Mordechai Anielewicz (1919 - 8 May 1943) was a Polish Jew who led members of the Jewish Combat Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against Nazi persecution in 1943. He remains a major symbol of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and inspired a number of other rebellions in Jewish ghettoes and extermination camps.
Biography[]
Anielewicz was born in Wyszków, Poland, in 1919, moving to Warsaw soon after his birth. At age 18 he received training at a military camp and joined the left-leaning Jewish youth group Hashomer Hatzair.
On 7 September 1939, during the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, Anielewicz moved to the east of the country with a group from Warsaw. When the east of the country was invaded by the Soviet Red Army Anielewicz became one of many Jewish refugees to relocate to the city of Vilnius, which was under Soviet control, and began attempting to convince people to return with him to the General Government area to fight the Germans. When this failed, he attempted to cross the border into Romania to open up a route for Jews to flee to Palestine but was arrested by Soviet authorities. He was released in January 1940 and returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend Mira Furcher. Upon his return he found that his father had been pressed into forced labour by the Nazis.
In April 1940, the Nazis forced the entire Jewish population of Warsaw into a giant prison called the Warsaw Ghetto, where tens of thousands died from disease, malnutrition and overcrowding. The following year, the Nazis began the genocide of Jews and others later known as the Holocaust, with special military groups known as Einsatzgruppen shooting Jews en masse during the war in Eastern Europe. When reports of this first broke in late 1941, Anielewicz began attempting to form anti-Nazi resistance groups within the ghetto, without much success.
In 1942, the Nazis began deporting Jews in the ghetto to "labour camps" in Eastern Poland, where they would in fact be killed in gas chambers as soon as they arrived. That same year, Jewish resistance groups in the ghetto made contact with the Polish Home Army, who began smuggling weapons into the ghetto, and started building fortified bunkers and shelters in the ghetto. By January 1943 they had built 600 fortified shelters and each fighter had been equipped with a gun and several hand grenades or Molotov cocktails.
When deportations were resumed in January 1943, members of the Jewish Combat Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB), of which Anielewicz was a member, and the Jewish Military Union (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, ŻZW), the two main Jewish resistance groups in the Warsaw Ghetto, decided to act. On 18 January 1943, Anielewicz and eleven other members of the ŻOB and ŻZW ambushed the deportation transport as Jews were being loaded on board. Several of the deportees managed to escape in the confusion, at the cost of most of the resistance members dying; Anielewicz himself was pursued as he fled the scene but was saved when ŻOB member Yitzhak Suknik threw two grenades at the soldiers who were chasing him. This offensive convinced the Home Army to increase the amount of weapons supplied to the Jewish resistance.
In the months after the assault, Anielewicz took further preparations for the upcoming revolt, establishing a vast network of tunnels, bunkers and interconnected houses through the ghetto for use in guerrilla warfare. He authored an open letter to the Jews of the ghetto reminding them that they would be killed when they were no longer useful for slave labour and encouraging them to rise up against the Nazis.
On 19 April 1943, German SS troops under Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg were deployed to undertake the final liquidation and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. When they arrived, they were met by armed ŻOB and ŻZW members who shot at them and attacked their vehicles with grenades and Molotov cocktails. Although the Germans had military superiority, they were not prepared for the guerrilla warfare they were met with, whereas the Jews had a superior knowledge of the environment, numerous hiding places not known to the Germans, and were difficult to target due to the interconnected houses. The Germans retreated after two hours of fighting.
The following day, SS General Jürgen Stroop was sent to suppress the uprising. His troops were met by 750 Jewish defenders who initially had the upper hand through guerrilla warfare, but over the following days Stroop was able to break through their resistance by using artillery and flamethrowers to demolish the buildings and shelters in order to dismantle the guerrilla network. When the resistance headquarters were destroyed, 200 Jewish rebels, including Anielewicz and his girlfriend, relocated to another command bunker at 18 Miła Street, sending a group under Zivia Lubetkin to find a way out of the ghetto. However, on 7 May the bunker was found and surrounded by Nazi troops. The following day they launched their offensive on the bunker, resulting in the deaths of most of the Jews inside. Anielewicz's precise fate is unclear, but he appears to have either committed suicide alongside his girlfriend and advisors or been shot on Stroop's orders after being taken prisoner. His body was never found and is believed to have been buried in the ruins of the bunker.