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In April 1943 the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto set an example of Jewish heroism and courage in a war for the honor of the nation and of the image of mankind. On the eve of Passover - the Festival of Freedom - on April 19, 1943, the great revolt broke out under the command of Mordechai Anilewicz. The heroism of those fighters is unparalleled in the history of people fighting for their lives, for freedom, and for the honor of the nation.
In the summer of 1941 defense squads were already set up in the Warsaw Ghetto by pioneer youth. In other ghettoes too, the call went out to resist the dispatch of Jews and in the ghettoes of Vilna, Kovno and Minsk groups of Jewish partisans organized themselves for action against the Germans. It was the Zionist youth movements that organized the fighting squads and which, in July 1942, set up the Jewish Fighting Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto that stood up to the Nazi enemy in open battle. In October 1942 a coordination committee was set up of representatives of the Jewish underground in Poland.
In the meantime, the transfer of Jews to the east continued. The Nazi extermination machinery was working at full speed on implementing the program decided upon at the secret meeting held at Berlin-Wannsee in January 1942 on the subject of the preparation of the "Final Solution." Hundreds of trains moved eastwards with no let or hindrance whatsoever, just as the Germans had surmised. Poland was found to be suitable from all points of view, as the place selected by the Germans for the execution of their dastardly plans.
All the demands made by the Jews that the Poles give them arms for self-defense against the assassins went unanswered. Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, the eminent historian and one of the organizers of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, wrote in his diary: "For 44 days of the 'action' no voice was heard from the 'Aryan' side. Complete silence reigned there in face of the drama taking place in full view of hundreds of thousands of Poles...". It was quite obvious what fate awaited the hundreds of thousands of Jews who reached the extermination camps in Poland from all corners of Nazi-occupied Europe.
The Holocaust that wiped out six million Jews was the great disaster of that generation, who stood face to face with the Nazi beast - the beast that destroyed everything holy, and trampled upon everything sacrosanct.
Out of the suffering, the murder, and the destruction, we meet the heroism of the fighters in the ghettoes and in the forests; the devotion of those who fought with the Allied armies, who went forth to battle with the murderous conqueror; the emissaries of the Yishuv - the Jewish community in the Land of Israel, and the fighters in the underground movements in all the Nazi-occupied countries - as well as the heroism of tens of thousands of Jews of whose bravery no details will ever be known, for the Germans left no trace of them.
