World War II: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

In the factory area, a tank led a German column down Leszno Street until brought under fire by the Jewish fighters there. Eight Germans were wounded, but they pressed on to Smocza Street. There, the Jews tried to explode another mine, but it failed to detonate. Dora Goldkorn and other fighters then pelted the tank with Molotov cocktails and had the satisfaction of seeing it catch fire.

Under Stroop’s relentless command, German reinforcements pressed the assault, driving the Jews from Lezsno to Nowolipie Street. Buildings and bunkers were blown up, after which any dazed survivors who emerged were promptly shot by the Germans.

While the ZOB and ZZW battled the Nazis inside the ghetto, two other resistance groups made desultory appearances. On the night of April 19, a large force of Polish AK fighters, led by Captain Jozsef Przenny, tried to blast a hole in the ghetto wall facing Sapierinska Street, through which some Jews could escape. Before they could, however, they were spotted by Polish police, who summoned German troops to the scene. After a brisk firefight, in which two Germans and two Polish policemen were killed, the AK men were forced to withdraw with two dead and several wounded. On April 20, the Guardia Ludowa (Peoples Guard), a small left-wing Polish underground movement, also made a gesture of solidarity with the Jewish fighters by attacking a German artillery emplacement on Nowajarska Street. The gun crew, consisting of two Germans and two Polish policemen, was killed and the gun silenced without loss to the attackers.

On April 22, Stroop changed his strategy in an effort to minimize casualties to his men. Demolition and incendiary teams, detached from the German artillery units, set fires that quickly spread through the ghetto. The screams of thousands of men, women and children could be heard above the roar of the flames as they burned alive in the conflagration.

On April 23–Good Friday–the ZOB issued a general appeal to the Polish population, associating the struggle in the ghetto with the time-honored Polish motto, ‘For your freedom and ours.’ Although the overall coordination of Polish and Jewish resistance was limited, there was ample evidence to support a statement in the April 23 edition of the underground paper Glos Warszawy that ‘there were Poles in the ghetto, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Jews in the streets of the ghetto against the Germans.’ Stroop himself wrote that his soldiers were ‘constantly under fire from outside of the ghetto, i.e., from the Aryan side.’

A noteworthy example of help from Catholic Poles occurred when a unit from the AK’s Corps of Security, commanded by Captain Henryk Iwanski, made early contact with the ZZW and smuggled arms, ammunition and instructional materials through the sewers or hidden in carts carrying lime and cement into the ghetto. One the first day of the uprising, members of Iwanski’s unit were in Muranowski Square and it was they who raised the Polish flag alongside the Jewish one. Soon afterward, Iwanski received a message from the commander of the ZZW unit at Muranowski Square, Dawid Moryc Apfelbaum, informing him that he had been wounded, and requesting more arms and ammunition. On the following day, Captain Iwanski and 18 of his men, including his brother, Waclaw, and his sons, Roman Zbigniew, made their way into the ghetto with weapons, ammunition and food. Seeing the Jewish fighters in an exhausted state, the AK men offered to relieve them at their posts at Muranowski Square and Nalewski Street, where they repelled several German attacks. Stroop later recorded the activities of Iwanski’s unit by writing: ‘The main Jewish group, with some Polish bandits mixed in, retreated to the so-called Muranowski Square already in the course of the first or second day of the fighting. It was reinforced there by several more Polish bandits.’

Iwanski’s brother and both sons were killed in the course of the fighting and the captain himself was seriously wounded. As organized resistance collapsed, Iwanski’s men managed to carry him through a tunnel to safety, as well as guiding out 34 fully armed Jewish fighters, some of whom were subsequently hidden in his home. After the war Henryk Iwanski, his wife, Wiktoria, and 10 other AK fighters were aware the Yad Vashem medal by the Israeli ambassador to Warsaw, for their part in the struggle.

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