Poland moves to heal wounds of the ghetto A wail of sirens echoed across Warsaw at 10am on Friday morning, while bells rang out in every Catholic church in the Polish capital, marking 70 years since the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto - the first armed resistance by Jews against the Holocaust. The ceremonies, which included surviving ghetto fighters as well as the premier and president, were by far the most prominent official commemoration of the doomed uprising as Poland tries to fully incorporate its Jewish past. The rebellion broke out on April 19, 1943, when Jewish fighters attacked several hundred German soldiers marching on the ghetto. It was an act of desperation by people who knew they were facing certain death at the hands of Poland's Nazi occupiers, but who wanted to die with dignity. The ghetto was formed out of a Jewish district in central Warsaw; at its peak it housed more than 450,000 people. The Nazis started deporting the inhabitants to death camps in 1942, and by 1943 only about 50,000 remained. The uneven fight lasted almost a month as about a thousand Jewish fighters, equipped largely with pistols and petrol bombs, battled thousands of well-armed German troops. The fighting ended on May 16, when Jürgen Stroop, the SS general in charge of liquidating the ghetto, blew up the Great Synagogue to symbolise the end of Jewish Warsaw. A few fighters managed to smuggle themselves out into the city, but most of the Jews remaining in the ghetto were either shot there or gassed in the death camps. Friday's ceremonies were marked by Michael Schudrich, Warsaw's chief rabbi, who sang the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of the dead, and by President Bronislaw Komorowski, who decorated Symcha Ratajzer-Rota, a surviving fighter, with Poland's highest honour. "The ghetto uprising was the first act of armed resistance in German occupied Europe and the final chapter in the tragedy of the Jews," said Mr Ratajzer-Rota, one of only three living fighters, in an emotional address to assembled dignitaries. The Ghetto Uprising has become part of the foundation myth of Israel, which seized on the image of heroic Jews fighting their killers in contrast to the millions who died without resisting. It is well-known around the world - despite the apathy that the murder of Europe's Jews inspired among the western Allies during the war. But the Ghetto Uprising is seen in a much more mixed way in Poland. Modern Poles have tended to focus on the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, when the city's inhabitants rose up against the Germans - a rebellion in which the capital was utterly destroyed and more than 200,000 were killed. That uprising, led largely by the anti-communist resistance, was condemned by the communists who ruled Poland from 1944 until 1989. Instead they extolled the earlier Jewish rebellion, thereby helping to seed bitter feelings that persist today. "Do you know how long we had to wait for a monument to the Warsaw Uprising while the little Jews have had theirs since 1948?" shouted an older man walking down a Warsaw street on Friday. Volunteers at the time were handing out paper daffodils, the yellow flower that was in bloom while the ghetto burnt and has since come to symbolise the Jewish uprising. The Ghetto Uprising is not only a fragment of Jewish history but also Poland's history. We have to remember those people's heroism," said Joanna Hac, who had volunteered to hand out the daffodils. Before the war, more than 3m Jews lived in Poland, the largest Jewish population in the world. A few hundred thousand survived the war, but even most of these emigrated in the face of hostility from Poles after 1945. Today, only a few thousand Jews live in Poland. Although Polish anti-Semitism still exists, nostalgia is growing for the country's lost Jews. Volunteers clean and care for abandoned Jewish cemeteries, the former Jewish district of Kazimierz in Krakow holds an annual celebration of Jewish culture, and a new museum of the history of the Polish Jews is set to open in Warsaw, celebrating the hundreds of years that Jews lived in Poland. On Friday night, a searchlight atop the museum commemorating the 1944 Warsaw Uprising was set symbolically to cross high in the sky with a light coming from the new Museum of Polish Jews. "They are including Jews in Polish history for the first time," said Eugeniusz Smolar, a Polish foreign policy expert of Jewish origin. Now they are calling the Ghetto Uprising the first Warsaw Uprising.