In an interview with Hanna Krall published in Shielding the Flame, Marek Edelman, the last leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, explained:

“After all, mankind has agreed that dying with a gun is more beautiful than dying without a gun. So we subscribed to this agreement. At that time, there were only two hundred and twenty of us in the Jewish Combat Organization. Can it even be called an uprising? The point was not to get slaughtered when they came for us in turn. It was just a matter of choosing the way of dying…”

Eighty-two years ago, on the morning of April 19th, 1943, fighters from the Jewish Combat Organization and the Jewish Military Union ushered in a heroic fight against German units that’d begun the final destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. It was the very first urban uprising in German-occupied Europe. The uprising had no chance of military success; the insurgents were fully aware of that. All it represented –– at least for them –– was a final response to the tragedy they could not escape.

The two largest ghettos where Nazis imprisoned Jews after the conquest of Poland in 1939 were Warsaw and Łódź (approximate populations: 460,000 and 210,000 respectively).

Did these hundreds of thousands of innocent people –– all sentenced to death –– ever have any choice?

In a sense, they did. Yet every single “choice” they may have had was tragic. Because each one still ended their life.

However, this “free will” approach is essential to understanding not only the mechanism of the Holocaust itself, but the necessities of responding to it.

The decision of Adam Czerniaków –– the chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat –– symbolizes the first choice. The true perfidy of Nazi policy was that Jews were given the appearance of self-governance by being given Jewish administration in the ghettos. The Germans essentially utilized these Jewish Councils, the Judenraty, to carry out genocide. Adam Czerniaków, however, would not allow himself to be “utilized.” He committed suicide on July 23rd, 1942, unwilling to cooperate with the Germans in the mass action of transporting the ghetto inhabitants to Treblinka.

The night before, he refused to sign a German notice about the forced eviction of Jews from Warsaw. He knew it wasn’t a „displacement,” but a deportation to an extermination camp. He committed suicide by taking potassium cyanide, leaving a letter for his wife: „They demand I kill children of my nation with my own hands. I have nothing to do but die.” Over the next two months, at least 254,000 ghetto inhabitants were transported to Treblinka and exterminated in gas chambers, the so-called „Großaktion Warschau” under the guise of „resettlement in the East.”

Czerniaków’s decision may have been considered heroic, yet it evoked the accusation of desertion. Czerniaków remained aware of this fine line until the very end: „I cannot turn defenseless children to death. I have decided to leave. Do not treat it as an act of cowardice or an escape.”

As a final gesture of protest, Czerniaków wasn’t alone in his decision to take his own life in the face of hopelessness. Suicide was considered death by one’s own terms. For example, Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto –– a meticulous record of practical daily ghetto life –– presents countless cases of suicide almost prosaically: people jumping from high floors or running „on the wire” to be shot by guards or the luckiest among them just happily taking poison.

At least they all willfully made the final decision.

The second choice is the diametric opposite to the former and is symbolized by Chaim Rumkowski. As Head of the Jewish Council of Elders in the Łódź ghetto, Rumkowski tried saving inhabitants by making them as useful as possible to the Germans. His slogan –– „Our Only Way Is Work” –– aimed to turn the Łódź ghetto into a machine supplying various products necessary for the Nazi war effort. He wanted to make Germans dependent on the ghetto, logically making the murder of the Jews simply unprofitable.

However, carrying out this idea forced him to hand over the children, the elderly, the sick –– all unproductive and therefore unnecessary –– to the Germans as early as September 1942. When the formal Nazi order was certified, Rumkowski delivered “Give Me Your Children,” one of the most shocking speeches in human history, to specifically share the reality of his approach to his fellow ghetto inhabitants.

„A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They [the Germans] are asking us to give up the best we possess –– the children and the elderly. I was unworthy of having a child of my own, so I gave the best years of my life to children. I’ve lived and breathed with children. I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters! Hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers: Give me your children! (…) I must carry out this difficult and bloody operation, I must cut off limbs in order to save the body! I must take away children, and if I do not, others too will be taken, God forbid…”

A few days later the Germans gassed over fifteen thousand children and elders at Chełmno death camp on the Ner River.

And Rumkowski ultimately suffered a fitting defeat. While the Łódź ghetto lasted until the end of August 1944 –– the longest “survival” rate –– the vast majority of inhabitants were murdered systematically, because the annihilation of the Jews was an absolute priority for the Germans, ultimately far more important than even supplying the war effort. Rumowski’s choice turned out to be a monstrous compromise, a tragic attempt to save the lives of a few not only by negotiating with the devil, but actually making it easier for Germans to transport Jews to extermination camps.

All he did was guarantee his own death would be that much worse, drowning in his own insurmountable guilt. He was taken to Auschwitz on the very last extermination transport from Łódź and killed like millions of others.

Yet Rumkowski was far from alone in his attitude and fate. That illusory hope that cooperative ghetto Jews “could be saved” was shared by hundreds of Jewish policemen as well as Judenrat clerks and officials. At first, it seemed that perhaps cooperating with Germans could provide the community with at least a minimum of security. Or later maybe they could save illustrious individuals, or certain families, or even themselves?

But that rarely ever happened. In fact, it never did. All they left behind was guilt, hopelessness, and tragic memory.

The third choice when facing imminent death was characterized by resignation, passivity, even apathy. In some ways it’s as simple as ignoring the fact that the collective death sentence against Jews had already been irrevocably decided. A helpless “fait accompli,” it was the only real “choice” made by the vast majority of Jews if only because most were women, children, and the elderly –– those for whom passivity was their natural state.

They didn’t have a choice, because there was no choice.

So there were essentially three attitudes, and therefore three ways of dying. There was death as an escape from death, there was a collaborator’s death who thought they could outsmart absolute evil and save someone (or something), and there was a resigned death without even an attempt to affect the tragedy. These three attitudes illustrated the human condition on both sides of the spectrum –– for Jews, death remained beyond decision, for Germans, Jewish death possessed no risk or cost.

And finally, there was one last choice, less a decision and more a way to “accept” death. The fourth choice was active resistance.

Ironically, active resistance only became possible when that last human force ceased to function: hope. Hope dies last. The Germans’ Holocaust “machine” had been constructed intentionally to maintain, if not maximize, the hope of survival in their victims, knowing that only hope would actually keep them “passive” and enable the genocide of millions. The Polish writer and Auschwitz survivor, Tadeusz Borowski, wrote, „It is hope that makes people apathetic to the gas chamber, tells them not to risk rebellion, and plunges them into deadness. (…) We have not been taught to give up hope and that is why we are dying in the gas.”

An armed struggle against Nazi Germany became the last viable choice when it was no longer possible to „win.”

In fact, it was exactly those people freed from hope itself who began the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was no longer about saving a life, it was about deciding how to die. Marek Edelman said it simply and succinctly, “Everything that followed –– [anything after] what happened on April 19th, 1943 –– was after all [that] longing for dying more beautifully.”

To his credit, Edelmann was obviously never concerned with aesthetic criteria. He accepted infinitely that no death is beautiful. The “aesthetics” of death is nothing but a camouflage for ethics. Active resistance to evil at the cost of one’s own life –– the highest price to pay –– is an attempt to assign morality and meaning to a circumstance beyond decision. Or even choice.

In other words, it’s the choice of death with a new component, one completely absent in the previous three approaches. Quite simply, if you’re going to take a Jewish life, you’d have to at least risk your own. Edelmann’s approach was turning the choice against the evildoer. If Nazis were going to liquidate the ghetto population, those murderers would be forced to risk their own lives, ponder their own deaths.

„Edelman, seeing the approaching [German] officers with white bows, yelled, ‚Shoot!’ And Zygmunt fired. […] Did he feel embarrassed by violating the fair play rules so typical of the Western European tradition?” So asked Hanna Krall, interviewing Edelman.

„He says he did not feel embarrassed because the three Germans were exactly the same who’d already deported four hundred thousand people to Treblinka, only that they’d attached white bows this time…”

The argument is simple: Resistance is more dignified than suicide, collaboration, or passive acceptance. If death is an imminent end, then resistance is a fitting means. It is not passive acceptance of death, it is active application of a goal to one’s death.

In this case, that goal became increasing the costs Nazis had to bear. Even the clearly underestimated losses on the German side as reported by Jürgen Stroop, who suppressed the uprising, amounted to sixteen dead and eighty-five wounded, but other sources list combined losses of at least three hundred between the SS and German police.

Dying Jews considered it the bill for their deaths… And Germans would pay that bill with their lives.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became the intentional opposite of the Masada story. When the Romans smashed Masada’s fortress wall on the Dead Sea, almost a thousand Jewish defenders took their own lives in a mass suicide. But the Jewish defenders in Warsaw fought until the very end. And in that sense, the Talmudic principle of self-defense remained simple and clear: „When anyone comes to kill you, kill him first.” (Sanhedrin 72a.)

To them, death would at least be defined by dignity. The ghetto fighters knew they’d die. That was never for them to determine. But how they’d die remained their choice. So they simply shared that decision with the Nazis.

Yes, we will die. But our lives will not be taken for free. We’ve set a price.

And the price is you.

Paweł Jędrzejewski