Something uplifting for Christmas Eve:
“Simcha Rotem, last surviving fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, died in Jerusalem Saturday at the age of 94.”
Thousands of Jews died in Europe’s first urban anti-Nazi revolt, most of them burned alive, and nearly all the rest were then sent to Treblinka.
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.
He continued to fight alongside Polish partisans and in 1944 participated in the Warsaw Uprising. After the war he joined avengers group Nakam, which was dedicated to exacting vengeance on Nazi war criminals.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the greatest incidence of Jewish resistance to the Nazis, has become a monumental symbol in Jewish and Israeli lore. Unlike the rest of the world, which commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, the day of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, Israel does so according to the Jewish date of the uprising (usually in April).
Rotem made aliyah to Israel in 1946 and served as a manager in a supermarket chain until retiring in 1986.
In 2013 Poland’s president awarded Rotem with the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, one of the nation’s highest honors, for his actions during the war.
May the memory of the righteous be a blessing…
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Tags: Jews, Obituary, Poland, Simcha Rotem, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, World War II