Smoldering ruins in Białystok (August 1943)
The Białystok Ghetto uprising was an insurrection in the Jewish Białystok Ghetto against the Nazi German occupation authorities during World War II. The uprising was launched on the night of August 16, 1943 and was the second-largest ghetto uprising organized in Nazi-occupied Poland after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April–May 1943. It was led by the Anti-Fascist Military Organisation (Antyfaszystowska Organizacja Bojowa), a branch of the Warsaw Anti-Fascist Bloc.
The revolt began upon the German announcement of mass deportations from the ghetto. The main objective was to break the German siege and allow the maximum number of Jews to escape into the neighboring Knyszyn (Knyszyński) Forest. A group of about 300 to 500 insurgents armed with 25 rifles and 100 pistols as well as home-made Molotov cocktails for grenades, attacked the overwhelming German force with a great loss of life. Leaders of the uprising committed suicide. Several dozen combatants managed to break through and run into the Knyszyn Forest where they joined other guerrilla groups.
The Białystok Ghetto was set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In February 1943, the first wave of mass deportations to Treblinka extermination camp took place, organized during country-wide Aktion Reinhard. The final liquidation of the ghetto was attempted on August 16, 1943, by regiments of the German SS reinforced by Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Latvian auxiliaries (“Hiwis”),known as the “Trawniki men” .
During the night of August 16, 1943, several hundred Polish Jews started an armed uprising against the troops carrying out liquidation of the ghetto. The guerillas led by Mordechaj Tenenbaum and Daniel Moszkowicz were armed with only one machine gun, rifles, several dozen pistols, Molotov cocktails and bottles filled with acid. As with the earlier Warsaw Ghetto Uprising extinguished in May 1943, the Białystok uprising had no chance for military success. However, it was seen as a way to die in combat rather than in German camps. A Betar youth commander was Yitzhak Fleischer, also spelled Fleisher, or Berl Fleischer according to different source.
The fights in isolated pockets of resistance lasted for several days, but the defence was broken almost instantly with a tank sent into the ghetto by SS Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik. German soldiers set fire to the area. The commanders of the struggle committed suicide after their bunkers ran out of ammunition. In spite of the insurgency, the planned deportations to concentration and extermination camps went ahead on August 17, 1943, without any delay. Approximately 10,000 Jews were led to the Holocaust trains and sent to camps in Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. A transport of 1,200 children were sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp and later to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
Several dozen guerillas managed to break through to the forests surrounding Białystok where they joined the partisan units of Armia Krajowa and other organisations and survived the war. It is estimated that out of almost 60,000 Jews who lived in Białystok before World War II, only several hundred survived the Holocaust.
US secretary of state says Poland’s 1943 Bialystok ghetto uprising was an act of bravery and dignity
Eighty years ago, no one would have dared to imagine a gathering like this – under the auspices of the mayor of Bialystok, in the presence of the United States ambassador to Poland, a former Polish ambassador to the United States, and Samuel Pisar’s wife – my mother – together with his children and grandchildren.
Survival simply was not in the cards when, on August 16, 1943, hundreds of Jewish men and women in the Bialystok ghetto led an uprising against the Nazis – a rebellion, as one leader put it, to determine how, not whether, they would die.
After crushing the revolt, the Nazis put the last of Bialystok’s Jews onto trains. Among them was my stepfather, Sam, then just thirteen years old, who was sent to Majdanek; his mother to Auschwitz; his little sister Freida likely to Theresienstadt.
How are we to understand this uprising eight decades later? I see it as one of countless acts of resistance by Jews in ghettos and Nazi German concentration camps across Europe – to reject their dehumanization, to reaffirm their dignity. Acts not of futility, but of bravery.
Acts like those of Sam’s father, David, who smuggled Jewish children out of the ghetto and weapons into it – for which he was eventually denounced to the Gestapo, and then tortured, killed, and thrown into a mass grave.
Acts like the decision of Sam’s mother, Helaina, made on the day they were deported – forcing her son to wear long pants instead of shorts, despite the blistering heat, so that he’d look more like a man than the boy he was, and so the Nazis would send him to a forced labor camp rather than to a death camp. He often said that, on that day, his mother gave him life for a second time.
For Sam himself, there were many acts of resistance. Surviving in the ghetto; escaping twice after being sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz – once by picking up a brush and pail and pretending he’d been sent to clean the floors; and, at dawn on a spring day in 1945, breaking away from a Nazi death march and into the arms of American GIs.
He never stopped resisting – by building a new life, a storied career, a family, and by relaying what he had endured from town halls to halls of power.
When the Polish edition of his memoir was first published in the 1980s, he made one of many returns to Bialystok. After speaking at a local high school, students followed him out onto the streets. They wanted him to show them where the ghetto had once stood, and to know what their parents and grandparents did when SS guards herded Jews toward the railway station. “Did they offer you a sip of water?” the students asked. “Did they shed a tear?”
Samuel kept telling his story, even though it was excruciating to relive it, because he felt an overwhelming responsibility to ensure that people never forgot, a responsibility made heavier by the fact that he was the only member of his immediate family – and of hundreds of students in his school in Bialystok – to survive.
As we lose more and more survivors, the responsibility to relay and to grapple with that history passes to all of us. For that reason, I’m grateful to the city of Bialystok, to its leaders, and to its citizens for recognizing this day, among other steps you have taken to ensure coming generations know what happened here.
Like teaching the accurate history of the Holocaust in Bialystok’s schools; and inviting survivors like Marian Turski and Ben Midler to share their experience; and placing a steppingstone outside Sam’s childhood home, inscribed with the names of his murdered family members.
The United States will always be your partner in keeping this history alive. We’re taking another step in that effort by working with our Congress to invest $1 million to help create a virtual tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau so that more people who can’t visit can experience the indelible impact of seeing that site.
So many more markers can and must be placed to educate people about this chapter of human history. For as my stepfather knew, “Never again” was not a guarantee. It was a command, in his words, “to do whatever I can in the struggle for a victory of hope over hate, destruction, and death, forces that can yet again, if [we do] not take care, drive humankind to madness.”
For Samuel, “Never again” was also a call for each of us to ask those difficult questions, not only of our past but of our present, not only of others but of ourselves. What are my acts of resistance? Wha am I doing in the face of inhumanity?
Of all his efforts to resist the Nazis, the one that I believe made Sam proudest was the act of love, not only surviving himself but building a new family and instilling the lives of those in it with a sense of hope, of freedom, of justice. That was his greatest revenge against Hitler.
So on this day, I know he would be especially moved to see not only his wife and two of his children in Bialystok, but also three of his five grandchildren – Arielle, David, Jeremiah – all doing their part to fulfill the enduring responsibility that, together, we inherit: to make real the command of “Never again.”