“We knew that we could not gain a physical victory in the long run, but we were determined to sell our lives at a very high price. Let it be said that had we received some assistance from outside, we would have inflicted much greater losses on the enemy.”
Speaking in Yiddish, Stephen Grayek, one of the leaders and founders of the Jewish underground in Poland during World War II, thus recalled the events of April, 1943 when the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto took arms against the German Army in the first organized resistance to Nazi occupation on the European continent.
Grayek delivered the keynote speech yesterday at the commemorative assembly at the St. Pancras Town Hall marking the 30th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and paying homage to the six million Jewish victims of the holocaust. The assembly is an annual event sponsored by the Association of Polish-Jewish ex-Servicemen in cooperation with the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the British Section of the World Jewish Congress and other Jewish organizations.
Grayek said the official Polish underground possessed huge stocks of arms and equipment but refused to provide any for the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. He said that after many months of protracted negotiations they managed to obtain between 40-50 guns and about 30 hand grenades. “For the rest we had to buy our arms outside the Ghetto.” he said.
“Poles bought the arms from German and Italian soldiers and sold them to us at a good price, simply for gain,” Grayek said. “We had the money from two sources: collections in the Ghetto and monies smuggled to us illegally by the Jews of what was then Palestine. The objective of the battle was to give the enemy an answer, to avenge the bloodshed. This objective we achieved…(but) the world stood by during the massacres as well as during the battle of the Ghetto, as we know.”
Grayek, who is an Israeli citizen, added: “Thirty years ago, we fought for the honor of our people but without hope of physical victory. Today we are engaged in a different type of war. We are fighting to secure the Jewish State and to make peace in the Middle East possible and durable. We have learned the lesson of the past and we are applying it to the present.”
Leon Feit, chairman of the Polish-Jewish ex-Servicemens Association who presided at the memorial, claimed that the world let down the Warsaw Ghetto fighters and is still letting down the Jewish people. He cited the recent Security Council resolution, sponsored by Britain and France, which condemned Israel, and the continued ill treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
