The 81st anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

The commemoration of the 81st anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commenced on Friday at noon in front of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw's district of Muranów.

The event was organized by the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland (TSKŻ). The association was founded on 29 October 29, 1950, as a result of a merger between the Central Committee of Jews in Poland and the Jewish Cultural Society.

The anniversary celebrations were attended by representatives of state and local government authorities, diplomatic corps, Jewish organizations and cultural institutions as well as members of the Jewish community, Righteous Among the Nations, and residents of Warsaw.

The participants laid wreaths at a number of places of memory relating to the Warsaw Ghetto: Żegota Monument, Szmul Zygielbojm Memorial, Anielewicz Bunker, and Umschlagplatz Memorial.

Today, we understand how harsh was the everyday existence of those imprisoned within the ghetto walls. Right there, in the very place where they were sentenced to complete annihilation, the ghetto heroes decided not to wait idly for their death.

"On the night of 18-19 April 1943, on the Passover holiday, the Warsaw Ghetto was surrounded by German military squads. First thing in the morning, the Germans entered the ghetto with the intention of its ultimate liquidation," the gathered heard in a speech delivered during the ceremony.

"In spite of having been overwhelmingly outnumbered, the ghetto residents were not going to surrender. The narrow streets of the pre-war Northern District became the arena of a fight for human dignity. The heroic rising of hundreds of members of the Jewish Combat Organisation and the Jewish Military Union was a symbol of resistance against disdain for human life."

As every year, volunteers handed out paper daffodils on the streets of Warsaw.

The daffodil has become a symbol of the uprising as Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, used to receive a bouquet of yellow daffodils from an anonymous person every year on April 19.

He would lay them at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in memory of those who fought and died.

German Nazi occupiers in 1940 corralled over 400,000 Jews into a small section of the Polish capital Warsaw, most of whom were then sent to camps to be killed or died from the conditions in the Ghetto itself.

The uprising broke out on April 19, 1943, when Jewish fighters took on German troops in an attempt to prevent Jews being transported to death camps.

It ended on May 16 the same year, when the Germans razed the ghetto to the ground. An estimated 13,000 Jews were killed.

The insurgency was the largest act of armed Jewish resistance during World War II and the first urban uprising against the Germans in occupied Europe.