Israel to honor Warsaw Ghetto revolt survivors

Resistance took place 80 years ago this week

JERUSALEM — Tova Gutstein was born in Warsaw the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. She was 10 years old when the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto launched the first act of collective defiance against the Nazis in Europe.

Now 90, she is among the few remaining witnesses of the ghetto uprising — and a vanishing generation of Holocaust survivors — as Israel marks the 80th anniversary of a revolt that has shaped its national consciousness.

On Monday night, Gutstein will be one of six Holocaust survivors honored by Israel as torch-lighters in its annual ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. She said the horrors are still seared in her mind.

“Over 80 years have passed, and I can’t forget it,” Gutstein said at her home in central Israel.

Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, marked with solemn ceremonies nationwide, begins at sundown on Monday. Theaters, concerts, cafes and restaurants close and television and radio broadcasts break into Holocaust commemorations.

A two-minute siren brings the country to a standstill; traffic freezes as people exit their cars and stand silently in the streets to commemorate the 6 million Jews killed by Nazi Germany and its allies.

A year after occupying Poland in 1939, Nazi Germany confined hundreds of thousands of Jews — 30 percent of Warsaw’s population — into 2.4 percent of the city’s area in what became known as the Warsaw Ghetto.

At the height of the ghetto’s horrors in 1941, one Jew died on average, every nine minutes from infectious diseases, starvation or Nazi violence, said David Silberklang, a senior historian at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

Gutstein grew up in the ghetto. Her father was forced into a labor camp by the Nazis and never seen again. Fenced in by electrified barbed wire, she and other Jewish children would crawl through the sewers to scavenge for food. Some children fell into the sewage and were swept away to their deaths, she recalled.

“We only thought about bread, food, how to obtain food,” she said. “We had no other thoughts.”

Around two-thirds of the Warsaw Ghetto, some 265,000 people, were deported to the Majdanek and Treblinka death camps in the summer of 1942. The following spring, the Nazis began preparing to deport the ghetto’s remaining 60,000 Jews to their deaths.

The Nazis stationed an army around the ghetto on April 18, 1943. The following day, on the eve of the Jewish Passover holiday, the German forces moved in. Jewish resistance groups fought back.

Gutstein was outside the ghetto when the uprising began. “German planes and tanks were bombing the ghetto. I was terribly afraid,” she said.

“The skies were red with fire. I saw buildings suddenly collapsing.” Returning to the ghetto through the sewers, she discovered that her house, along with many others, was destroyed.

“I wandered about and looked for my mother and my siblings but couldn’t find anyone,” Gutstein said.

The Warsaw Ghetto fighters fought for their lives in bunkers they made inside the ghetto’s buildings. Many were killed in the streets or deported to the death camps. After a month of fighting, the Germans destroyed the Great Synagogue.

“The goal of the uprising was not rescue,” said Silberklang, the historian. He said it was last-ditch resistance against inevitable death.

The aim was “to go down fighting and influence when and how they die — and hopefully somebody will survive,” Silberklang said.

Tova Gutstein