The Warsaw Ghetto Memorial

(AFP/File/Tim Sloan)
Some 150 people gathered in Warsaw to pay tribute to the heroes of the ghetto uprising in which, 62 years ago, several hundred Jews rose up in a desperate armed struggle against Nazi soldiersThe ghetto, set up in 1940 by Nazi Germany to isolate the thriving Jewish community in Warsaw, originally contained almost 450,000 people, but by January 1943, deportations, summary executions, starvation and disease had reduced it to around 37,000 people.
The Warsaw ghetto uprising began on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover, when the Nazis tried to resume deportations of the last remaining Jews in the walled-off ghetto in the Polish capital to death camps.
A few hundred young Jews decided to take up arms against their Nazi captors, prepared to die fighting rather than passively accept being sent to death camps.
Although armed with only a few weapons and homemade explosives, they held out against Nazi troops for three weeks.
Only about a dozen of the few hundred fighters escaped the ghetto and survived to the end of the war.