THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

exterminated. A group of Jewish youth in Warsaw rose to fight for their lives. Againstall odds, they acquired weapons and for an entire month in the spring of 1943 heldback the German military and even inflicted losses on their enemy. But the end of themonth also meant the end of the ghetto and its heroes. The densely populated ghettowas ravaged, burned, and ground to oblivion. The fighters met their deaths in everypossible way: on barricades, in close combat, in the last battle at the commandbunker on 18 Mila Street, and there were those who shot themselves dead lest theybecome prisoners of the Nazis. Others suffocated from the gas that the Germanspoured into the trenches, and only a few escaped and fled to Warsaw’s Aryanquarters and zigzagged their way through Europe.As modest as the victories were, the ghetto rebellion became the symbol of lightthat defeats darkness. We did not understand the Shoah then like we do today, butwe understood heroism right away. The rebels have names and faces. It is not ananonymous industry of genocide, a concept beyond human comprehension withinconceivable numbers. It is a contained, human, and heroic battle. The Warsawghetto uprising caught the Jewish and the world’s imagination and at once became anequal component of the Shoah-and-heroism equation, half and half. The heroism isours, of the Israelis, and the Shoah is theirs, of the Diasporic Jews. They are fromAuschwitz, and we are from Warsaw.Following the Shoah, Zionism became the movement of the winning majority. Allthe other Jewish ideological movements were destroyed by the Nazis or silencedforever behind the walls of the Soviet bloc. Only the Zionist movement remainedfree, outside in the West. By then it had the tools of a state-in-waiting. All itsresources and skills were harnessed to erect and build the foundations of the state.And not least of all: It invented and aggrandized myths and legends andmisrepresented them. Shamelessly. The end was holy and the means justified. AsWoody Allen once said: “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?”Thus the rebels who did not fit the Zionist stereotype were deleted from the privateand collective memory. We were not taught, for example, that the uprising wasoverseen by an umbrella organization that included everyone who was in the ghetto,all the Jewish political parties, many of whom were socialist Bundists and anti-ZionistCommunists. They hid from us that the uprising would not have been possible withoutthe support of the community’s institutions, leaders, the non-Zionist Jewish JointRelief organization and even the non-Jewish Polish Underground. The roles of these