Warsaw ghetto uprising documentary summary

Two events made April 19, , an especially tragic day in the history of the Holocaust: In an exclusive resort on the island of Bermuda, British and American delegates began a day conference supposedly to consider what their countries could do to help the Jews of Europe. Very little, they concluded. At the very same time, on the other side of the world in Poland, the Nazis moved to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto.

In a desperate last stand, the remaining Jewish inhabitants of the walled-in enclave began a hopeless month-long battle against the Nazis. It was the first time during the war that resistance fighters in an area under German control had staged an uprising. It would end in the complete destruction of the ghetto. The Nazis had established the ghetto two and a half years earlier.

In mid-November of , after ordering all Jews in Warsaw to collect in a designated part of the city, they sealed it off from the rest of the city with a medieval-like foot high wall. Moving to the ghetto was a ghastly experience; it was like moving to prison.

Warsaw uprising 1944

One inhabitant wrote, "we are segregated and separated from the world and the fullness thereof, driven out of the society of the human race. In November the Nazis went so far as to institute the death penalty for any Jew found beyond the ghetto walls. And very little information was allowed in. Earlier in the occupation, the Nazis had already taken away radios.

Now they also removed telephone lines, censored mail and frequently confiscated incoming packages. Conditions in the ghetto were appalling. At one point, more than , Jews were crowded inside its walls.