Remember, too, what lay behind the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto

19th April  is an important day for all enemies of racism, of fascism, of dehumanisation – for all who fight for a world of dignity and freedom for every human being.

We remember that on this day in 1943 in Warsaw, the capital of Nazi-occupied Poland, a few hundred Jews aged 13-43, who had already endured nearly 2.5 years of ghettoisation dehumanisation, starvation and enslavement by their oppressors, had organised themselves into fighting units in a united Jewish combat body, the ZOB (Zydowska  Organizacje Bojowa) to resist the Nazis’ attempt to wipe them out and to erase their culture and existence from the face of the earth.

The Nazi tanks and troops entered the ghetto in the early hours of 19th April, hoping that by the end of the next day, 20th April, their officers could present Hitler with the news, on his birthday, that Jewish life and culture had been almost entirely destroyed in the Polish capital, where Jews constituted a third of the pre-World War II population.

Instead, the Nazi shock troops met a hail of bullets and grenades, many homemade. They retreated, leaving their dead and their weapons behind, which were eagerly collected by the fighters. Of course the Nazis returned with even greater firepower. But it took them more than three weeks to suppress the resistance.

Even then, nearly 40 fighters escaped from the ghetto through the sewers to fight on with other Jewish and non-Jewish partisans in the forests against the Nazi occupiers until the end of the war. News of the incredible resistance In the Warsaw Ghetto encouraged many later acts of resistance in ghettoes, concentration camps, even death camps.

That physical resistance took immense courage and immense principle. But what lay behind it must also be acknowledged, remembered and cherished. The fighters in that united combat organisation were women and men, children and adults. They came principally form three left-wing political movements whose serious ideological differences had been played out in the 1930s: Bundists, Communists and left-wing Zionists. In the ghetto those differences were superseded by their joint commitment to fight together for dignity and freedom

Those who physically rose up in open combat against their oppressors were nurtured by a much larger ghetto population that operated underground mutual aid networks, cultural and educational activities, that was engaged in countless acts of passive resistance for continued life and hope, every day, keeping their vision of a world of freedom and dignity that could still one day come into being.

When we remember and honour those who fought in that final battle in the Warsaw Ghetto, we must also remember those ghetto inhabitants (including a small number of Roma Gypsies), who were deported to death camps, mainly Treblinka but also Majdanek) many months before that battle. We also remember those who stubbornly fought for life but succumbed to starvation and disease before that uprising could begin.

A special mention, too, must be made of the ZOB operatives, mainly women, who lived in hiding with Polish Catholic families outside of the ghetto, and carried out essential work as “couriers”, smuggling messages and goods from ghetto to ghetto, organising support and payment for families hiding Jewish children, and helping to obtain weapons that reached the ghetto fighters.

In the increasingly horrifying world of 2025, when the far-right is on the rise in America, in western and eastern Europe, in India, Israel and  other lands, we can see how little human life is worth to those in power, and those striving for power. We must infuse our struggles today against all injustice and oppression with the spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto resisters – combatants and non-combatants.