Resistance fighter guided comrades to safety during the Warsaw Uprising
Simcha Rotem, who has died aged 94, was almost certainly the last survivor of the several hundred Jewish combatants who in 1943 defied the overwhelming might of the occupying German forces in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; while most of the fighters perished, Rotem helped lead dozens to safety through the city’s sewers.
On September 1, 1939, the population of Warsaw numbered about one million, of whom almost a third were Jews. Rotem, then aged 15, was on his way to school when he saw German aircraft in the sky overhead. He returned home, but his house took a direct hit from a bomb and was destroyed.
His younger brother Israel and four other family members, including his grandparents, were killed, and he himself was gravely injured by a large wooden splinter which pierced his windpipe. Having eventually freed himself from the debris, and narrowly avoided being electrocuted by power lines which had fallen across him, Rotem was taken by stretcher to a first-aid post only to discover that there was no-one to tend the wounded. Staggering about the streets, he was spotted by a schoolfriend, who carried him home on his back.
In September 1940, the Germans established a ghetto, 3.5 square miles in area and bounded by a 10ft high wall, into which were eventually herded almost 500,000 Jews from Warsaw and beyond. Amid the cramped conditions, shortage of food and prevalence of disease, the orderly conduct of life inevitably broke down.
Already tough and wily, Rotem became a successful smuggler of food. He also found work cleaning houses beyond the ghetto which had been requisitioned by the families of SS officers. This gained him a pass which enabled him to move around the city.
He had inherited his maternal grandfather’s Aryan looks and throughout the war was able to get away without donning the yellow triangle Jews were forced to wear as a badge of race. During the summer of 1942, he lived as a cowherd with relations outside of Warsaw, while his family found sanctuary on another farm.
Consequently, they all escaped the initial liquidation of the ghetto, when some 300,000 of its inhabitants were sent to extermination camps, notably Treblinka.
Rotem was then asked by a girl he knew to take a package back into the ghetto. This he did by tagging along one evening with a returning Jewish working party. His looks made them think he was a provocateur, and he was only able to convince them by reciting prayers in Yiddish.
Thereafter, at 19 and under the nom de guerre ‘‘Kazik’’ (Casimir), he became the chief courier of one of the two main Jewish resistance movements in the city, the Leftwing ZOB. He was also its only male courier, it being less easy for the Germans to ascertain whether women were Jewish.
Constantly at risk from informers and spotchecks, Rotem often adopted a disguise as a Gestapo collaborator, wearing the long leather coats they favoured. This identity also enabled him more easily to intimidate those reluctant to aid him.
On April 19 1943 – the eve of Passover – the Germans began the final clearance of the ghetto. The operation was expected to last three days but the ZOB and other groups had established numerous defensive bunkers and held out for more than a month in what was the largest Jewish resistance action of the war.
Rotem and his comrades were armed only with light weapons and home-made petrol bombs. ‘‘At the first moment when I saw the great German force entering the ghetto, my first reaction . . . I felt utterly helpless,’’ he recalled. Yet that was followed by ‘‘an extraordinary sense of spiritual uplifting . . . this was the moment we had been waiting for ... to stand up to this all-powerful German’’.
Many fighters eventually committed suicide as the Germans closed in. Some 13,000 civilians also died in the fighting, with the official German death toll reported as 16.
Rotem remained haunted by his experiences of the time. ‘‘One night I was on patrol in the nearly completely destroyed ghetto,’’ he said. ‘‘I came upon a heap of human bodies. There was a sound of crying, and there was a dead mother still holding her baby. I stopped for a moment, then went on. The Germans had succeeded not only in annihilating the Jews, they had also robbed me of my humanity.’’
Throughout the fighting, Rotem risked his life to act as liaison between the ZOB commander in the ghetto, Mordechai Anielewicz, and his counterpart in the Gentile part of Warsaw, Yitzhak Zuckerman.
As the ghetto began to burn, he was sent back from outside to organise an escape route for the fighters, but the Germans had discovered many of the secret underground passageways. With the help of Polish sewage workers (encouraged at gunpoint), he ultimately got back into the ghetto, yet by the time he arrived the area lay in ruins.
He was born Szymon Ratheiser in Czerniakow, Warsaw, and grew up in a rowdy, working-class quarter of the city. His parents, Zvi and Miriam, Hasidic Jews, had four children, of whom he was the eldest. Rotem’s sister Dina died in the Ghetto Uprising, as did his girlfriend.
After his escape, he continued to help the 20,000 Jews still hiding in Warsaw, and in 1944 he took part in the city-wide Uprising against the Germans. This, too, was crushed, as the approaching Red Army halted and watched.
Following the end of the war, Rotem joined a vengeance group before emigrating with his parents to Palestine. There he was placed in the Atlit detention camp by the British. He subsequently joined the Haganah and in 1948 fought in Israel’s war of independence. Later he worked as a manager for a supermarket chain.
Rotem was a member of the Yad Vashem committee, which honours those who saved Jews during the Holocaust as being Righteous Among the Nations. Latterly, citing his own experience, he had criticised Poland for passing a law criminalising references to Poles as having been complicit in the actions of the Nazi regime.
He published a memoir, Warsaw Ghetto Fighter, in 1984 and in 1997 was awarded the Raoul Wallenberg medal, which is given to those who have helped the defenceless.
His wife Gina predeceased him and he is survived by their two sons. – Telegraph