israel’s top leaders, 83 percent of Israeli Jews
believe the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has conducted itself with
“good or excellent ethical conduct during the war.”

Many non-Jewish Poles privately expressed empathy for Jews in the
Ghetto.

The attitudes reflected in this poll have been expressed by Israeli
leaders, soldiers, journalists, and citizens. Former Israeli defense
minister Yoav Gallant — who was eventually fired for being too
moderate — declared Israel that was “fighting human animals” in
announcing a complete siege on Gaza. IDF soldiers have posted videos
of themselves on social media celebrating the destruction of Gaza,
mocking Palestinian captives. Avi Rabina
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with the Jerusalem-based show Radio Kol-Chai, tweeted, “Erase Gaza!
Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza!” Erytan
Weinstein
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of the longest standing Israeli podcast broadcasted in English, said,
“If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living
being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in
a second.” At the annual Jerusalem Day march
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crowds erupted chanting, “Death to Arabs! May your village burn!”

 

Just as antisemitism existed in Polish society before the Holocaust,
anti-Palestinian dehumanization is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, it
goes back to the very founding of Israel. During the 1947–48 Nakba,
Zionist leaders manipulated trauma from the Holocaust by comparing
their Palestinian adversaries to Nazis. This instilled the idea that
Palestinians defending their homes were motivated by a wicked
antisemitic hatred, thereby justifying their ethnic cleansing. In
1969, former prime minister Golda Meir, regarded by many as a liberal
Israeli hero, declared, “There was no such thing as Palestinians.”
As Israel bombed Gaza in 2014, Israelis gathered in the border town of
Sderot to celebrate the spectacle
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Locals and visitors from Tel Aviv pulled out lawn chairs and couches,
clinked beers, and took selfies with the backdrop of Gaza on fire —
an updated version of festivities from Warsaw.

As in Poland in 1943, attitudes are not monolithic in Israeli society.
Some Israelis refuse mandatory military conscription
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subjecting themselves to prison sentences. Activists
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illegal settlements in the West Bank. Recent rallies
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Tel Aviv garnered crowds of hundreds demanding an immediate
cease-fire. These acts should not be diminished, but they are not
representative of a society that overwhelmingly supports the
subjugation of Palestinians.

Of course, the circumstances that underlie these attitudes are
distinct from those in Warsaw in 1943. For one, Israel is the result
of a decades-long colonial project that dispossessed Palestinians of
their land, whereas no equivalent colonial history was perpetrated by
Poland. Palestinian resistance to this colonialism has at times
inflicted violence against Israelis, including on October 7, 2023,
when Hamas fighters killed 1,181 people, among them 736 Israeli
civilians. (At least fourteen Israelis were also killed by the IDF’s
use of the Hannibal Directive
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Conversely, Jewish resistance during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was
against Germans soldiers, not Catholic Poles, who were most often
onlookers. Poles also suffered at the hands of the Nazis, facing
deportations to concentration camps and brutal bombing campaigns, and
many supported Jewish resistance to the German occupation forces.

Some might argue that the dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli
society stems from a legitimate fear of violent retaliation and thus
cannot be compared to Warsaw 1943. It is true that the antisemitism
outside of the burning ghetto was generally rooted in conspiratorial
tropes resembling _The Protocols of the Elders of Zion _rather than
any threat that Jews posed to Gentile Poles_. _However, Israeli
political leaders, now and historically, also distort reality
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manufacture fear and hatred toward Palestinians. As Israel’s
response to the Great March of Return at the Gaza border in 2018–19
shows, even peaceful Palestinian protest is met with devastating
Israeli violence and public demonization
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What Will We Remember?

It is tempting to believe that the memorials to the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising represent an idealized arc of history that bends toward
justice. But while the official Polish narrative does indeed honor the
uprising as a bold and principled act of resistance, it also shirks
the responsibility of Polish society for the atrocities of the
Holocaust. Missing from the narrative is the elation of the
“never-ending parade,” the Poles who blackmailed
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Ghetto, and those who collaborated directly with the Nazis.

When Polish historian Barbara Endelking curated the POLIN exhibit
exploring common Polish attitudes to the uprising, she was met with
tremendous backlash. In 2023, the Institute of National Remembrance,
the Polish institution responsible for overseeing Holocaust memorials
in Warsaw, published an open letter
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Endelking for statements she made on television about Polish-Jewish
relations. This letter followed a 2018 law
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Polish Parliament that criminalizes speech claiming that Poland was
complicit in the crimes of the Holocaust.

Memorials exist to shape the future. On the eighty-second anniversary
of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the ongoing genocide in Gaza reveals
that the world has failed to heed its lessons. When the dust settles
in Gaza, what will we remember?

JOSEPH MOGUL is an independent journalist and organizer currently
residing in Minneapolis.

JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
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* Genocide
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* Warsaw Ghetto uprising
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* Nazis
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* Poland
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* Gaza
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* History
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