WARSAW (Reuters) – Eighty years on from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – the largest Jewish revolt against Nazi Germany during World War II – Poland marked the heroism of those who took part with a warning to the world against sowing hatred.
In 1940, German Nazi occupiers corralled over 400,000 Jews into a small section of the Polish capital Warsaw; most were then sent to camps to be killed or died from the conditions within the ghetto, but on April 19, 1943 hundreds took up arms.
Their fight against heavily armed German troops to try to stop the transports to the death camps ended on May 16, when the Germans razed the ghetto to the ground. An estimated 13,000 Jews were killed.
“Anyone who sows hatred, anyone who tramples on people, tramples on the graves of the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto, tramples on the graves of murdered Jews, but also of those who helped,” said Polish President Andrzej Duda.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier attended the commemorations, which began with sirens sounding across the Polish capital.
“The heroism of the resistance and the rebels and the imperative to remember that terrible chapter of history… offer a platform for important dialogue between Poland and Israel and for the advancement of friendship between our peoples,” said Herzog.
Steinmeier said that “every crime that the Germans committed should have a place in our memory.”
As in previous years, volunteers handed out paper daffodils on the streets of Warsaw.
The daffodil has become a symbol of the uprising as Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, used to receive a bouquet of yellow daffodils from an anonymous person every year on April 19.
He would lay them at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in memory of those who fought and died.
Organisers are giving out 450,000 paper daffodils, as this was the number of people in the ghetto when its population was at its peak.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish and Pawel Florkiewicz in Warsaw, additional reporting by James MacKenzie in Jerusalem; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
