- During World War II, the Nazis set up more than 1,000 ghettos in Europe and forced Jewish residents into it.
- The largest was in Warsaw, where about 400,000 Jews lived in a shabby house in an area of 1.3 square kilometers.
- Resistance fighters in Warsaw, more than one third of their wives, launched the largest ghetto uprising of the war on 19 April 1943, inspiring similar rebellions across Europe.
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After the German dictator Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Nazis began separating millions of Jews in Eastern Europe into parts of cities and towns designated as ‘ghettos’, eventually stripping residents of their possessions and rights and using barricades and armed guards sealed.
In the Polish capital Warsaw, home to the second largest Jewish population in the world before the war, Nazis established the largest of more than 1,000 ghettos erected in Europe.
They deliberately housed about 400,000 Jews in inhumane conditions in the 1.3-square-kilometer Warsaw ghetto, which allowed disease and famine before mass deportations to extermination camps.
Years of war and genocide would pass before Allied troops liberated Europe, but as the Nazis systematically killed millions, bags of rebellion emerged, including secret Jewish resistance groups.
People stand in the direction of water near a sign “Infected Area” in Warsaw, Poland, January 1940. The Germans use these signs as a first step towards the establishment of the ghetto.
Hugo Jaeger / Timepix / The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images
Hungry, lacking supplies and ruthless oppression, Jewish partisans carried out acts of rebellion in the ghettos.
Among the best known is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that began on April 19, 1943, when resistance fighters launched a surprise attack on Nazis who would liquidate the ghetto, leading to the largest ghetto uprising of World War II and similar rebellions in inspired occupied Europe.
More than one-third of the fighters who rose up in the Warsaw ghetto were women. Many were active in Jewish youth movements before the war.
Ghetto girls defied the typical image of World War II party divisions and used Nazis’ misogyny to their advantage. Some smuggled weapons into coffins and grenades into menstrual pads. They carried illegal publications between ghettos in their braids and sewed forged papers into their skirts. They blew up an Auschwitz crematorium with gunpowder smuggled in a teaspoon each time.
Their courage and sacrifice remained in the background of resistance history. A new book by Judy Batalion, “The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos”, tells how the war’s most modest fighters fought Hitler’s final solution.
Here are some of their stories:
Zivia Lubetkin established a large underground movement and led the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto through neck-deep sewage to escape the final liquidation.
Zivia Lubetkin in 1946.
RDB / wool stone image via Getty Images
Born into a middle-class Jewish family in the rural Polish city of Byten, Zivia Lubetkin moved to youth movements as a teenager.
Despite the disapproval of her parents, in the 1930s she became a leader in a socialist-Zionist movement called ‘Freedom’, which encouraged Jews to work on communal farms, or ‘kibbutzim’, in Palestine.
In August 1939, while living in Warsaw managing educational programs and securing visas for the Freedom Movement, she attended a meeting in Switzerland of Zionist delegates from around the world. There she received a special certificate that allowed her to immigrate to Palestine and avoid what promised to be a difficult future for the Jews in Europe.
But Zivia would return to Poland and arrived in Warsaw a day before the Nazi invasion. She moves east to the Soviet territory, where she leads communication and intelligence for her Zionists’ efforts to smuggle people to Palestine.
An SS soldier guarding a group of Jewish workers in the Warsaw ghetto, 1943.
Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
In 1940, she returned to Warsaw held by the Nazis, and went with fellow partisans to conduct underground educational and social programs, helping the Jewish families face the horrors of the occupation.
When the Nazis started mass deportations from the ghettos in July 1942, Zivia founded an underground youth movement called the Jewish Fighting Organization (FightOB). As the only elected female leader of ŻOB, she helped arm and mobilize fighters within the Warsaw ghetto, steal from wealthy German Jews, and assassinate Nazis in an ambush.
She fought in an attack on Nazis that would come to the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto in January 1943, to survive a few days of fighting and mobilize other fighters to build an underground network of bunkers and escape routes in preparation of the next revolt.
On April 19, 1943, when more than 1,000 heavily armed Nazis entered the Warsaw ghetto to transport the remaining inhabitants to death camps, Zivia and fellow fighters dropped homemade bombs and fired on the German soldiers.
Their arsenal was a meager supply of smuggled weapons and homemade Molotov cocktails, but they surprised the Nazis and forced them to withdraw for a few days.
Jewish resistance fighters Rachela Wyszogrodzka, left, Bluma Wyszogrodzka, center and Małka Zdrojewicz, after their captivity during the Warsaw Uprising in 1943.
Unknown photographer / National Archives
Ghetto residents hid in bunkers and sewage, but when the German soldiers returned, they began leveling the ghetto. Due to the armed resistance, the Nazis’ original plan to liquidate the ghetto within a few days became almost a month of guerrilla fighting between the soldiers and the inhabitants.
The Germans eventually forced thousands of people out of their hiding places and sent most of the remaining inhabitants to the Treblinka extermination camp. However, Zivia led a group through a network of underground sewage and hid outside the ghetto walls.
Soviet forces liberated Warsaw in January 1945. Zivia moved to Palestine and co-founded the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz and Museum with other Polish resistance leaders. She testified against senior SS officer Adolf Eichmann in 1961 and gave speeches on the Holocaust. She had two children in Israel and died there in 1978 at the age of 63.
Faye Schulman escaped extermination because Nazis made her work as a photographer, and ran away and joined the partisans as a fighter and nurse whose photos documented atrocities and resistance activities.
Holocaust survivors, Peter Silverman, greet and Faye Schulman during a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising in Toronto, April 7, 2013.
Vince Talotta / Toronto Star via Getty Images
Faigel “Faye” Lazebnik Schulman grew up in Lenin, a city on the eastern border of Poland, where Nazis carried out a mass shooting that killed her family and friends.
Faye was spared by the Nazis, who ordered her to work for them to develop gruesome photos of the liquidation, including the murder of her family.
Only 19 years old, she ran into the woods and convinced a biased commander to allow her to resist, where a veterinarian trained her as a nurse.
Schulman helped make consulting rooms out of branches, and once stunned a rival with vodka before cutting off his wounded finger bone with her teeth.
Faye Schulman during an operation.
American Holocaust Memorial Museum / Belarusian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War
She kept her Judaism a secret and slept with a gun she used during regular fighting missions, including a raid on her hometown.
After the liberation, she received a medal from the Soviet government and married a partisan commander.
They lived in a displaced camp in Germany and joined an underground organization that smuggled European Jews to Palestine.
In 1948, she, her husband, and their baby emigrated to Canada, where she lives today.
Niuta Teitelbaum – whose disguise includes the Polish farm girl, SS officer’s girlfriend and doctor – killed Nazis with a silent pistol.
Niuta Teitelbaum in Lod36, Poland, in 1936.
Thanks to the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum
Teitelbaum hoped her petite frame and blonde braids would make her look like an innocent Aryan girl, when in fact she was an armed Jewish partisan who killed Gestapo officers and arranged a women’s unit in the Warsaw ghetto.
She grew up in Łódź and studied history at the University of Warsaw. Shortly after the Nazis occupied Warsaw in 1939, 22-year-old Teitelbaum fought as a volunteer for the underground volunteers to fight for fellow Jews and a free Poland.
She works for the People’s Army and ŻOB and trains women in the Warsaw ghetto to use the weapons she helps smuggle.
On one occasion, she walked into a central Gestapo apartment in Warsaw, killing two Nazi Gestapo agents and wounding a third.
In order to deal with the injured agent, she gained access to the hospital he was in by putting on a doctor’s coat and pretending to be a doctor; then she shot dead the Nazi and the police officer guarding him.
Her reputation as flirting in the company of SS agents and then shooting them in the head gave her a place on the Gestapo’s most coveted lists and the nickname ‘Little Wanda with the Braids’.
She survived the uprising in Warsaw and even joined a raid on a Nazi machine gun position on top of the ghetto walls during a battle, but in the summer of 1943, a few months after the Warsaw ghetto was destroyed, Gestapo agents Teitelbaum captured, tortured and executed. She was 25 years old.