Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; the largest Jewish resistance movement during the Second World War. Anielewicz inspired further rebellions in both ghettos and extermination camps with his leadership. His character was engraved as a symbol of courage and sacrifice, and was a major figure of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
The Jewish Combat Organization was a World War II resistance movement in occupied Poland, which was instrumental in organizing and launching the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. ŻOB took part in a number of other resistance activities as well.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the 1943 act of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Poland during World War II to oppose Nazi Germany's final effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to the gas chambers of the Majdanek and Treblinka extermination camps.
Jürgen Stroop was a German SS commander during the Nazi era, who served as SS and Police Leader in occupied Poland and Greece. He led the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 and wrote the Stroop Report, a book-length account of the operation. Following the defeat of Germany, Stroop was prosecuted during the Dachau Trials and convicted of murdering nine U.S. prisoners of war. After his extradition to Poland, Stroop was tried, convicted, and executed for crimes against humanity.
Mokotów Prison is a prison in Warsaw's borough of Mokotów, Poland, located at 37 Rakowiecka Street. It was built by the Russians in the final years of the foreign Partitions of Poland. During the Nazi German occupation and later, under the communist rule, it was a place of detention, torture and execution of the Polish political opposition and underground fighters. The prison continues to function, holding prisoners awaiting trial or sentencing, or those being held for less than one year.
Piotr Fronczewski, is a Polish actor and a cabaret and theatre singer. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most popular actors of his generation.
Kazimierz Damazy Moczarski was a Polish writer and journalist, an officer of the Polish Home Army. His book Conversations with an Executioner, recounted a series of interviews with Nazi war criminal Jürgen Stroop, a fellow inmate of the UB secret police prison under Stalinism, who was soon to be executed. Thrown in jail in 1945 and pardoned eleven years later during Polish October, Moczarski spent four years on death row (1952–56), and was tried three times as an enemy of the state while in prison.
In Poland, the resistance movement during World War II was led by the Home Army. The Polish resistance is notable among others for disrupting German supply lines to the Eastern Front, and providing intelligence reports to the British intelligence agencies. It was a part of the Polish Underground State.
The Great Synagogue of Warsaw was one of the grandest synagogues constructed in Poland in the 19th century. At the time of its opening, it was the largest Jewish house of worship in the world. It was located on Tłomackie street in Warsaw.
Josef Blösche was a convicted war criminal and a member of the Nazi Party who served in the SS and SD during World War II. Blösche shot and killed many Jews, and helped send many more Jews to their deaths in extermination camps. He also participated in several massacres.
Stanisław Zaczyk was a Polish theatre and film actor. He was awarded the Polonia Restituta in 1969.
The Grossaktion Warsaw was the Nazi code name for the deportation and mass murder of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto during the summer of 1942, beginning on 22 July. During the Grossaktion, Jews were terrorized in daily round-ups, marched through the ghetto, and assembled at the Umschlagplatz station square for what was called in the Nazi euphemistic jargon "resettlement to the East". From there, they were sent aboard overcrowded Holocaust trains to the extermination camp in Treblinka.
The Stroop Report is an official report prepared by General Jürgen Stroop for the SS chief Heinrich Himmler, recounting the German suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the liquidation of the ghetto in the spring of 1943. Originally titled The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!, it was published in the 1960s.
Erich Steidtmann was a Nazi SS officer believed to have been involved in the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest single revolt by the Jews during the Holocaust, the bulk of which occurred from April 19 until May 16, 1943, ending when the resistance was crushed by German troops under the direct command of Jürgen Stroop. Efforts were being undertaken by German prosecutors in the months before his death to prosecute Steidtmann for his involvement in war crimes.
Andrzej Krzysztof Kunert is a Polish historian and lecturer, specializing in the history of Polish resistance movement in World War II. Since April 2010 he is the secretary general of the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites.
During World War II, Trawniki men were Central and Eastern European Nazi collaborators, consisting of either volunteers or recruits from prisoner-of-war camps set up by Nazi Germany for Soviet Red Army soldiers captured in the border regions during Operation Barbarossa launched in June 1941. Thousands of these volunteers served in the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland until the end of World War II. Trawnikis belonged to a category of Hiwis, Nazi auxiliary forces recruited from native subjects serving in various jobs such as concentration camp guards.
The Battle of Muranów Square was a battle between the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) and Third Reich troops which took place during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on April 19–22, 1943. The fighting between the German pacification forces under Jürgen Stroop, which were destroying the ghetto, and the Jewish insurgent forces of ŻZW, under Paweł Frenkel, took place in the now non-existent Muranów Square.
Executions in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto (1943–1944) – mass executions of Polish Political prisoners and people of Jewish descent carried out secretly by German occupiers in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.
In the best-known photograph taken during the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a boy holds his hands over his head while SS-Rottenführer Josef Blösche points a submachine gun in his direction. The boy and others hid in a bunker during the final liquidation of the ghetto, but they were caught and forced out by German troops. After the photograph was taken, all of the Jews in the photograph were marched to the Umschlagplatz and deported to Majdanek extermination camp or Treblinka. The exact location and the photographer are not known, and Blösche is the only person in the photograph who can be identified with certainty. The image is one of the most famous photographs of the Holocaust, and the boy came to represent children in the Holocaust, as well as all Jewish victims.
A well-known Holocaust photograph depicts three Jewish women who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, took shelter in a bunker with a weapons cache, and were forced out by SS soldiers. One of the women, Bluma Wyszogrodzka (center), was shot. The other two, Małka Zdrojewicz (right) and Rachela Wyszogrodzka (left) were marched to the Umschlagplatz and deported to Majdanek concentration camp, where Wyszogrodzka was murdered.
