Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ANNOTATION
Until the Nazi invasion, Warsaw was the home of Europe's largest Jewish community. Resistance is the full story of the Jews' attempts to fight the Nazis, revealed by dramatic excerpts from diaries, letters, and other documents of the period. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Photos.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
On April 19, 1943, thousands of Nazi troops were given the order to remove all Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, a few square blocks sheltering the remnants of the half million or more Jewish citizens of Poland's capital, to the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz. They were to kill those who resisted. A few hundred of the trapped Jews, mostly teenagers, armed only with pistols, Molotov cocktails, and a few light machine guns, vowed to fight back. Resistance is the full story of the uprising and the events leading to it, told by a survivor of the battle who is now a world-renowned Israeli scholar of the Holocaust. Warsaw in the 1920s and 1930s was the home of Europe's largest and most vibrant Jewish community. It included the rich, the poor, and the middle class; casual assimilationists and ardent Zionists; representatives of the full spectrum of political and religious factions. Then came the German onslaught of ruthless violence against the Jews - isolation and starvation amid desperation and disease - then deportations. As the ghetto walls rose, hundreds of thousands were rounded up and sent to Treblinka. But resistance began to take shape, and when the final attack order came, the ghetto fighters stood ready. Supported by moving and dramatic excerpts from diaries, letters, and other documents of the period, Resistance is destined to take its place as the classic account of a most important turning point in Jewish and world history.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, following Hitler's orders to annihilate the Jewish population of Poland's capital, pitted hundreds of poorly armed, starving Jews fighting to the death, in total isolation, against an overwhelming Nazi army. This superb, moving, richly informative history of the uprising, which was led by an underground resistance group, should erase the stereotype of the passive Jewish victim. Himself a survivor of the battle, Gutman ( The Jews of Warsaw ), a history professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, uses contemporaneous diaries, letters, underground press articles, survivors' accounts, poems and Nazi documents to create a vivid picture of daily life in the ghetto, and of temporary alliances forged among Jewish fighting factions torn by ideological rifts. He also illuminates contacts between Jewish partisans and the Polish underground and fills in the cultural background by delineating Warsaw's vibrant pre-war Jewish community. Photos. (Apr.)
"Superb, moving, richly informative history."
Library Journal
Gutman, a survivor of the Holocaust and a scholar on the subject, here traces the events that led the peaceful Warsaw Jewry into active resistance against the Nazis. In the 1920s and 1930s, Warsaw had Europe's largest and most vibrant Jewish community. After Warsaw fell to Hitler, the Jewish underground formed in order to preserve the humanity of the Jews. They ran a clandestine press, established an uneasy alliance with the Polish underground, and eventually armed themselves while plotting retaliatory strategies. Gutman explores commonly held beliefs, e.g., that the Jews waited too long to defend themselves and that many did not believe reports of a Final Solution. The facts of the book are supported by excerpts from diaries, letters, newspapers, rare documents, and photographs. Gutman presents a dramatic and memorable picture of the ghetto. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.-Mary Salony, West Virginia Northern Community Coll. Lib., Wheeling
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