A man who was one of the last remaining survivors of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that constituted the most significant act of Jewish resistance against Nazi terror has died at the age of 94, Israel's official Holocaust memorial and museum, Yad Vashem, announced on Sunday. Rotem, who passed away Saturday after a long illness, helped save the last survivors of the uprising by smuggling them out of the burning ghetto through sewage tunnels. The group was able to hold their positions in heavily fortified bunkers and killed 16 Nazi soldiers while wounding nearly 100, the Guardian reported. Only after I managed to extricate myself did I see that our house was totally destroyed and no sign of life was to be seen," the resistance fighter said in an interview with the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. “The challenge for all of us now is to continue giving meaning to remembrance without exemplary figures like Kazik.”

Rotem was born in 1924 in Warsaw, at a time when its vibrant Jewish community made up a third of the city’s population. At the outbreak of World War II, his family's home was destroyed by German bombing raids, resulting in the death of his brother, grandparents, aunt and uncle. As the Germans pounded the Ghetto and the uprising faltered, Rotem was instrumental in helping fighters flee to safety through the Warsaw’s sewer system to forests outside the city. Speaking at a 2013 ceremony in Poland to mark the 70th anniversary of the uprising, Rotem recalled that by April 1943 most of the ghetto's Jews had died and the 50,000 who remained expected the same fate. “His story and the story of the uprising will forever be with our people.”

President Reuven Rivlin noted that in one interview, Rotem said his one message to Israeli teens would be “to be human beings.”

“We are all animals on two legs,” Rotem said.
Simcha Rotem, the last surviving fighter of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, also a participant in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, dies at the age of 94.