Despair Not!

Gvald, Yidn, zayt zikh nisht m’yayesh!

I never expected to open an essay with the call, “Gvald, Yidn, zayt zikh nisht m’yayesh!” “Gvald, Jews, don’t despair!” This was the battle cry issued in the final months of the Warsaw ghetto, rallying its remaining Jews to resistance against the Nazi stormtroopers. In April 1940, a half-year after their invasion of Poland, the Germans had walled in the ghetto and forced into those walls Warsaw’s 375,000 Jews, about one third of the city’s population, then thousands more from surrounding towns and villages. By the winter of 1943 over a quarter million of those not already dead of starvation and illness had been deported to their death in Treblinka and another 35,000 had been murdered inside the ghetto. What Israelis now call the konseptzia, a false conception based on underestimating and downplaying the enemy’s intentions, is the natural temptation of a peaceful people. The Jews of Poland, the most peaceable population imaginable, could not have imagined that the Germans intended to wipe them out.

Yet Jews do ultimately respond to reality. When it became too obvious to deny that they were marked for extermination, two Jewish underground organizations formed in the ghetto—the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB: Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa) and the Jewish Military Union ŻZW (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy). When the Germans entered the ghetto on the first night of Passover 1943 to begin rounding up the remaining Jews and sending them to their deaths, the two politically divided factions fought together with whatever arms they had managed to smuggle in or to devise. The uprising lasted, incredibly, from April 19 until May 16, 1943, the first urban anti-German uprising in Europe. They fought like lions.