The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto - The first and most detailed documentation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising battles, by Shloyme Mendelsohn. Published by the Yiddish Scientific Institute YIVO - New York 1944 - First English edition released during the Nazi occupation a year and a half before the war ended - accompanied by an early map documenting the battles in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943.
The detailed report of Shloyme Mendelsohn delivered in Yiddish on January 9, 1944 and translated here for the first time into English at the initiative of the Institute's management committee. This is early and preliminary documentation of the battles that took place as part of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Mendelsohn based his description of the uprising on four sources - underground reports, underground press from the ghetto, official reports of the representative of the Polish government, and witness accounts of those who escaped occupied territories. Based on these four sources, he managed to sketch a reliable picture of the situation of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto before the outbreak of the uprising and a detailed description of the uprising battles themselves. At the center of the booklet is a detailed map depicting the battles that took place in the ghetto in April 1943. The map describes the areas of the "Small Ghetto" and the "Large Ghetto", the exact place on Stawki Street where Jews were required to be for deportation, the location of the railroad tracks from where Jews were deported to an "unknown destination", the street section where the first uprising broke out in January, the location of the Jewish cemetery where the Gestapo gathered women and children as hostages, the streets where the Nazis set fire to Jewish homes, the location where an attempt was made by Jewish fighters to break through the ghetto walls on Wolność Street, and more.
This is one of the earliest reports on the ghetto battles, and Mendelsohn's shock is evident upon first exposure to the Nazi atrocities in the ghetto. He writes: "Occasionally in the underground press, in the reports of the representative of the Polish government we find data on German cruelty in the destruction of the remnants of the Jewish population in the Warsaw ghetto. I will not quote them. Suffice it to say that in their inhuman humiliation the Germans acted worse than anything we have heard or read about them". Mendelsohn's words indicate the full picture of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was still lacking at such an early stage of attempting to accurately understand what happened there, with sentences like "All reports lead us to believe the guerrilla fighting lasted about two months" or "When and how did the battle in the Warsaw ghetto end? It is difficult to answer this question." etc.
The YIVO Yiddish Scientific Institute, which published the booklet, was founded in 1925 in Vilnius and dealt with research on Jewish life around the world. With the outbreak of World War II, the Institute's headquarters were transferred to New York, and it engaged in collecting materials documenting the fate of Jews during the war.
28 [4] p. Very good condition.
