Martyrs and Fighters

The heroic Warsaw Ghetto epic that inspired "The Wall" and "Mila 18."

Told by the survivors...

It's the story of the most desperate battle in history against the most bitter odds. The true story of the Warsaw Ghetto: they had almost no weapons: they could not possibly win.-Print ed.

“The systematic and thorough annihilation of Jewish communities, wherever found, was one of the main objectives of the ferocious doctrine of Nazism, bred on German soil. On September 1, 1939 the German army invaded Poland where the Jewish community had existed for many centuries and where three million Jews were living at the time of the invasion. Ruthless extermination of the Jews began at once and eventually reached dreadful proportions never before known in human history. To accomplish this mass annihilation more efficiently, the Nazi occupants established segregated areas, or ghettos, in many Polish cities, where the Jews were forced to live. The largest ghetto was in Warsaw, where half a million human beings were herded together in a very small area in which physical and moral conditions made life a trying experience.

Although they faced inevitable deportation to death camps and gas chambers, the spirit of these free human beings was not daunted. The Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw, though eventually reduced to one-tenth of their original strength by the Nazis, were determined not to surrender; they made up their minds to exact a heavy toll from their oppressors and murderers. The Jewish insurrection in the Polish capital was a bold challenge to the Nazi tyrants—a historic manifestation of faith in freedom and in the innate rights of man against slavery, oppression and degradation of the human spirit.”-Introduction.