During the months of April and May 1943, a celebratory atmosphere took hold outside the Warsaw Ghetto’s walls. Children whirled around carousels, giddy crowds converged to holler at the explosive spectacle, and friends watched the pyrotechnics show from front-row rooftops. One onlooker described the streets of Warsaw as a “never-ending parade.”

Within the Ghetto walls, cries were not of laughter and wonder but of terror and anguish. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — the largest Jewish-led armed resistance to the Holocaust — prompted Nazi occupiers in Warsaw to raze the entire urban area. The open-air prison where 450,000 Jewish people had once dwelled suddenly ceased to exist.

Today the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is universally commended in Poland and around the world as a bold act of resistance, but this was far from the case when it occurred. In the streets of Warsaw, many non-Jewish Poles rejoiced as their neighbors burned.

On the eighty-second anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, another population is burning. Israel’s ongoing genocide has devastated Gaza, damaging or destroying over 90 percent of its housing, displacing nearly two million Palestinians, and killing over sixty thousand, including around eighteen thousand children. Israelis have mostly expressed support for this calamity in a rhetorical landscape shockingly reminiscent of Warsaw 1943.

For many Jews, including descendants of Holocaust survivors like myself, it is agonizing that this violence is committed under the false pretext of Jewish safety. Some have forgotten the lessons of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The Uprising

In October 1940, about one year after invading Poland, Nazi Germany established a ghetto in the Jewish sector of Warsaw, erecting an eighteen-kilometer wall to separate Jewish from Catholic Poles. Within the walls, Jews suffered from starvation rations, deteriorating sanitation infrastructure, and squalid living conditions. Between 1940 and 1942, eighty-three thousand died of starvation and disease.

In July 1942, the Nazis ramped up the pace of genocide, relocating 265,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp over the course of three months. When people in the Ghetto discovered that “relocation” was a euphemism for murder, Jewish militants, many of whom belonged to socialist political organizations, founded the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) to coordinate an armed resistance.

A second round of deportations, begun on April 19, 1943, the day before Passover, sparked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Approximately 650 Jewish fighters, most of whom were untrained, staged their defense against over two thousand Nazi soldiers backed by tanks and heavy artillery. On the first day of the uprising, insurgents pelted two Nazi tanks with Molotov cocktails, successfully destroying one of them. The uprising, which leveraged guerrilla tactics to strike unexpecting Nazi forces with grenades and pistol fire before retreating to hideouts, lasted twenty-seven days.

The Nazis responded by razing the entire Warsaw Ghetto, destroying buildings block by block until there was nowhere left for fighters to coordinate their resistance. By May 16, 1943, with the bombing of the Great Synagogue, every building in the Jewish sector of Warsaw had been destroyed, and all captives were deported to death camps.

Today the city of Warsaw is strewn with plaques and monuments to the Holocaust. Preserved fragments of the ghetto wall mark the boundaries where it once stood; the POLIN Museum tells the thousand-year history of Polish Jews; and a commemorative grave marks the exact location where uprising commanders took their own lives, refusing to die at the hands of their enemies. The countless memorials scattered across Warsaw today celebrate the uprising, but the Polish reaction to the Jewish resistance when it occurred was distinct.

A Sinister Spectacle

Firsthand accounts collected in a POLIN Museum exhibit titled Around Us a Sea of Fire, many of which come from Jewish Poles hiding outside the Ghetto, piece together a vivid picture of how non-Jewish Warsaw reacted to the Nazis quelling the uprising. Overwhelmingly, at least in public, the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, when not regarded with indifference, was considered a spectacle for onlookers to enjoy.

Henryk Rudnicki, witnessing the destruction of the Ghetto, wrote,

The first thing to catch my attention were the merry-go-rounds, jammed with people. Yes, the carousels were spinning round in the thick clouds of smoke from the tenement houses burning next to them. Few metres away people are being burnt alive, but the show must go on. The crowds, bubbling with excitement, rushed from all corners of the city to watch the burning quarter.

Part of this attitude was apathy toward the suffering of Jews. Aleksandra Sołowiejczyk-Guter, a Jewish woman hiding in Warsaw, wrote in her diary that “the vast majority responded to the fighting in the ghetto as if they were responding to a struggle of a faraway, unknown tribe on another hemisphere.” Perhaps this false sense of distance came from a sense of relief that it wasn’t they who were targeted. But attributing the celebratory atmosphere to mere apathy is insufficient. Sołowiejczyk-Guter writes, “Alas, there were some Poles who, having hitherto resented the Jews for allowing themselves to be led like lambs to slaughter, now resented them for defending themselves.”

This resentment revealed itself in the form of antisemitic disdain, which was present in prewar Polish society and frequently expressed by the Roman Catholic Church and Polish nationalists.

Bluma Altmed, a Polish Jew disguised as a Gentile outside the ghetto, recalled a conversation with a Catholic woman who was upset with Jewish resistance fighters for disturbing her sleep: “I have a constant headache because I can’t sleep in such conditions. All night long, I hear machine guns. . . . The explosions and shootings never end. What are those Yids thinking, anyway? They have to die, one way or the other. The least they could do is to give up.”

The streets were rife with familiar antisemitic tropes. Emanuel Ringleblum, who founded a clandestine organization in the Warsaw Ghetto that provided a meticulous record of events in German-occupied Poland, documented public statements like “Little Yids are burning alive, but Big Yids are in power in America and they will rule us once the war has ended” and “Jews have been sucking our blood.” Prominent among these stereotypes were the comparisons of Jews to bed bugs, vermin, rats, and cannibals.

Not everybody reacted with such vitriol. Many non-Jewish Poles privately expressed empathy for Jews in the Ghetto. Some families even took great risk in helping Jews escape the ghetto and hide in the non-Jewish sector of Warsaw. Later in the war, Jewish survivors and non-Jewish Poles joined forces in a subsequent citywide uprising against the Nazis. But at the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, solidarity and compassion were mostly contained to the privacy of homes. In the streets, dehumanization reigned supreme.

Decades of Dehumanization

As Israel continues its onslaught on Gaza, indiscriminately killing men, women, and children, many are appalled by the indifference or support from Israeli society. An October 2024 poll shows that the majority of Israeli Jews either think the war in Gaza should continue or feel indifferent. Among those who think the war should end, only 6 percent cite “great cost in human life” as the primary motivator; instead, the majority are concerned with the twenty-four remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. Furthermore, despite ample documentation of war crimes and the International Criminal Court’s issuing of a warrant for the arrest of Israel’s top leaders, 83 percent of Israeli Jews believe the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has conducted itself with “good or excellent ethical conduct during the war.”

The attitudes reflected in this poll have been expressed by Israeli leaders, soldiers, journalists, and citizens. Former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant — who was eventually fired for being too moderate — declared Israel that was “fighting human animals” in announcing a complete siege on Gaza. IDF soldiers have posted videos of themselves on social media celebrating the destruction of Gaza, mocking Palestinian captives. Avi Rabina, journalist with the Jerusalem-based show Radio Kol-Chai, tweeted, “Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza! Erase Gaza!” Erytan Weinstein, host of the longest standing Israeli podcast broadcasted in English, said, “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second.” At the annual Jerusalem Day march, crowds erupted chanting, “Death to Arabs! May your village burn!”

Just as antisemitism existed in Polish society before the Holocaust, anti-Palestinian dehumanization is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, it goes back to the very founding of Israel. During the 1947–48 Nakba, Zionist leaders manipulated trauma from the Holocaust by comparing their Palestinian adversaries to Nazis. This instilled the idea that Palestinians defending their homes were motivated by a wicked antisemitic hatred, thereby justifying their ethnic cleansing. In 1969, former prime minister Golda Meir, regarded by many as a liberal Israeli hero, declared, “There was no such thing as Palestinians.” As Israel bombed Gaza in 2014, Israelis gathered in the border town of Sderot to celebrate the spectacle. Locals and visitors from Tel Aviv pulled out lawn chairs and couches, clinked beers, and took selfies with the backdrop of Gaza on fire — an updated version of festivities from Warsaw.

As in Poland in 1943, attitudes are not monolithic in Israeli society. Some Israelis refuse mandatory military conscription, subjecting themselves to prison sentences. Activists protest illegal settlements in the West Bank. Recent rallies in Tel Aviv garnered crowds of hundreds demanding an immediate cease-fire. These acts should not be diminished, but they are not representative of a society that overwhelmingly supports the subjugation of Palestinians.

Of course, the circumstances that underlie these attitudes are distinct from those in Warsaw in 1943. For one, Israel is the result of a decades-long colonial project that dispossessed Palestinians of their land, whereas no equivalent colonial history was perpetrated by Poland. Palestinian resistance to this colonialism has at times inflicted violence against Israelis, including on October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters killed 1,181 people, among them 736 Israeli civilians. (At least fourteen Israelis were also killed by the IDF’s use of the Hannibal Directive.) Conversely, Jewish resistance during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was against Germans soldiers, not Catholic Poles, who were most often onlookers. Poles also suffered at the hands of the Nazis, facing deportations to concentration camps and brutal bombing campaigns, and many supported Jewish resistance to the German occupation forces.

Some might argue that the dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society stems from a legitimate fear of violent retaliation and thus cannot be compared to Warsaw 1943. It is true that the antisemitism outside of the burning ghetto was generally rooted in conspiratorial tropes resembling The Protocols of the Elders of Zion rather than any threat that Jews posed to Gentile Poles. However, Israeli political leaders, now and historically, also distort reality to manufacture fear and hatred toward Palestinians. As Israel’s response to the Great March of Return at the Gaza border in 2018–19 shows, even peaceful Palestinian protest is met with devastating Israeli violence and public demonization.

What Will We Remember?

It is tempting to believe that the memorials to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising represent an idealized arc of history that bends toward justice. But while the official Polish narrative does indeed honor the uprising as a bold and principled act of resistance, it also shirks the responsibility of Polish society for the atrocities of the Holocaust. Missing from the narrative is the elation of the “never-ending parade,” the Poles who blackmailed Jews escaping the Ghetto, and those who collaborated directly with the Nazis.

When Polish historian Barbara Endelking curated the POLIN exhibit exploring common Polish attitudes to the uprising, she was met with tremendous backlash. In 2023, the Institute of National Remembrance, the Polish institution responsible for overseeing Holocaust memorials in Warsaw, published an open letter condemning Endelking for statements she made on television about Polish-Jewish relations. This letter followed a 2018 law passed by Polish Parliament that criminalizes speech claiming that Poland was complicit in the crimes of the Holocaust.

Memorials exist to shape the future. On the eighty-second anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the ongoing genocide in Gaza reveals that the world has failed to heed its lessons. When the dust settles in Gaza, what will we remember?

Joseph Mogul is an independent journalist and organizer currently residing in Minneapolis.

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