American Jewish History

On Passover eve, April 19, 1943, Jews in the sealed Warsaw Ghetto staged the oft-remembered revolt against their Nazi oppressors. Despite modest numbers and insufficient weapons, against all odds, a small group of Jewish militants held off 2,000 well-armed SS men for twenty-eight days; in comparison, the entire Polish Army had fallen to the Nazis in a similar amount of time after the Blitzkrieg invasion on September 1, 1939. From the day news of the uprising reached the outside world until the current moment, the courageous actions of the ghetto partisans have captured the American imagination. The Warsaw Ghetto’s culminating affair has metamorphosed into a potent emblem of the war and Jewish life in Europe, nearly as prominent as Auschwitz. If the Holocaust is known as unqualified evil, with Auschwitz serving as a synecdoche, then the Warsaw Ghetto serves as the epitome of courage.

Unsurprisingly, the uprising has been mythologized for over seven decades. Something of a surprise, however, is how quickly Americans appropriated the battle for their own ends, by exploiting the revolt, at times, as a compelling tool of propaganda. Early cultural manifestations of the uprising eagerly eulogize the valor and self-determination of the partisans. As the following pages will show, in diverse media, various Jewish groups and secular liberal organizations used the revolt as a vehicle to spur the American government and larger public to further action. Indeed, the hope was to bolster support for trapped Jews in Europe by demonstrating that Jews were helping themselves, that they took “heroic” responsibility for themselves and were not impotent, helpless sheep being led to slaughter. I am interested in the forms representations of the Warsaw Ghetto took and what they were intended to mean to audiences in their own day. Accordingly, this essay contributes to previous discussions of the Americanization of the Holocaust, a term used to denote the persistence, appropriation, and transformation of the Holocaust in American culture. As Hilene Flanzbaum aptly observes, “If the Holocaust, as image and symbol, seems to have sprung loose from its origins, it does not mean we should decry Americanization; rather, the pervasive presence of representations of the Holocaust in our culture [End Page 125] demands responsible evaluation and interpretation.”¹ This article adds new dimensions to previous evaluations of the Americanization of the Holocaust by concentrating on creative treatments about the Warsaw Ghetto, aiming to widen our understanding of the ghetto’s legacy in American consciousness at that moment when the reality of the destruction of European Jewry firmly took hold.

At the outbreak of World War II, Jews made up around ten percent of Poland’s population and one-third of Warsaw’s citizens, the largest Jewish community in Europe. Approximately 400,000, Jews lived, worked, and contributed to the thriving city. With the onset of war in late September 1939, the Germans started to introduce a growing number of unnerving restrictions on Jewish life.² Finally, on November 15, 1940, Warsaw’s Jews were quarantined in a three and a half square-mile ghetto comprising only two percent of the city’s space, with all entrances sealed the next day. Soon they were more strongly isolated behind ten-foot high red brick walls reinforced with barbed wire. Living in a mere hundred square blocks and in only 27,000 apartments, Jews were confined in startling numbers: 240,000 in September, 360,000 by November, and over 470,000 by the summer of 1941.³ Destitution, starvation and disease were rampant in the overcrowded ghetto. Beggars mingled with dead bodies in the teeming streets, and fear of unprovoked attack or deportation was pervasive.

By spring 1942, the occupiers began to liquidate the ghetto; from July to September 1942, 265,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka. [End Page 126] Only 60,000 Jews remained in the ghetto when a second series of mass deportations began in January 1943. Realizing that the noose had tightened and they had little left to lose, a number of Jews mounted a small resistance, allowing some deportees to...