- During World War II, the Nazis established more than 1,000 ghettos across Europe, forcing Jewish residents to enter them.
- The biggest was in Warsaw, where about 400,000 Jews lived in misery in an area of 1.3 square miles.
- The resistance fighters in Warsaw, more than a third of them women, launched the biggest ghetto uprising of the war on April 19, 1943, inspiring similar rebellions across Europe.
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After German dictator Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, the Nazis began to segregate millions of Jews in Eastern Europe into sections of towns and cities called “ghettos”, eventually depriving the inhabitants of their belongings and rights and sealing them with barricades and armed guards.
In the Polish capital of Warsaw, home to the second largest Jewish population in the world before the war, the Nazis established the largest of more than 1,000 mounted ghettos across Europe.
They intentionally housed about 400,000 Jews in inhumane conditions in Warsaw’s 1.3 square mile ghetto, allowing disease and hunger to increase ahead of mass deportations to extermination camps.
Years of war and genocide would pass before the Allied troops liberated Europe, but as the Nazis systematically murdered millions, pockets of rebellion emerged, including secret Jewish resistance groups.
People line up to receive water near a sign that says “Infected area” in Warsaw, Poland, in January 1940. The Germans used these signs as a first step in establishing the ghetto.
Hugo Jaeger / Timepix / The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images
Hungry, out of supplies and facing relentless oppression, Jewish guerrillas carried out acts of rebellion within the ghettos.
Among the most famous is the Warsaw ghetto uprising that began on April 19, 1943, when resistance fighters launched a surprise attack on the Nazis who came to liquidate the ghetto, leading to the greatest ghetto uprising of World War II and inspiring rebellions throughout occupied Europe.
More than a third of the combatants who rebelled in the Warsaw ghetto were women. Many were active in Jewish youth movements before the war.
The ghetto girls challenged the typical image of World War II guerrillas and used Nazi misogyny to their advantage. Some weapons smuggled in coffins and grenades in menstrual pads. They carried illegal publications between ghettos in their braids and sew counterfeit papers on their skirts. They blew up an Auschwitz crematorium with smuggled gunpowder one teaspoon at a time on her breasts.
His courage and sacrifice remained in the background in the stories of resistance. A new book by Judy Batalion, “The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos,” recounts how the most unpretentious combatants in the war fought Hitler’s Final Solution.
Here are some of their stories:
Zivia Lubetkin co-founded a major clandestine movement and led the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto through the sewage with water up to their necks to escape the final settlement.
Zivia Lubetkin in 1946.
RDB / ullstein bild via Getty Images
Born into a middle-class Jewish family in the rural Polish town of Byten, Zivia Lubetkin gravitated to youth movements when she was a teenager.
Despite her parents’ disapproval, she became a leader in a socialist-Zionist movement called “Freedom” in the 1930s, encouraging Jews to live and work on communal farms, or “kibbutzim”, in Palestine.
In August 1939, when she was living in Warsaw and administering educational programs and securing visas for the Freedom movement, she attended a meeting in Switzerland of Zionist delegates from around the world. There, she received a special certificate that allowed her to immigrate to Palestine and avoid what promised to be a difficult future for Europe’s Jews.
But Zivia was determined to return to Poland and arrived in Warsaw the day before the Nazi invasion. She moved east, into Soviet-controlled territory, where she led communications and intelligence for her Zionist movement’s efforts to smuggle people into Palestine.
An SS soldier guarding a group of Jewish workers in the Warsaw ghetto, 1943.
Universal History Archive / Universal Image Group via Getty Images
In 1940, she sneaked back to Nazi-controlled Warsaw, joining other guerrillas to run clandestine social and educational programs, helping Jewish families cope with the horrors of the occupation.
In July 1942, when the Nazis began mass deportations from the ghettos, Zivia co-founded a clandestine youth movement called ŻOB (Jewish Combat Organization). As the only elected female leader of the ŻOB, she helped to arm and mobilize fighters within the Warsaw ghetto, steal wealthy German-aligned Jews and kill Nazis in ambushes.
She fought in an attack on the Nazis who had been deporting the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto in January 1943, surviving several days of fighting and mobilizing other fighters to build an underground network of bunkers and escape routes in preparation for the next revolt.
On April 19, 1943, when more than 1,000 heavily armed Nazis entered the Warsaw ghetto to transport the remaining inhabitants to the death camps, Zivia and other fighters fired on homemade bombs and at German soldiers.
Their arsenal was a meager supply of smuggled weapons and homemade Molotov cocktails, but they took the Nazis by surprise and forced them to withdraw for a few days.
Jewish resistance fighters Rachela Wyszogrodzka, left, Bluma Wyszogrodzka, center, and Małka Zdrojewicz, after his capture during the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943.
Unknown photographer / National Archives
The ghetto’s inhabitants hid in bunkers and sewers, but when German soldiers returned, they began to demolish the ghetto. Because of armed resistance, the Nazis’ original plan to liquidate the ghetto in a few days turned into almost a month of guerrilla warfare between the soldiers and the inhabitants.
The Germans ended up massacring thousands of people who were forced to leave their hiding places and sent most of the remaining inhabitants to the Treblinka death camp. Zivia, however, led a group through an underground sewer network and hid behind the ghetto walls.
Soviet forces liberated Warsaw in January 1945. Zivia moved to Palestine and, together with other leaders of the Polish resistance, founded the Kibbutz and Ghetto Fighters Museum. She testified against the senior SS officer Adolf Eichmann in 1961 and gave lectures on the Holocaust. She had two children in Israel and died there in 1978 at the age of 63.
Trapped by extermination because the Nazis did her job as a photographer, Faye Schulman fled and joined the guerrillas as a fighter and nurse whose photos documented atrocities and resistance activities.
Holocaust survivors Peter Silverman, saluting, and Faye Schulman in a ceremony for the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising in Toronto, April 7, 2013.
Vince Talotta / Toronto Star via Getty Images
Faigel “Faye” Lazebnik Schulman grew up in Lenin, a city on Poland’s eastern border where the Nazis carried out a mass shooting that killed his family and friends.
Faye was spared by the Nazis, who ordered her to work for them by revealing horrific photos of the settlement, including the murder of her family.
At just 19 years old, she fled to the forest and convinced a guerrilla commander to let her join the resistance, where a veterinarian trained her as a nurse.
Schulman helped to perform surgeries on stretcher stretchers, once anesthetizing a fellow fighter with vodka before cutting the bone from his injured finger with his teeth.
Faye Schulman during an operation.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum / Belarus State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War
She kept her Judaism a secret and slept with a weapon she used on regular guerrilla combat missions, including an invasion of her hometown.
After liberation, she received a medal from the Soviet government and married a guerrilla commander.
They lived in a refugee camp in Germany and joined an underground organization that smuggled European Jews into Palestine.
In 1948, she, her husband and son emigrated to Canada, where she now resides.
Niuta Teitelbaum – whose disguises included a Polish farm girl, the girlfriend of an SS officer and a doctor – murdered Nazis with a silenced pistol.
Niuta Teitelbaum in Lodz, Poland, in 1936.
Courtesy of Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum
Teitelbaum hoped that her small body and blond plaits would make her look like an innocent Aryan girl, when in reality she was an armed Jewish guerrilla who murdered Gestapo officers and organized a women’s unit within the Warsaw ghetto.
She grew up in Łódź and studied history at the University of Warsaw. Shortly after the Nazis occupied Warsaw in 1939, 22-year-old Teitelbaum volunteered for the underground movement to fight for other Jews and for a free Poland.
Working for the People’s Army and ŻOB, she trained women in the Warsaw ghetto to use the weapons she helped smuggle.
On one occasion, she entered a Gestapo apartment in central Warsaw, killed two Nazi Gestapo agents and wounded a third.
With the intention of ending the wounded agent, she gained access to the hospital where he was wearing a doctor’s coat and pretending to be a doctor; then she shot and killed the Nazi and the policeman who guarded him.
His reputation for flirting with SS agents and then shooting them in the head earned him a place on the Gestapo’s most wanted list and the nickname “Little Wanda with the Braids”.
She survived the Warsaw uprising, even joining an attack on a Nazi machine gun position atop the ghetto walls during the fighting, but in the summer of 1943, a few months after the Warsaw ghetto was destroyed, Gestapo agents captured, tortured and executed Teitelbaum. She was 25 years old.