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Post by Chaindriven on Apr 19, 2013 12:21:01 GMT -6
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Sirens wailed and church bells tolled in Warsaw as largely Roman Catholic Poland paid homage today to the ordinary men & women that took up arms and rose up 70 years ago against Nazi forces in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
Israel also marked the anniversary of the historic event on its Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 7, which coincided with the Hebrew date of the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. About 750, with few arms and no military training, made their opening attack on April 19, 1943, on the over whelming, much larger and well-equipped German forces. The attack came after most of the nearly half a million inhabitants of the ghetto had been disarmed and sent to be diabolically and systematically murdered at Treblinka. The insurgency came when it was clear the Nazis were about to send the remaining residents of the ghetto to die too. The revolt was crushed and the ghetto was razed to the ground with few if any survivors. Contrast to how the world remembers the revolt. A clear military defeat, it is hailed as a moral victory for freedom fighters, who refused to go without a fight. It is prominently commemorated in Israel, part of a never-again ethos that stresses the importance of self-defense, the right to keep and bear arms.
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