Commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 3 Women - by Camille Saunders
TW: violence, death and Holocaust denial
This week, on Wednesday 19th April, marked 80 years since the Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Nazi occupiers in Poland in 1943. Now in 2023, the German, Polish and Israeli heads of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Andrzej Duda and Isaac Herzog, met in Warsaw to commemorate the Holocaust and pledge to honour the memory of the victims forever. This move has its critics in those who accuse the men of using the trauma of the Holocaust as a pawn for international relations. However, here at Nous we would like to honour 3 women who have shaped the memorial, showing that even in the worst moments of history, and in the darkest places of humanity, there is always a glimmer of hope, no matter how impossible it seems.
At the peak of the ghetto’s overcrowding in 1941, there were 450,000 people imprisoned there, and the 50,000 who were left there in 1943 decided that if their fate was to die, they would do so fighting. They held off the Nazi soldiers and tanks for a month, after which everyone who wasn’t killed in the fighting were taken to concentration camps. However, some of the incredibly rare survivors are still alive today and maintaining the true history of the Holocaust and the ghetto uprising in the modern world.
Escaping over the barbed wire and enforced walls of the ghetto just 48 hours before the rebellion was Aliza Vitis-Shomron. She was aged just 15, and had been a messenger within the ghetto, passing leaflets and information among the inhabitants, and helping the resistance leaders communicate despite restrictions and curfews to stop them from interacting. In an interview with CNN[1], she said:
“We would spread the news to different parts of the ghetto. I would sometimes take leaflets of news and orders and would hide them under my clothes on my body so that the Germans wouldn’t catch me when they searched me. The messengers were not fighters but had a very important mission to complete. It was very dangerous, and we knew it,” she said.
She managed to escape with her mother and 10-year-old sister, and remembers seeing the red flames and black smoke rising above the ghetto walls as she watched from the outside, the colours of the Nazi flag hovering over the buildings where she knew thousands of innocent people, including her own father, were being brutally killed. Later in the war, all three of them were captured and taken to the Bergen-Belsen camp, but they survived long enough to be liberated by the US army after the war. Today, Vitis-Shomron speaks regularly at conferences about remembering the Holocaust, keeping in mind the last thing her friend and resistance leader told her the day she left Warsaw: that they needed someone to stay alive to pass on the story of their heroism. Ever loyal, she had stayed true to her word and continues her promise even now aged 95.
Much like Vitis-Shovrom, Halina Birenbaum has much to teach us about bravery and resistance. Having been arrested during the Warsaw ghetto uprising, her family was rounded up to be taken to Auschwitz and her mother managed to get herself and her children to safety and away from the train. They were arrested a second time later in the war and taken to Majdanek, where Halina was already in the gas chamber with 200 other women when the Nazi soldiers ran out of Zyklon B poison. But her message now, as she said in an interview with the Times of Israel, is that there is just as much bravery in keeping your family alive and safe as there is in dying in rebellion. To me, this just illustrates the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust as this is a choice nobody should even come close to ever having to make. However, she says the narrative after the end of the war, particularly in Israel in the 1950s was divided between those arriving traumatised from Europe, and Zionist communities who believed they had allowed themselves to be victims like "lambs going to the slaughter". In 1951, the Holocaust Remembrance Day was named as the "Holocaust and Ghetto Uprising Day", which, in conjunction with the following letter from Yosef Weitz suggests many who had not experienced it first-hand were reluctant to honour the European Jewish communities unless they deemed them to have died as heroes and not as victims. The Times of Israel[2] says:
“Few documents reflect this attitude more pointedly than a letter that Yosef Weitz, a Jewish National Fund executive who immigrated to Israel in 1908 from what is today Ukraine, wrote to a friend who had just lost his son in Israel’s War of Independence. Holocaust victims died “a shameful death, whereas our dead are sacrificed in courageous battles, the birth of a people and land,” Weitz wrote.”
This wildly misinformed ill-judgement of the Holocaust continued until the 1961 trial of prominent Nazi Adolf Eichmann when any remaining details of the dehumanisation of Jewish people came to light and could no longer be denied. Despite this, still now Birenbaum says few people know what bravery really is or what it looks like. For her, it is:
"to lead your children to life through paralyzing fear. To fight tooth and nail for a bowl of soup for your sister-in-law – and to then go back and fight for another one for yourself."
Finally, we turn to Helena Czernek, a Jewish-Polish designer living in Warsaw currently. Thanks to her design, since 2013 the yellow daffodil has become a symbol of remembering the horrors of the Holocaust in Poland. 450,000 have been printed, as well as live flowers being picked, one for each person imprisoned in the ghetto, and are being worn all over the country, including by Duda and Herzog during the ceremony. Not only do the golden, pointed leaves reflect the Star of David sewn onto the clothes of Jewish communities and Eastern Europeans during the Nazi regime, making it an especially poignant symbol in Poland, but also the use of a living flower that will bloom every year all over the world shows that the memory of the victims will never die. However, this year, the bright yellow flower may also remind many of the colours of the Ukrainian flag: while unintentional, the link is not unhelpful, as it ensures that nobody forgets that ultra-nationalist violence and oppression did not die with Hitler. Rather, the moment we take democracy for granted is the moment it starts to slip away.
by Camille Saunders
[1] Survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance tells of those who dared to stand up to the Nazis | CNN
[2] Halina Birenbaum survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. She saw heroism elsewhere | The Times of Israel