RUTHFULLY YOURS

SEVENTY years ago today, a group of young men and women fired the shots that began the largest single act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising is rightly commemorated — through books, memoirs and movies — as an extraordinary act of courage in the face of near-certain death. Those who fought in the ghetto provide the iconic image of heroism, and an antidote to images of Jews being led to the gas chambers.

The uprising was indeed extraordinary. But the manner in which it has been remembered over the years — in Communist Poland, in the West and in Israel — says more about the use of history for contemporary purposes than the uprising itself. The true nature of the uprising cannot be understood through its postwar commemorations but only through its wartime origins.

In the fall of 1940, the Nazis, having defeated Poland, began the herding of nearly half a million Polish Jews into a ghetto in Warsaw. The Nazis forced them to build a wall and then sealed them inside. Children began to die of cold, disease and hunger. Emaciated bodies and corpses lay on the streets.

A Jewish council, headed by Adam Czerniakow, was made responsible by the Germans for organizing the ghetto’s Jews for slave labor, requisitions and soon worse. On July 22, 1942, the Germans began mass deportations to the death camp at Treblinka, about 60 miles to the northeast. They ordered the local Jewish council to prepare the daily deportation lists. Czerniakow knew the transports meant death. He did not call for resistance. Instead, on July 23, he swallowed a cyanide capsule.

Marek Edelman, a commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, declared many years later that he held only one thing against Czerniakow: that he made death his own private affair. “It was necessary to die with fireworks,” Edelman said.

During the summer of 1942, the Germans sent more than 265,000 Jews from the ghetto to the gas chambers, and shot thousands more. It was not easy to organize a Jewish resistance. The Jews had been uprooted, demoralized and impoverished, stricken by typhus and hunger. The Jewish council urged accommodation with the Germans. Reports about the fate of those who had been deported reached the ghetto, but were often not believed. Even as late as 1942, the Final Solution was beyond most imaginations.

But not all imaginations. It was predominantly young, secular men and women who began to organize. After the deportations began, Zionists of various persuasions formed the Jewish Combat Organization and began to procure arms. They were later joined by Communists and members of the Bund, a secular, socialist Jewish workers’ movement, which called for national-cultural autonomy for Jews within a Polish state. The Zionist far right formed its own resistance group, the Jewish Military Union.

In October 1942, the Jewish Combat Organization carried out its first death sentence, assassinating a Jew serving as a policeman in the ghetto. They had to send a message: there was a price for collaboration. By early 1943, most Jews of the ghetto had already been gassed. Those who remained were often young and alone, having lost their families. On Jan. 18, Jewish fighters surprised the German forces entering the ghetto with gunfire. Faced with resistance, the Germans soon ceased deportations.

But three months later, on April 19, they came back. Members of the resistance fired revolvers and threw grenades. The Star of David and the Polish flag were raised side by side on the ghetto’s tallest building. On April 23, Mordekhai Anielewicz, the uprising’s leader, wrote to his socialist Zionist comrade Yitzhak Zuckerman, “Things have surpassed our boldest dreams: the Germans ran away from the ghetto twice.”

The ghetto fighters were poorly armed, but determined. It was an incredible — and hopeless — battle. The Germans set fire to the ghetto. Anielewicz and his unit hid in a bunker. On May 8, when the Germans surrounded them, most of the fighters committed suicide. On May 16, the Nazi SS general Jürgen Stroop reported, “The former Jewish quarter in Warsaw no longer exists.”

The number of Jews who burned to death in the fire is unknown. More than 56,000 Jews were reported captured, about 7,000 of them were shot and 7,000 more were sent to Treblinka. Most of the others were sent to concentration camps and shot in November 1943.

“The only way out was the sewers,” Edelman testified at Stroop’s 1951 trial. Edelman had led the last surviving ghetto fighters to freedom through water that reeked of feces and methane. They were trapped underground for days and some suffocated to death. Perhaps 40 survived. Edelman, together with his fellow survivors Zivia Lubetkin and Yitzhak Zuckerman, went on to fight the Germans again the following year with a division of Polish Communist partisans.

The ghetto uprising was important to Poland’s postwar Communist government. A heroic act was a useful foundation myth for an unpopular regime fighting a civil war against the remnants of an anti-Nazi resistance that had turned against the Communists. In appropriating — and de-Judaizing — the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the Communists also sought to suppress the legacy of another anti-Nazi revolt: the 1944 Warsaw uprising. In August 1944, the Polish Home Army, an anti-German resistance connected to the Polish government in exile, rose up against the Nazis for 63 days while the Soviet Red Army remained camped across the river watching the city go up in flames. In postwar Poland, Communists seeking to discredit the Home Army and obscure Moscow’s ignominious role hung posters side by side reading “Glory to the heroic defenders of the ghetto” and “Shame to the fascist servants of the Home Army.”

The ghetto uprising was even more important to the nascent state of Israel, which sought to monopolize the history as a battle for the new Jewish state. The desire was understandable: for a long time Israelis — like Jews elsewhere — preferred to identify only with that tiny fragment of the Jewish population who fired shots during the Holocaust.

Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day was established in 1953 to mark the anniversary of the uprising. “Some Israeli leaders looked back on the Holocaust with fear and sometimes with shame,” wrote the Yad Vashem historian Israel Gutman. “The only usable past, the only history of that period that they adopted for the image of the future was the heroic chapter of resistance.” The struggle for a Jewish state, Gutman explained, was cast as an extension of the uprising.

IN the Israeli version, the uprising was carried out by Zionists — that is, by “New Jews,” who were vigorous, muscular and productive. The diaspora had produced the pale yeshiva boy bent over his books, who was unable to defend himself, and the Jewish council, who, confronted with Hitler’s Final Solution, could do nothing but continue a long tradition of accommodation and hoping for the best.

By contrast, the New Jew envisioned by the Zionists would be bound to his own land and capable of working it himself. He would overcome the emasculation and degradation of the diaspora. It was this New Jew who could transform a humiliating past into a proud future and redeem a unified Jewish nation.

But there was no unified nation, and the ghetto uprising was not a purely Zionist affair. The Jews who found themselves sealed within the ghetto, like the millions of other Jews living in Eastern Europe, were deeply divided — by language and religiosity and class, by national identification and political ideology. Inside the ghetto were Polish speakers and Yiddish speakers; Orthodox, Hasidic, secular Jews; assimilated Jews and nationalists. The Zionists ranged from radical right to radical left. And most politicized Jews were not Zionists; some were Polish socialists, some Communists, some members of the secular socialist Bund. A debate raged between Zionists and the Bund over the issue of “hereness” versus “thereness” — and the Bund believed firmly that the future of the Jews was here, in Poland, alongside their non-Jewish neighbors.

Today, the teleological deceptions of retrospect make it seem a foregone conclusion that the Zionists would win that debate. Yet in the 1920s and 1930s, the Bund’s program seemed much more grounded, sensible and realistic: a Jewish workers’ party allied with a larger labor movement, a secular Jewish culture in Yiddish, the language already spoken by most Jews, a future in the place where Jews already lived, alongside people they already knew. The Zionist idea that millions of European Jews would adopt a new language, uproot themselves en masse, and resettle in a Middle Eastern desert amid people about whom they knew nothing was far less realistic.

In 1942, it took time before Bundists and Communists joined Zionists in the creation of the Jewish Combat Organization. They organized themselves into fighting divisions according to political party. Even then, the better-armed Revisionist Zionists — the Zionist far right — remained apart, and fought the Germans separately during the ghetto uprising. The parties had very different ideas about the political future. But the uprising was less about future life than present death.

Edelman, who had survived by escaping through the sewers, was the last living commander of the uprising. After the war, in Communist Poland, he became a cardiologist: “to outwit God,” as he once said. In the 1970s and ’80s he re-emerged in the public sphere as an activist in the anti-Communist opposition, working with the Committee for the Defense of Workers and the Solidarity movement. He died in 2009, and to this day, he is celebrated as a hero in Poland.

He is remembered with more ambivalence in Israel. “Israel has a problem with Jews like Edelman,” the Israeli author Etgar Keret told a Polish newspaper in 2009. “He didn’t want to live here. And he never said that he fought in the ghetto so that the state of Israel would come into being.” Not even Moshe Arens, a former Israeli defense minister and an admirer of Edelman, could persuade an Israeli university to grant the uprising hero an honorary degree.

After the war, Yitzhak Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin, who had survived with Edelman, founded a kibbutz in Israel in memory of the ghetto fighters. Edelman remained close to them until they died.

Zionism, however, remained unappealing to him. Nor did he fantasize about reviving the diaspora nationalism of the Bund. He believed the history of Jews in Poland was over. There were no more Jews. “It’s sad for Poland,” he told me in 1997, “because a single-nation state is never a good thing.”