City alarm sirens and church bells rang on 19.4.2023 at noon in the Polish capital, triggering the start of commemorative events for the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The uprising, which broke out on April 19, 1943, is the largest event of Jewish resistance against the Nazis during World War II, an event during which many armed Jews attacked the Nazis.
The presidents of Israel, Isaac Herzog, and Germany, Frank Walter Steinmeier, accompanied by their Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda, appeared together in front of the monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto, opposite the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, located at the site of battles during the uprising.
In the afternoon, the three presidents are expected to go together to a synagogue in Warsaw.
Across the city, as in previous years, at least three thousand volunteers began distributing cardboard daffodils and capes in memory of Marek Edelman, the last leader of the Jewish uprising who died in 2009, who used to mark each anniversary by laying a bouquet with the yellow flowers at the base of the monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto.
Because of their color and shape, daffodils resemble the yellow star that the Nazis forced Jews to wear.
Pamphlets summarizing the history of the uprising, in Polish, Ukrainian and English, accompanied the daffodils.
A year after invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis designated a zone in Warsaw to herd nearly half a million Jews into three square kilometers to exterminate them by starvation and disease, and send more than 300.000 to the camp's gas chambers death in Treblinka, 80 km east of the Polish capital.
About seven thousand people were killed during the clashes of the uprising, while another six thousand died later against the background of the fires methodically caused by the Nazis. The survivors were sent to camps.
Events of all kinds, meetings with survivors, concerts, film screenings, theater performances, are planned to take place this year against the background of the anniversary. Recently discovered photographs of the ghetto taken by a Polish firefighter will form part of an exhibition at the Polin Museum, while until now, the majority of known photographs were taken by the Nazis and showed the Jewish quarter through the eyes of Germans.
SOURCE: DAILY website, 19.4.2023