What the Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Means to Me
BRONKA FEINMESSER - "MARYSIA WITH BLUE EYES" - HER GERMAN-ISSUED ID USED AFTER LEAVING THE GHETTO, FOT. JERZY WARMANS ARCHIVE
On the occasion of the upcoming 81st anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, we share a message from Jerzy Warman, son of Warsaw Ghetto survivors and Board Member of American Friends of POLIN Museum.
Dear Friends,
As we approach April 19, the 81st anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, my thoughts turn to the people I knew who were at the center of that event. They were among the most important figures in my life.
I live in New York City and serve on the board of the American Friends of POLIN Museum, but my life – my entire being – has been marked by the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. I was born in Warsaw after the war and grew up in Poland, a son of ghetto survivors.
I belong to the second ring around the actual participants and witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. As a member of the generation born a few years after the war, the uprising is still very personal. My older sister, Ania, was only a year old when our father, who worked as the secretary of the Jewish Council in the Warsaw Ghetto, was forced to attend the fateful meeting on July 22, 1942, when the Nazis ordered the deportation of most of the Jews in the ghetto. The next day Adam Czerniaków, the head of the Council, committed suicide in protest. During the following two months, almost 300,000 Jews were loaded onto cattle cars and sent to their deaths in Treblinka – my grandmother among them. This action prompted Jewish organizations in the ghetto to form a tiny army of underground resistance, ŻOB, the Jewish Fighting Organization, leading to a military action in January 1943, and then the uprising of April 1943.
Both of my parents escaped from the ghetto to the “Aryan side” a few months before the uprising. My mother, who had worked at the Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital in the ghetto, began to carry out assignments for the resistance, using a false ID and a pseudonym "Marysia with Blue Eyes." She was given the task of finding hiding places for those who also managed to escape and, especially, for the surviving partisans. Together with other courier female couriers (“łączniczki”), she maintained a network of secret apartments where Marek Edelman, the last commander of the uprising, Yitzhak (“Antek”) Zuckerman, the deputy chief of ŻOB, and fighters like “Kazik” Ratajzer (Simcha Rotem), Tziviah Lubetkin, Baruch (Bronek) Spiegel, Tuviah (Tadek) Borzykowski, and many others hid until the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. My parents were part of the Jewish detachment, commanded by Antek, which fought together with the (communist) People’s Army. When the Warsaw Uprising ended in defeat on October 2, the ŻOB partisan unit, unable to surrender, hid in a cellar amid the ruins of Warsaw for six weeks until a miraculous rescue mission saved them all. Every year, on November 15, they celebrated this second “birthday” in my parents’ Warsaw apartment, with Ania and me listening to their stories.
When I was growing up these people were not “heroes.” For a child like me, they were simply Marek, Kazik, Bronek… but there was an aura of great moral authority about them. Marek’s outward cynicism was a mere cover for his lifelong commitment to the humanist ideals of the Bund, the Jewish democratic socialist party. Kazik’s modesty arose from his deep reflection on the moral dilemma of whether the ghetto fighters had the right to choose hopeless armed struggle that condemned tens of thousands of civilians to death in flames when these civilians possibly could have lived a few weeks or months longer.
These are the memories I inherited from my parents and their closest friends, which coalesced around this most symbolic of dates. Anniversaries mark the milestones of collective memory. From the formative experiences of a generation that lived through the ghetto uprising, individual memories pass into the realm of history, forming the knowledge that guides the generations who come after.
Ever since I can remember, every April 19, we gathered under Nathan Rapaport’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes – just a small group of survivors who had remained in Poland and those who came from Israel and other countries. We walked with Marek, who stood on the sidelines until official state delegations laid their wreaths, and then, alone, put a bouquet of yellow daffodils beneath the dramatic bronze figures leaning out of the rectangular granite prism of the monument.
Marek always refused to join state officials, whose speeches attempted to use the uprising for their own political purposes. We were there solely to reflect on his comrades who perished in the flames, and to mourn the void their deaths left in our hearts.
In 1983, when Poland was under martial law, Marek issued an impassioned appeal to Jews around the world, calling on them to boycott the official ceremony sponsored by the military government. Not many listened. Ten years later, on the 50th anniversary in 1993, when Poland’s resurgent democracy after the fall of communism changed the meaning of our commemoration, he did walk toward the monument, in silence, with Lech Wałęsa, the President of Poland, and Marek’s six-year-old grandson between them holding their hands. This was the one exception he made. Ever since, we have held our tribute apart from the world’s officialdom, joined by the growing company of young people for whom our memory became their meaningful history.
Then came the 70th anniversary in 2013 which ended an era because it was the last time when a living fighter in the uprising was present. It was Kazik, who had led a few dozen surviving fighters out of the Warsaw Ghetto through the sewers, and whose testimony forms the last words in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah. It was at that 2013 event that I last saw Kazik, whom I had known since I was 16. He died at the age of 94 in 2018 in Israel.
The commemoration of April 19 has fully passed into the hands of generations whose connection to the uprising has been less direct. Would they feel the shivers that shot through me every time I stepped toward the monument? Do they sense the historical forces that I felt so deeply? I really wish that they could experience these anniversaries on as personal a level as I have.
Until ten years ago the monument on the site of the ghetto stood alone as a symbol of death and resistance – the embodiment of memory. Today it looks smaller – but not diminished – against the building facing it, our POLIN Museum. The contrast in scale is apt – the Monument of Jewish Memory reflected in – and amplified by – the Museum of Jewish Life. Each in its own way ensures that both memories and history speak to the future. On April 19, this year or next, please join us in Warsaw. And wherever you are, pick up the memorial paper daffodil distributed by our campaign, which finds its inspiration in the yellow flowers Marek left at the monument each year.
Jerzy Warman
New York City, 2024
The 2024 Warsaw Ghetto Campaign of POLIN Museum
If you wish to join Jerzy Warman and other friends of POLIN Museum in honoring the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, please participate in our 2024 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Campaign.
You can:
Share our campaign hashtags in your social media posts #RememberingTogether, #WarsawGhettoUprisingCampaign
We are deeply gratified that we are partnering again with the World Jewish Congress to make daffodils available to Jewish communities around the globe, from Tel Aviv to Washington DC.