Israeli President Shimon Peres joined his Polish counterpart, Lech Kaczynski, Tuesday, April 14, for a ceremony at the site from which the Nazis ultimately sent 300,000 Jews to death camps. Young Israelis’ laid flowers and lit candles at the monument to the ghetto fighters to honor the dead, television footage showed.
The annual ceremony was apparently brought forward because of a clash with the Jewish Sabbath.
Peres, who was born in Poland before moving to Israel, and President Kaczynski were set to meet survivors from the Jewish resistance. The Israeli leader praised those who resisted the Nazis, saying that although they lost the battle, they scored a "victory of humanity over
human bestiality."
"They lost the battle, but from history’s point of view there never was a greater victory, a victory of humanity over human bestiality," he said at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial on the Zamenhofa street near the Umschalgplaats.
The uprising began on April 19, 1943, and lasted for three weeks. A few hundred young Jews took up arms to resist deportation to Nazi extermination camps.
GERMAN TROOPS
For almost a month, fighters held at bay 3,000 German troops who used explosives and fire to raze the Ghetto, according to several accounts.
Between seven and fourteen thousand Jews reportedly died during the battle. A further 300,000 were sent by train to the Treblinka death camp, some 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Warsaw.
It was described as the first major act of armed civilian resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland, and one of the largest Jewish uprisings. At a at the camp, Kaczynski, who paid tribute to the non-Jewish Polish resistance: "While we remember that unimaginable crime, we must also remember those who, under the threat of death for them and their families, saved other innocent human lives," he said, accompanied by Peres.
Several hundred young Israelis also took part, with several of them accompanying elderly Holocaust survivors to light candles in a ceremony marked by prayers and songs. An estimated 800,000 people were killed at the camp.
At the beginning of World War Two, Poland was the centre of Europe’s Jewish community. About half of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust were Polish.
ANTI-SEMITISM CONCERNS
Tuesday’s ceremony came amid concern about rising anti-Semitism and nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. In one of the latest incidents, graves of over 320 Holocaust victims were desecrated on the site of a former concentration camp in the Czech Republic, Radio Prague reported Tuesday, April 14.
It said that in the attack at TerezÃn, Northern Bohemia, the bronze name plates of 327 victims of the Holocaust were stolen. The station quoted a news website, Novinky.cz, as saying that the attack "appears not to have been an act of anti-Semitism, but of theft."
The theft happened last week, and on Tuesday, April 14, local police reportedly appealed for witnesses to come forward. Those responsible, if caught, could face up to eight years in prison, Radio Prague said. In recent days, government officials were involved in several anti-fascist demonstrations in Budapest and Prague. (With reports from Warsaw).
