Warsaw Ghetto uprising survivor honored on 80th anniversary

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 told The Associated Press at her home in central Israel.

Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, marked with solemn ceremonies in schools and workplaces 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% of Warsaw’s population — into just 2.4% 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. 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.

TSAFRIR ABAYOV — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Holocaust survivor Tova Gutstein, 90, who lived in the Warsaw Ghetto as a child, poses for a photo at her apartment in the city of Rishon Lezion, Israel, on Sunday.