Vitis-Shomron, her sister and their mother were eventually captured and sent to Bergen-Belsen – where they remained until US forces liberated the camp at the end of the war. He was later deported to the Majdanek concentration camp, where he was murdered on November 3, 1943. At least 7,000 Jews died fighting or in hiding in the ghetto, while a similar number were captured and deported to concentration camps and extermination centers.Īmong them was Vitis-Shomron’s father, Simcha Melamed, who was trapped within the ghetto. I remember seeing the fires over the ghetto walls and the sky glowed red and black from the fires and smoke.”īut by May 16 the uprising had been crushed. Vitis-Shomron recalled: “The uprising broke out two days later and I was on the other side. They were unprepared for the resistance they met from the ghetto’s Jewish inhabitants and the urban revolt lasted for a month.Ībout 700 young Jewish fighters participated in the uprising, which also saw the ghetto’s civilian population resist by refusing to assemble at collection points and hiding in underground bunkers. The uprising began just two days later, after German troops and police stormed the ghetto in an attempt to deport the surviving inhabitants to concentration camps. “She knew that if I stayed I would not survive and it was more important to her that someone would be left alive to tell the story and because of that I agreed to leave the ghetto,” said Vitis-Shomron, who made a commitment to tell the world what had happened after she escaped with her mother and sister on April 17.Īliza Vitis-Shomron speaks at Yad Vashem in 2013, on the 70th anniversary of the uprising. She told me that I should go because she said ‘we need someone to survive to tell our story.’” “I told her that my parents wanted me to leave the ghetto and that they had found a hiding place for me. “I wanted to stay and fight with my fellow fighters,” she told CNN, explaining that she had sought the advice of one of the commanders within the resistance movement. Two days before the uprising erupted, the teenager escaped the ghetto with her mother and 10-year-old sister by climbing over a wall. Holocaust survivor left on a bench as a baby finds new family at 80 Speaking to CNN from the World Holocaust Remembrance Center at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on Wednesday, Vitis-Shomron said she and her fellow couriers acted like “the television, radio or newspapers which we didn’t have.”įind out more: Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the people who fought backĪlice Grusová, now 81, survived the holocaust because her parents abandoned her on a train station bench. She told CNN that she acted as a messenger, warning the Jews forced to live there that the Nazis were planning to liquidate it. Though just 15 by the time of the uprising, Aliza Vitis-Shomron – then known by her maiden name, Melamed – was actively engaged in the resistance through her involvement with a youth movement within the ghetto. About 400,000 Jews were sealed off from the rest of the Polish capital behind a high wall topped with barbed wire. APĮstablished by the Germans in October 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto was the largest Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Europe. In this 1943 photo, a group of Polish Jews are led away for deportation by German SS soldiers, during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.
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