60 years ago on 19 April, 1943 - Passover eve - members of the Jewish Fighting Organization went from house to house in the Warsaw ghetto and informed the last surviving inmates who had escaped the two previous deportations that armed policemen were surrounding the ghetto wall, and that in the morning the final deportation of the tens of thousands of remaining Jews would begin.
This was probably the first time that Jews inside a ghetto had prior information regarding what was to befall them and when. Hundreds of fighters armed with inadequate weapons took up pre-arranged battle positions, and the tormented, determined ghetto inmates packed up their small bundles of belongings and some crumbs of matzo - that symbol of the Festival of Freedom - and went down into the secret bunkers and cellars that had been dug over many nights. At dawn, when the German armed units came through the ghetto gates, they found empty streets and houses, and were then showered with bullets and grenades.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews fought in the Allied armies’ anti-Nazi front in World War II. Many thousands joined the fighting units in the forests and mountains as partisans. In the death camps, and in the shadow of the crematorium at Birkenau, Jews were the only ones in the multinational prisoner population who rebelled.
We know from totalitarian regimes in general, and above all from the Nazi German Reich, that even individuals who were once impressive public figures, and the millions of prisoners and camp inmates of many nationalities, sentenced to oppression and systematic annihilation, did not rise up and did not rebel. The popular uprising in the Warsaw ghetto is a singular and symbolic event, the first revolt in an occupied city, which compelled the German forces to conduct a military campaign against the helpless few, and to quash the desperate uprising house by house, bunker by bunker.
The Nazi Third Reich set itself two goals in this cursed war. The first was aggressive territorial expansion that knew no bounds. The second was the uprooting of national and social groups and the destruction of man’s existential “I believe” shaped by religious, humane and ethical imperatives. The Nazis sought to replace the existing civilization with a reign of absolute evil: a thousand years of racist, Aryan tyranny. From the outset, the Jews were declared an obstacle and an enemy. The total physical liquidation of the Jews was ranked as one of the essential tasks of the war, and the Reich’s entire administrative machine was mobilized to carry it out, although to the Allies who were fighting against the Nazis this unparalleled crime seemed like a marginal civil matter, of concern to neither the army nor public opinion. For four years, innocent Jewish communities and whole families including babies on their mother’s breasts were murdered in the face of silence, indifference and almost total alienation, and as a result of this destruction, an age-old, traditional, dynamic Jewish presence in Europe was all but obliterated.
These bitter facts raise the disturbing question of whether this indescribable crime in the heartland of developed countries and enlightened people would have been possible had it not been for the antisemitism that had seeped into the consciousness and mentality of Christian Europe over generations.
After this terrible tragedy, standing on the threshold of the 21st century, we hoped to wake up to a new dawn, and in light of this expectation we, the surviving remnant, rebuilt our sorrow-filled lives here in Eretz Israel. We assumed that the world had learned its lesson, and had put an end to the plague of Jew-hatred once and for all, but like many times in the past, we were too naïve. In the multi-faceted conflict that has given us no rest since our national rebirth on the soil of Eretz Israel, the discordant voices of old/new antisemitism that we thought had vanished forever in Europe are now increasing in volume. We have to sound the alarm and to remind both them and ourselves that this baseless, infectious hostility does not end with Jew-hatred, but that as we saw, the seed of venom contains a danger that threatens man and humanity the world over.
