What+events+led+up+to+the+rebellion?


 * Events Leading up to the Rebellion **



The Jewish people of Warsaw were becoming angry and afraid of the extended occupation of the Nazis in their city and how they had to live in the ghetto. Since the Nazis had marched into Warsaw, the Jewish people had been put down and had to face the worst conditions in the city. The walls of the ghetto were sealed on November 16, 1940, and the people knew nothing of what was going on in the outside world since their radios had been taken away and there was a towering wall separating them from the rest of the city. They became angry at this fact, and also scared. Starting in 1942, there were mass deportations of Jewish people from the ghetto to death and work camps across Germany and Poland. In the span between July 22 and September 12, 1942, there were almost 300,000 people deported from the ghettos. Around 265,000 were forced by SS guard and police units to the Treblinka killing center.

These rumors of killing centers began to spread and an effort began to arise to stop these deportations. Both the Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy and Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB) were created to fight the Nazi effort for deportations. The two groups fought for power of the resistance and the ability to control the fight against the Nazis. However, they decided to work together after a while where the threat of deportation rose. With a total of around 750 men, the resistance groups began to collect fire arms and explosives. Through smuggling, they were able to stockpile pistols, rifles, and Molotov cocktails. All of this would come to a fire point when the Nazis began a mass deportation on the eve of Passover. The plan for the Nazis was to liquidate the ghetto of all its inhabitants by April 20, 1943 as a birthday present for Adolf Hitler. The resistance forces realized this and thusly began what would be as they called it, the David versus Goliath battle, the Warsaw Resistance. Yitzhak Zuckerman tells about the decision to revolt:

"I don't think there is any need to analyze the Uprising in military terms. This was a war of less than a thousand people against a mighty army, no one doubted how it was likely to turn out. This is not a subject for a study in military school. Not the weapons, not the operations, nor the tactics, If there is a school to study the human spirit, there it should be a major subject. The really important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youths, after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers, and determine what death they would choose; Treblinka or Uprising. I don't know if there is a standard to measure that" (Bachrach, 28).