THE BOOK FAIR

Review:

Dan Kurzman’s non-fiction epic, “The Bravest Battle”, details the twenty-eight day battle, of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  Kurzman includes a detailed bibliography, complete with notes and also snippets of Jewish history in Poland, before WWII.

The German’s invaded Poland, in September of 1939, and immediately stepped up their war against the Jews.

The Nazis relocated large numbers of the Jewish population of Poland into the Warsaw Ghetto, a small section of the city that they then, closed off to the outside world. The forced overcrowding, totaling approximately 300,000 Jews, caused rampant outbreaks of disease, such as dysentery and typhus, the lack of food allowed into the ghetto caused starvation, and the continued deportations to death camps resulted in only, some 60,000 Jews left in the Warsaw Ghetto, by the spring of 1943.

Tired of the countless beatings, murders, forced slave labor and the deportations, several hundred of the surviving Jews decided to fight the Germans, against all odds. The fundamental realization of these fighters was that they well knew the battle was lost, before it even began.  They, however, preferred to choose how they would die, and to reach their deaths while avenging their brethren, by killing Nazis in return.

Kurzman writes of the fighters including Mordechai Anielewicz, leader of the ZOB, of his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, and of many other fighters in the ZOB, the Jewish Fighting Organization, (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa).  Kurzman also writes of fighters from the right-wing, Betar or the ZZW, the Jewish Military Organization (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy), as well as the Bund Movement, the socialist workers party.

On April 23, 1943, the polished German Army, along with the Lithuanians, whom the Germans gave the honor of first entering the ghetto, received an unexpected volley of shots from the Jews, which left several dead, several wounded, and the others running for cover.  Heard by the Jewish fighters was one of the German soldiers who shouted, “The Jews have weapons!”

The book is explicit and graphic in detail, depicting a realistic view of life in the ghetto, of the atrocities committed by the German’s and an account of each individual day of the twenty-eight day battle that took place between the highly organized, highly trained Germans and the poorly equipped, starving, exhausted Jews.  Very few of the brave men and women of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters survived.  The book includes pictures of the fighters, of the ghetto, and of confrontations with Germans soldiers.

 

An excellent, historical, non-fiction, account, documenting the magnitude of desperation the Jewish fighters faced during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.