In May of 1943 the Germans finally destroyed the Jews still in the Warsaw ghetto but Warsaw, now Juden frei, was to see more blood in 1944.
The suicidal actions of Hamas, their willingness to die for a failing cause, reminds me of the Warsaw ghetto.
The Jewish resistance had arisen within the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Poland during World War II,. The Warsaw ghetto uprising ended when the poorly armed and supplied Jewish resistance was crushed by the Germans on 16 May. The ghetto uprising was, like todays Hamas war, essentially suicidal. The Jewish fighters knew that everyone in the ghetto would die.
The Jewish uprising was reflected a year later when , on 1 August 1944, as part of a nationwide plan, the Polish resistance organized Operation Tempest, As the Soviet Army approached Warsaw, the Poles wanted to drive the German occupiers from the city and help with the larger fight against Germany. Equally important. the Poles wanted to liberate Warsaw before the Soviets, to underscore Polish sovereignty .
Winston Churchill pleaded with Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt to help Britain’s Polish allies, to no avail. Then, without Soviet air clearance, Churchill sent over 200 low-level supply drops by the Royal Air Force, the South African Air Force and the Polish Air Force under British High Command. Later, after gaining Soviet air clearance, the US Army Air Force sent one high-level mass airdrop as part of Operation Frantic. The Soviet Union refused to allow American bombers from Western Europe to land on Soviet airfields after dropping supplies to the Poles.
Although the exact number of casualties remains unknown, it is estimated that about 16,000 members of the Polish resistance were killed and about 6,000 badly wounded. In addition, between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians died, mostly from mass executions. Jews being harboured by Poles were exposed by German house-to-house clearances and mass evictions of entire neighbourhoods. German casualties totalled over 8,000 soldiers killed and missing, and 9,000 wounded. During the urban combat approximately 25% of Warsaw’s buildings were destroyed. Following the surrender of Polish forces, German troops systematically leveled another 35% of the city block by block. Together with earlier damage suffered in the 1939 invasion of Poland and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, over 85% of the city was destroyed by January 1945, when the course of the events in the Eastern Front forced the Germans to abandon the city.
My Dad saw mush of the horror wrought by the Nazis. not just in the horror of Buchenwald but on the devastation the Nazi-ism caused to all of Germany. The pictures my brother refuses ot allow to be mad pubic show that horror.
Is this the fate Hamas wants for Gaza?
(a large part of this is from WIKIPEDIA)