While many Jews in the ghetto desperately refused to believe what they heard, thousands of others did–and concluded that if they were all to be annihilated anyway, they would kill as many of their tormentors as they could before they died. Young Zionists, conservative-minded pioneers training to go to Palestine, mobilized first, forming a resistance organization called the Zhydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy (Jewish Military Union), or ZZW. They were followed soon after by Jewish members of the Polish Workers Party, which had replaced the former Communist Party. On July 28, 1942, the Zhydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organization), or ZOB, was formed, consisting of about 1,000 men and boys. Their leader was Mordechai Anielewicz, a scholar approximately 25 years old who had displayed an interest in economics and Jewish history before the war.

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Making their way through the sewers, Jewish smugglers embarked on a desperate quest to obtain firearms. Some were obtained through the black market at inflated prices and were often paid for by robbing the treasuries of the Judenrat or of high-ranking Jewish collaborators.

The ZOB and ZZW placed high hopes on gaining the support of the Polish Armia Krajowa (AK), or Home Army, the largest anti-Nazi resistance organization in Europe, but they were to be disappointed. The AK officials claimed that they had barely enough small arms for themselves. Several AK men added that the Jews had been too docile toward the Germans and doubted that they had the courage or fighting ability to make good use of any weapons they got. Such sentiments were by no means universal. A number of AK soldiers, who believed in the solidarity of Polish resistance regardless of religious differences, took the Jewish smugglers aside and, on their own initiative, supplied them with some small arms and trained them in their use. Even so, by February 1943, only 50 pistols (many of them defective), 50 grenades and four kilograms of explosives had been obtained from the AK.

On January 9, 1943, Himmler visited Warsaw and inspected the ghetto, whose population had been reduced to about 66,000. Himmler ordered the ‘intensified measures’ to be brought to an accelerated conclusion. By February 15, he decreed, the last Jews would be cleaned out of the ghetto–16,000 to slave labor camps, the remaining 50,000 ‘resettled’ (i.e., gassed and cremated).

Himmler placed responsibility for this final ghetto ‘housecleaning’ in the hands of SS Oberstandartenführer Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg and the chief of security police, Dr. Otto Hahn. January 18 was to be the date when the initial quota of 8,000 Jews would be removed, and Sammern-Frankenegg confidently invited SS Sturmbahnführer Theodor von Eupen-Malmedy, the commandant of the Treblinka death camp, to witness the ‘resettlement’ process.

Germans swept into the Umschlagplatz, but this time few Jews heeded the order to assemble, as factory workers laid low in hiding places and women hurried their children into bunkers. Some who were caught fought back with knives, axes, iron bars, scissors and anything else resembling a weapon.

Caught unprepared, only four ZOB fighting groups were able to mobilize in reaction. The first armed resistance occurred when a 17-year-old girl named Emily Landau flung a grenade into a cluster of SS men from a rooftop on Gesia Street, killing or wounding a dozen of them.

The SS promptly assaulted the building with submachine guns blazing, only to be met by a volley of return fire that felled four or five Germans and drove the rest back in disorder. Emily Landau was bending down to recover a pistol from a slain SS officer when she was struck by a bullet fired by a German rifleman covering his comrades’ retreat. The first to fight, she was also the first to die.

At the intersection of Zamenhofa and Mila streets, an SS detail was leading some prisoners to the Umschlagplatz when it came under attack by a squad led by Mordechai Anielewicz from his headquarters at Mila 18. The astonished Germans abandoned their captives, who scattered in all directions.

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