Anniversary of The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

A Triumph of Humanity

Published on April 6, 2004 By Larry Kuperman In Current Events

I have said before, and this is an old joke, that all Jewish Holidays may be explained as follows: they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat! Tonight, the second night of the Passover Holiday, is no exception.

Tonight I had dinner with over a hundred of my closest friends.

We held a Passover meal with many participants, many readers. Not only adults, but children participate in the telling of the old story. We have a common mission, to make some small, incremental difference that moves us closer to Tikkun Olam, the healing of the world. So we teach our children to do acts of charity, to remember the past while looking to the future.

The Passover holiday is celebrated with a Seder meal to remember the Exodus from Egypt. Friends and family gather for a festive meal and retell the story of Moses. But it was also on a Passover night in 1943, April 19th to be exact, that a group of poorly armed Jewish men and women, trapped in the ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, rose up against the mightiest army of the day. For 43 days and nights, this half-starved rag-tag band would hold off the mighty Wehrmacht. Facing tanks and planes, flame-throwers and artillery and armed with only a few cast-off or smuggled guns, the Jewish Fighting Army would cling to a few square blocks. Tonight, we also remembered the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Beginning with a shot fired on Nalevki Street, the Jewish partisans would fight from within attics, bunkers and piles of rubble. When it was over, the survivors were taken to concentration camps. Several hundred Jews would escape through underground tunnels and live to testify at war crimes trials.

Hirsh Glik was a 24-year old poet living in the Vilna Gaon in Lithuania. He was part of resistance there and when he heard about the uprising in Warsaw, wrote a song that became the anthem of the Jewish Resistance. He was deported to a concentration camp in Estonia, but continued to write songs and poems. Hearing that the Russians were coming, he escaped into the forest and is presumed to have been caught and killed.

The song that Hirsch Glik wrote is entitled Zog Nit Keyn Mol, which is Yiddish for "Never say that you are on the final road." It became the song of the Jewish resistance, of the people that Hitler said he would erase from the world's memory. One chorus goes:

This song was written with our blood and not with lead.
It's not a song that birds are singing overhead.
It was a people among toppling barricades
That sang this song of ours with pistols and grenades.

So never say that there is only death for you.
Though leaden skies may be concealing days of blue.
The hour that we have hungered for is near.
Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble: WE ARE HERE!
******************************************************************************

For more about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, see http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/wgupris.htm and also
http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/gallery/G1941WGU.htm

For more about Hirsch Glik, see http://www.holocaustsurvivors.org/cgi-bin/data.show.pl?di=record&da=encyclopedia&ke=24

For the actual call-to-arms from the Vilna Gaon uprising, see http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/fpo.html

Comments

Sherye Hanson

on Apr 06, 2004

That was one of those moments in history in which people with no hope acted as if they had hope.

Larry Kuperman

on Apr 07, 2004

Sherye, with your pemission I will certainly use that quote.

Matt Aster

on Apr 07, 2004

Happy Passover.

but yah your joke sums up a lot.

Although Yom Kippur is kind of an exception.... it's the one holiday where we actually DON'T eat. Kind of odd.

WiseFawn

on Jul 18, 2004

Wonderful article and links. Often when I read some of yours, I don't comment, but give a rating. Thank you for putting up the links. I don't know if it's my computer, but I can't get the first link to work.

Gideon MacLeish

on Jul 18, 2004

Excellent article. Though I am Christian, my heritage is Jewish, and we, for many reasons, celebrate Passover rather than Easter. Thank you for a poignant reminder of why.

Manopeace

on Jul 18, 2004

Bless you for sharing Larry. Zei Gezunt!

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