U.S. secretary of state says Poland’s 1943 Bialystok ghetto rebellion was act of bravery and dignity

WARSAW, Poland — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken despatched a message Wednesday marking the anniversary in Poland of the 1943 Bialystok ghetto rebellion, saying it was an act of bravery that reaffirmed the dignity of Jews in the course of the Holocaust.

Blinken’s mom, Judith Pisar, the widow of one of many ghetto survivors, Samuel Pisar, the state secretary’s late stepfather, took half within the observances in Poland’s jap metropolis of Bialystok. U.S. Ambassador to Poland Mark Brzezinski additionally attended.

“I see it as one of countless acts of resistance by Jews in ghettos and Nazi German concentration camps across Europe to reject their dehumanization, to reaffirm their dignity,” Blinken mentioned in a prerecorded message.

It was an act “not of futility but of bravery,” he mentioned, despite the fact that “survival was not on the cards” when the rebellion started on the night time of Aug. 16, 1943.

For its leaders, the revolt was to “determine how, not whether they would die,” Blinken mentioned.

The members, who included metropolis authorities and residents, honored the fighters and victims of the revolt, which was the second greatest single act of Jewish resistance towards the Nazi Germans, after the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Both revolts had been brutally crushed and the survivors had been despatched to dying camps.

Before the warfare, Jews constituted some 43% of Bialystok’s inhabitants of 100,000. An estimated 60,000 Jews had gone by means of the ghetto that occupying Nazi Germany had constructed within the metropolis, till the rebellion.

Historians estimate that not more than 200 Jews fled the ghetto, amongst them Samuel Pisar, who was 13 on the time. His complete household perished within the Holocaust. Pisar died in 2015 in New York.

“As we lose more and more survivors, the responsibility to relay and grapple with the history passes to all of us,” Blinken mentioned, stressing that for Pisar, the phrases “never again” weren’t sufficient of a safety towards warfare and violence.

During World War II and the Nazi Germany’s occupation, Poland misplaced round 6 million of its 35 million residents. Half of the victims had been Jewish.