Several hundred people commemorated the
beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising 64 years ago. Marek Edelman, the
only surviving leader of the uprising against the Nazis, laid flowers Thursday at a memorial to ghetto rebels in central Warsaw. President Lech Kaczynski placed a wreath at the memorial in honor of
the victims, andPolish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich said Kaddish. “The fighters wanted to choose how they
would die, they wanted to fight to the end,” Schudrich said. “This struggle is a lesson to us that
the good must not remain silent.” The Nazis crammed some 400,000 Jews into the ghetto in 1940. After mass deportations to the Treblinka death camp in 1942, some 700 fighters launched an uprising against thousands of German soldiers. The uprising was crushed after nearly a month, and some 7,000 Jews were shot. The remaining Jews were sent to
concentration camps.
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