eir bare-hands. Fifteen Jews escaped into the woods and survived to testify against Paul Blobel, the perpetrator of the Babi Yar massacre. The rest were executed.
3 The Auschwitz Sonderkommando Revolt
Auschwitz was the largest and most infamous of the Nazis’ concentration camps. It became operational on May 20, 1940 and remained so until January 27, 1945, when the Soviets liberated it. Over one million people were murdered in the three camps, about 90 percent of them Jewish.
“Sonderkommando” was a special unite comprised of Jewish prisoners selected at random upon arrival at the camp. They were tasked with policing the corpses, clothing, and valuables to and from the gas chambers and crematoria, and though their job was horrible, they were rewarded with more food and better working conditions. On the morning of October 7, the Sonderkommandos suddenly attacked every single SS guard in and around the gas chambers and crematoria. There were two gas chambers and four crematoria, about 275 meters (300 yds) apart at the north end of Camp II. The Sonderkommandos totaled 451, vastly outnumbering the SS—but the SS were much better armed.
However, these well-fed rebels proved very formidable adversaries and quickly killed several dozen guards with axes and knives, shoved two of them alive into the ovens, then stripped them of their weapons and opened fire on all SS personnel responding to the commotion. Over 70 Nazis were killed. Then the Jews flung the gunpowder satchel into an oven and blew up Crematorium IV. About one dozen men escaped the camp but were recaptured. All remaining Sonderkommandos, whether they had a part to play in the revolt or not, were executed.
2 The Bialystok Ghetto Uprising
Bialystok is the largest city in northeastern Poland, not far from the Belarusian border, and the ghetto contained about 50,000 Jews from late July 1941 until the final liquidation and their deportations to concentration and death camps. When taking over the city one month earlier, the Nazis locked close to 1,000 Jews in the Great Synagogue and burned it down. Himmler visited two days later and gave his approval of the SS actions. The 50,000 ghetto Jews lived in cramped squalor, as was the case in all the ghettos.
Every few weeks, a detachment of several thousand Nazis entered the ghetto to round up thousands of Jews to be sent to their deaths. Rumors could not help but be spread, and by the time rail cars reached their destinations, the passengers were screaming in terror and banging on the walls to try to escape. By August 1943, the Jews of the Anti-Fascist Military Organization had worked up the courage to fight back, though they were only equipped with a single MG 34 machine gun and a single belt of 500 rounds of ammunition, 100 pistols, most of them Walther police pistols, and 25 Mauser rifles. They supplemented this meager arsenal with Molotov cocktails of gasoline, diesel, and kerosene, and about 100 glass bottles of hydrochloric, sulfuric, and nitric acids. They had set up command bunkers in the sewers and Moskowicz and Tenenbaum emptied their pistols at the surrounding SS until they turned their final bullets on themselves.
The remaining 10,000 Jews in the ghetto were immediately shipped to Majdanek, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. Some 1,200 children eventually arrived at Auschwitz for the gas chambers or Josef Mengele’s experiments.
1 The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
This should not be confused with the Warsaw Uprising, which was a city-wide battle between the Nazis and the Polish Home Army. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took place from April 19 to May 16, 1943, over a year before the Warsaw Uprising. The ghetto was established between October and November 1940, and from then until May 16, 1943, around 300,000 Jews were killed in various deportations, liquidations, and the final destruction.
Life in the ghetto was deplorable. The Nazis allowed the Jews only 184 calories of food each per day, and they had to supplement this by stealing from outside the walls whenever possible. The Nazis entered the ghetto in January of 1943 for a deportation 