Posted on 04/18/2006 11:53:15 AM PDT by lizol
Poland marks 63rd anniversary of WWII Warsaw ghetto uprising Canadian Press
Radek Sikorski and religious leaders of Poland's Jewish community, flanked by Jewish Second World War veterans, laid flowers and prayed Tuesday to mark the 63rd anniversary of the doomed Warsaw ghetto uprising.
Several dozen officials and local residents also lit candles and said the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, at the monument to the heroes of the ghetto struggle during observances held on the eve of the anniversary.
On April 19, 1943, hundreds of young Jewish fighters took up arms in the first major act of armed civilian resistance against the Nazis, who invaded and occupied Poland in 1939.
The insurgents opted to fight the Nazis in the face of the German plan to exterminate the tens of thousands of Jews remaining in the ghetto.
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Would have been nicer if the Polish underground had tried to help out, 63 years ago.
And nicer now if there were an apology for failing to do so.
(And when the Poles in the rest of Warsaw rose up two years later, and nobody came to help them, they got just what they had dished out to others.)
Would have been even nicer if the American Jewish diaspora had tried to help out, 63 years ago.
Most of the able-bodied Poles were helping the Jews, by fighting against the Germans during the Battle of Britain, D-Day, North Africa, Monte Cassino.....
Poland never surrendered to Germany, there was NO Vichy Poland.
Bottom line:
The camps could never have been placed in France.
France had an active underground and the camps, the transportation lines to them, and their garrisons would have been under constant attack.
Poland also had an active underground. Attacks on the RR lines? Harrassment of the garrisons? Zip! Nada.
Help for the Warsaw ghetto? 50 old (and some unworkable)
pistols.
Uhh France was also a little bit closer to England than Poland was. It took flights from England to supply the French resistance.
Guys, cool down! What are you doing here? This is to remember the victims of the Ghetto uprising and not to blame those who didn´t stand up. I´m German, and I´ve asked myself what had I done during the Nazi time. The honest answer is, that I don´t know. Given I´d been educated the way I was I would not have participated in the Nazi party, but I don´t know whether I had had the strength to risk my life in the resistance.
Why do we call those who had this courage heroes? Because their actions were extra-ordinary. If it were ordinary, why should we call them heroes? I don´t blame anybody for being ordinary. The extra-ordinary behaviour needs our attention - be it in the evil sense or in the good sense.
So don´t engage in verbal fights about those who behaved ordinary. They don´t deserve to be blamed. The Nazis committed the atrocities.
These few Jews, who decided to fight in the ghetto didn't have any chances anyway. There was no sense to waste weapons for them.
While the behavior of partisans toward Jews was often shameful, no one "deserved" what happened to Warsaw at the hands of Hitler and Stalin a year later, or to the AK for years afterward.
The relatively few Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto held off the Germans longer than the entire French Army.
It's permissible for university professors to write books that appeal to the rest of the anti semites, the David Duke types.
Permissible for certain Churches to recommend divestiture from investments in Israel.
Equating palestinian terrorism with the bulldozing of the houses of terrorists.
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