From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 96th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution- “Warsaw Ghetto Anti-Nazi Uprising of Labor”
Leon Trotsky On The Lessons Of The Russian Revolution
Workers Vanguard No. 968
5 November 2010
In Honor of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
For New October Revolutions!
(From the Archives of Marxism)
November 7 (October 25 by the calendar used in Russia at the time) marks the 93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the workers’ seizure of power in Russia gave flesh and blood reality to the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state, culminating in its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, the October Revolution was and is the international proletariat’s greatest victory; its final undoing, a world-historic defeat. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fought to the bitter end in defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, while calling for workers political revolutions to oust the parasitic nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies that ruled these states. This is the same program we uphold today for the remaining workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
Having been expelled from the USSR in 1929 by Stalin, Trotsky spent the remainder of his life in exile. In November 1932, he gave a speech to a Danish social-democratic student group in Copenhagen. He outlined the political conditions and the social forces that drove the Russian Revolution, stressing the decisive role of the Bolshevik Party. Illuminating the worldwide impact of the Russian Revolution and its place in history, Trotsky underlined the necessity of sweeping away the decaying capitalist order and replacing it with a scientifically planned international socialist economy that will lay the material basis for human freedom.
The ICL fights to forge workers parties modeled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to lead the struggle for new October Revolutions around the globe.
* * *
Revolution means a change of the social order. It transfers the power from the hands of a class which has exhausted itself into those of another class, which is on the rise....
Without the armed insurrection of November 7, 1917, the Soviet state would not be in existence. But the insurrection itself did not drop from Heaven. A series of historical prerequisites was necessary for the October revolution.
1. The rotting away of the old ruling classes—the nobility, the monarchy, the bureaucracy.
2. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in the masses of the people.
3. The revolutionary character of the peasant question.
4. The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed nations.
5. The significant social weight of the proletariat.
To these organic pre-conditions we must add certain conjunctural conditions of the highest importance:
6. The Revolution of 1905 was the great school, or in Lenin’s words, the “dress rehearsal” of the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets, as the irreplaceable organizational form of the proletarian united front in the revolution, were created for the first time in the year 1905.
7. The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the backward masses out of their immobility and thereby prepared the grandiose scale of the catastrophe.
But all these conditions, which fully sufficed for the outbreak of the Revolution, were insufficient to assure the victory of the proletariat in the Revolution. For this victory one condition more was needed:
8. The Bolshevik Party....
In the year 1883 there arose among the emigres the first Marxist group. In the year 1898, at a secret meeting, the foundation of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was proclaimed (we all called ourselves Social-Democrats in those days). In the year 1903 occurred the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the year 1912 the Bolshevist fraction finally became an independent Party.
It learned to recognize the class mechanics of society in struggle, in the grandiose events of twelve years (1905-1917). It educated cadres equally capable of initiative and of subordination. The discipline of its revolutionary action was based on the unity of its doctrine, on the tradition of common struggles and on confidence in its tested leadership.
Thus stood the Party in the year 1917. Despised by the official “public opinion” and the paper thunder of the intelligentsia press, it adapted itself to the movement of the masses. Firmly it kept in hand the control of factories and regiments. More and more the peasant masses turned toward it. If we understand by “nation,” not the privileged heads, but the majority of the people, that is, the workers and peasants, then Bolshevism became in the course of the year 1917 a truly national Russian Party.
In September 1917, Lenin, who was compelled to keep in hiding, gave the signal, “The crisis is ripe, the hour of the insurrection has approached.” He was right. The ruling classes had landed in a blind alley before the problems of the war, the land and national liberation. The bourgeoisie finally lost its head. The democratic parties, the Mensheviks and social-revolutionaries, wasted the remains of the confidence of the masses in them by their support of the imperialist war, by their policy of ineffectual compromise and concession to the bourgeois and feudal property-owners. The awakened army no longer wanted to fight for the alien aims of imperialism. Disregarding democratic advice, the peasantry smoked the landowners out of their estates. The oppressed nationalities at the periphery rose up against the bureaucracy of Petrograd. In the most important workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets the Bolsheviki were dominant. The workers and soldiers demanded action. The ulcer was ripe. It needed a cut of the lancet.
Only under these social and political conditions was the insurrection possible. And thus it also became inevitable. But there is no playing around with the insurrection. Woe to the surgeon who is careless in the use of the lancet! Insurrection is an art. It has its laws and its rules.
The Party carried through the October insurrection with cold calculation and with flaming determination. Thanks to this, it conquered almost without victims. Through the victorious Soviets the Bolsheviki placed themselves at the head of a country which occupies one sixth of the surface of the globe....
Let us now in closing attempt to ascertain the place of the October Revolution, not only in the history of Russia but in the history of the world. During the year 1917, in a period of eight months, two historical curves intersect. The February upheaval—that belated echo of the great struggles which had been carried out in past centuries on the territories of Holland, England, France, almost all of Continental Europe—takes its place in the series of bourgeois revolutions. The October Revolution proclaims and opens the domination of the proletariat. It was world capitalism that suffered its first great defeat on the territory of Russia. The chain broke at its weakest link. But it was the chain that broke, and not only the link.
Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system. It has ceased to fulfill its essential mission, the increase of human power and human wealth. Humanity cannot stand still at the level which it has reached. Only a powerful increase in productive force and a sound, planned, that is, Socialist organization of production and distribution can assure humanity—all humanity—of a decent standard of life and at the same time give it the precious feeling of freedom with respect to its own economy. Freedom in two senses—first of all, man will no longer be compelled to devote the greater part of his life to physical labor. Second, he will no longer be dependent on the laws of the market, that is, on the blind and dark forces which have grown up behind his back. He will build up his economy freely, that is, according to a plan, with compass in hand. This time it is a question of subjecting the anatomy of society to the X-ray through and through, of disclosing all its secrets and subjecting all its functions to the reason and the will of collective humanity. In this sense, Socialism must become a new step in the historical advance of mankind. Before our ancestor, who first armed himself with a stone axe, the whole of nature represented a conspiracy of secret and hostile forces. Since then, the natural sciences, hand in hand with practical technology, have illuminated nature down to its most secret depths. By means of electrical energy, the physicist passes judgment on the nucleus of the atom. The hour is not far when science will easily solve the task of the alchemists, and turn manure into gold and gold into manure. Where the demons and furies of nature once raged, now rules ever more courageously the industrial will of man.
But while he wrestled victoriously with nature, man built up his relations to other men blindly, almost like the bee or the ant. Belatedly and most undecidedly he approached the problems of human society. He began with religion, and passed on to politics. The Reformation represented the first victory of bourgeois individualism and rationalism in a domain which had been ruled by dead tradition. From the church, critical thought went on to the state. Born in the struggle with absolutism and the medieval estates, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people and of the rights of man and the citizen grew stronger. Thus arose the system of parliamentarism. Critical thought penetrated into the domain of government administration. The political rationalism of democracy was the highest achievement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
But between nature and the state stands economic life. Technology liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire and air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to nature, to become a slave to the machine, and, still worse, a slave to supply and demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man, who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man and every woman, not only a selected few—become a full citizen in the realm of thought.
—“Leon Trotsky Defends the October Revolution” (Militant, 21 January 1933)
************************
Leon Trotsky On The Lessons Of The Russian Revolution
Workers Vanguard No. 968
5 November 2010
In Honor of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
For New October Revolutions!
(From the Archives of Marxism)
November 7 (October 25 by the calendar used in Russia at the time) marks the 93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the workers’ seizure of power in Russia gave flesh and blood reality to the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state, culminating in its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, the October Revolution was and is the international proletariat’s greatest victory; its final undoing, a world-historic defeat. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fought to the bitter end in defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, while calling for workers political revolutions to oust the parasitic nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies that ruled these states. This is the same program we uphold today for the remaining workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
Having been expelled from the USSR in 1929 by Stalin, Trotsky spent the remainder of his life in exile. In November 1932, he gave a speech to a Danish social-democratic student group in Copenhagen. He outlined the political conditions and the social forces that drove the Russian Revolution, stressing the decisive role of the Bolshevik Party. Illuminating the worldwide impact of the Russian Revolution and its place in history, Trotsky underlined the necessity of sweeping away the decaying capitalist order and replacing it with a scientifically planned international socialist economy that will lay the material basis for human freedom.
The ICL fights to forge workers parties modeled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to lead the struggle for new October Revolutions around the globe.
* * *
Revolution means a change of the social order. It transfers the power from the hands of a class which has exhausted itself into those of another class, which is on the rise....
Without the armed insurrection of November 7, 1917, the Soviet state would not be in existence. But the insurrection itself did not drop from Heaven. A series of historical prerequisites was necessary for the October revolution.
1. The rotting away of the old ruling classes—the nobility, the monarchy, the bureaucracy.
2. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in the masses of the people.
3. The revolutionary character of the peasant question.
4. The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed nations.
5. The significant social weight of the proletariat.
To these organic pre-conditions we must add certain conjunctural conditions of the highest importance:
6. The Revolution of 1905 was the great school, or in Lenin’s words, the “dress rehearsal” of the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets, as the irreplaceable organizational form of the proletarian united front in the revolution, were created for the first time in the year 1905.
7. The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the backward masses out of their immobility and thereby prepared the grandiose scale of the catastrophe.
But all these conditions, which fully sufficed for the outbreak of the Revolution, were insufficient to assure the victory of the proletariat in the Revolution. For this victory one condition more was needed:
8. The Bolshevik Party....
In the year 1883 there arose among the emigres the first Marxist group. In the year 1898, at a secret meeting, the foundation of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was proclaimed (we all called ourselves Social-Democrats in those days). In the year 1903 occurred the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the year 1912 the Bolshevist fraction finally became an independent Party.
It learned to recognize the class mechanics of society in struggle, in the grandiose events of twelve years (1905-1917). It educated cadres equally capable of initiative and of subordination. The discipline of its revolutionary action was based on the unity of its doctrine, on the tradition of common struggles and on confidence in its tested leadership.
Thus stood the Party in the year 1917. Despised by the official “public opinion” and the paper thunder of the intelligentsia press, it adapted itself to the movement of the masses. Firmly it kept in hand the control of factories and regiments. More and more the peasant masses turned toward it. If we understand by “nation,” not the privileged heads, but the majority of the people, that is, the workers and peasants, then Bolshevism became in the course of the year 1917 a truly national Russian Party.
In September 1917, Lenin, who was compelled to keep in hiding, gave the signal, “The crisis is ripe, the hour of the insurrection has approached.” He was right. The ruling classes had landed in a blind alley before the problems of the war, the land and national liberation. The bourgeoisie finally lost its head. The democratic parties, the Mensheviks and social-revolutionaries, wasted the remains of the confidence of the masses in them by their support of the imperialist war, by their policy of ineffectual compromise and concession to the bourgeois and feudal property-owners. The awakened army no longer wanted to fight for the alien aims of imperialism. Disregarding democratic advice, the peasantry smoked the landowners out of their estates. The oppressed nationalities at the periphery rose up against the bureaucracy of Petrograd. In the most important workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets the Bolsheviki were dominant. The workers and soldiers demanded action. The ulcer was ripe. It needed a cut of the lancet.
Only under these social and political conditions was the insurrection possible. And thus it also became inevitable. But there is no playing around with the insurrection. Woe to the surgeon who is careless in the use of the lancet! Insurrection is an art. It has its laws and its rules.
The Party carried through the October insurrection with cold calculation and with flaming determination. Thanks to this, it conquered almost without victims. Through the victorious Soviets the Bolsheviki placed themselves at the head of a country which occupies one sixth of the surface of the globe....
Let us now in closing attempt to ascertain the place of the October Revolution, not only in the history of Russia but in the history of the world. During the year 1917, in a period of eight months, two historical curves intersect. The February upheaval—that belated echo of the great struggles which had been carried out in past centuries on the territories of Holland, England, France, almost all of Continental Europe—takes its place in the series of bourgeois revolutions. The October Revolution proclaims and opens the domination of the proletariat. It was world capitalism that suffered its first great defeat on the territory of Russia. The chain broke at its weakest link. But it was the chain that broke, and not only the link.
Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system. It has ceased to fulfill its essential mission, the increase of human power and human wealth. Humanity cannot stand still at the level which it has reached. Only a powerful increase in productive force and a sound, planned, that is, Socialist organization of production and distribution can assure humanity—all humanity—of a decent standard of life and at the same time give it the precious feeling of freedom with respect to its own economy. Freedom in two senses—first of all, man will no longer be compelled to devote the greater part of his life to physical labor. Second, he will no longer be dependent on the laws of the market, that is, on the blind and dark forces which have grown up behind his back. He will build up his economy freely, that is, according to a plan, with compass in hand. This time it is a question of subjecting the anatomy of society to the X-ray through and through, of disclosing all its secrets and subjecting all its functions to the reason and the will of collective humanity. In this sense, Socialism must become a new step in the historical advance of mankind. Before our ancestor, who first armed himself with a stone axe, the whole of nature represented a conspiracy of secret and hostile forces. Since then, the natural sciences, hand in hand with practical technology, have illuminated nature down to its most secret depths. By means of electrical energy, the physicist passes judgment on the nucleus of the atom. The hour is not far when science will easily solve the task of the alchemists, and turn manure into gold and gold into manure. Where the demons and furies of nature once raged, now rules ever more courageously the industrial will of man.
But while he wrestled victoriously with nature, man built up his relations to other men blindly, almost like the bee or the ant. Belatedly and most undecidedly he approached the problems of human society. He began with religion, and passed on to politics. The Reformation represented the first victory of bourgeois individualism and rationalism in a domain which had been ruled by dead tradition. From the church, critical thought went on to the state. Born in the struggle with absolutism and the medieval estates, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people and of the rights of man and the citizen grew stronger. Thus arose the system of parliamentarism. Critical thought penetrated into the domain of government administration. The political rationalism of democracy was the highest achievement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
But between nature and the state stands economic life. Technology liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire and air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to nature, to become a slave to the machine, and, still worse, a slave to supply and demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man, who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man and every woman, not only a selected few—become a full citizen in the realm of thought.
—“Leon Trotsky Defends the October Revolution” (Militant, 21 January 1933)
************************
From the Archives of Marxism
“Warsaw Ghetto Anti-Nazi Uprising of Labor”
Militant, 6 May 1944
Last month marked the 70th anniversary of the heroic uprising
against the Nazis by Jews interned in the Warsaw Ghetto. Memorial events
grotesquely claimed the memory of these martyrs for Zionist Israel, a state
whose oppression of the Palestinian people calls to mind the Nazis’ drive for
lebensraum (“living space”). During the Nazi occupation, Zionist leaders
in the West provided little assistance to the East European Jews. As Polish Jews
bitterly observed in a January 1943 appeal to American Jewish leaders: “The
survivors of the Jews in Poland live with the awareness that in the worst days
of our history you have given us no aid.”
Who came to the assistance of the isolated and courageous Jews
fighting extermination? The Polish nationalist Home Army not only refused to
offer any practical or military assistance but also pocketed most of the small
quantity of arms airlifted from Britain for the ghetto insurgents. The British
Royal Air Force refused to bomb the gas chambers of Auschwitz even as they
carried out sorties a few miles away. But 600,000 Soviet soldiers died
liberating Poland from the Nazi scourge. We honor their memory. (For more, see
“Hail Warsaw Ghetto Fighters!” WV No. 452, 6 May 1988.)
As our comrades of the Spartakusowska Grupa Polski said, “We stand
in the tradition of the brave Trotskyists in the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw”
(WV No. 892, 11 May 2007). Trotskyists, including those of Czerwony
Sztandar [Red Flag] who went to their deaths in the Warsaw Ghetto, sided
militarily with the Soviet Union despite the misrule of the Stalinist
bureaucracy and opposed all the imperialist combatants, not least the
“democratic” Allied powers. For the imperialists, World War II was a struggle
over the redivision of colonies and spheres of exploitation. The Trotskyists saw
in the German working class, trampled under the fascist jackboot, the instrument
to overthrow the Nazi regime and to expropriate the bourgeoisie that had brought
Hitler to power.
Zionist leaders remained silent about Nazi atrocities. The American
government kept their knowledge secret as well. But our forebears, the American
Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), broke the government and
Zionist news blackout. They reported in their newspaper, the Militant, on
19 September 1942 that the State Department had “suppressed information that it
received from its consular agents in Switzerland. This information has to do
with the treatment of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Evidence of the greatest
atrocities has occurred there in connection with the renewed campaign to
exterminate all Jews.” The SWP also fought to lift U.S. immigration restrictions
on Jewish refugees, even as American Zionist leaders did not.
The article reprinted below, which was based on the limited
information available at the time, originally appeared in the Militant on
6 May 1944.
* * *
The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, which began on April 19, 1943 and
raged for 42 days, will go down in history as the first great revolutionary act
of working-class mass resistance to the Nazi enslavers and hangmen of Occupied
Europe.
Amid the dark alleyways and crumbling walls of their rat-infested,
disease-ridden Ghetto prison, 40,000 men, women and children, the proletarian
remnants of the Jewish population of Warsaw, Poland, went to their death
battling arms in hand against the massed, trained legions of Hitler.
With weapons sufficient for only 3,000 fighters, the starved and
ragged Jewish workers, who were organized and led by the labor and socialist
underground movement, for six weeks held out with revolvers, rifles, a few
machine guns, home-made bombs, knives, clubs and stones against thousands of
trained soldiers using heavy artillery, tanks, flame throwers and aerial
bombs.
The battle ended only after the Nazis dynamited and put to the
torch every hovel and tenement in the entire area, and when every Jewish fighter
lay dead under the ashes and rubble that marked the site where 400,000 Jews once
lived.
Three Facts
Only within recent weeks have some of the details of the Battle of
the Warsaw Ghetto been revealed outside of the labor and socialist press. But
from the still-scanty information now available, three salient facts stand out.
The Jewish fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto were overwhelmingly workers, armed,
organized and led by the labor and socialist underground. They were inspired not
merely by Jewish and Polish nationalist sentiment, but by class solidarity and
socialist convictions, hoping that their struggle, conducted under the red flag,
would help to arouse the workers everywhere in Poland and Europe to
revolutionary class struggle. And theirs was not a “spontaneous revolt, out of
desperation,” as bourgeois press commentators would have it appear, but a
well-prepared, skillfully planned, organized mass action.
The Gestapo on July 22, 1942, demanded that the Judenrat (Jewish
Council) deliver 6,000 to 10,000 persons a day for deportation to the “East,” as
it turned out, for mass execution in specially designed gas chambers or by
machine-gunning. Deceptively, the Nazis broadcast the rumor that the deportees
were going to labor camps and even “the machinery of the Jewish auxiliary police
was utilized by the Germans to spread rumors about the favorable labor
conditions which awaited the deported.” (The Battle of Warsaw by S.
Mendelsohn.) The Ghetto was a self-contained, isolated world with its own
government, police, firemen and public health agencies.
The extermination campaign was initiated because “the German
authorities, according to the report of the Polish government representatives,
reckoned with the possibility of armed resistance at the time when there were
still half a million Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. They were afraid of it...”
Extermination Campaign
Within the Ghetto, a conflict arose. The Jewish leadership from the
bourgeois class counseled against resistance, spreading the hope that the
deportations were what the Nazis claimed. But the Jewish underground labor
organizations, according to an official report to the Polish
government-in-exile, “through handbills warned against the trap and called at
least for passive resistance.”
The extermination campaign raged unabated. By January 1943, only
about 40,000 to 45,000 of the original 400,000 Jews remained alive in the
Ghetto. During this entire period, the Allied powers and their press scarcely
commented on the unprecedented mass slaughter of the Jewish people.
Then came accounts of the first resistance. In the Polish newspaper
Przez Walke do Zwyciesta, Jan. 20, 1943, it was reported, “We extend our
admiration to the Fighter Unit (of the Jewish Labor underground) which during
the latest liquidation met the Gestapo with gun in hand. Shooting broke out and
developed into a real battle on Zamenhofa Street from where the Gestapo agents
and German police had to flee and to which they returned only with
reinforcements. Jews defended themselves with hand grenades and revolvers.
Twenty Gestapo agents and police are dead and many more wounded.”
For three months the Nazis drew back from completing their
liquidation drive. The Jewish workers of Warsaw used the respite to organize
further for armed resistance.
Nazi Attack
When, in the middle of April, 1943, the Gestapo and Nazi military
police attempted to renew the “deportation” drive, their orders for an
assemblage of the Ghetto inhabitants were defied. Their police detachments tried
to enter the Ghetto. “As a reply from the seemingly empty houses came flying
bullets and hand grenades. Roofs and attics began to spit fire and to rain death
on the German police. Fear descended on Hitler’s henchmen. They fled in
confusion.” (Polska, April 29, 1943.)
From the account of an official representative of the Polish
Government-in-Exile, we learn that the Nazis began the attack with “numerous,
heavily armed S.S. detachments on cars mounted with machine guns and on
tanks.”
“The actions of the defenders were perfectly coordinated,” says the
report, “and the battles were fought on practically the entire territory of the
Ghetto. Jewish resistance was brilliantly planned, so that in spite of the vast
superiority in men and materiel on the German side, good results were achieved.
In the first days of combat the Germans took severe punishment; hundreds of them
were killed and more wounded. Several times they had to retreat behind the
Ghetto walls. During the first week the battle had all the characteristics of
regular military operations. The din of a tremendous cannonade was constantly
heard from the Ghetto.” This phase of the battle lasted a week.
Authentic Accounts
Then the Nazis concentrated forces at individual points of
resistance reducing them slowly one by one with dynamite, flame throwers and
incendiary bombs. The Jewish workers fell back on guerrilla tactics, fighting
from cellars, roofs, sewers, sortying out at night to assault the Nazi troops
under cover of darkness. “The burning in the Ghetto kept spreading. The fires
were becoming intolerable. After six days of further combat, after the Germans
had already been using planes, artillery and tanks, they managed to break into
the northern part of the Ghetto... By April 28th, the Germans had thrown into
the battle 6,000 heavily armed troops. Estimates place the number of Germans
dead at between 1,000 and 1,200. The Jews lost about 3,000 to 5,000...”
According to the most authentic accounts, Nazi occupation of the
Warsaw Ghetto was not completed until 42 days after the fight began, and even
months later they were meeting unexpected resistance from tiny hidden groups dug
into the ruins and cellars.
Above all, it is necessary to emphasize the working class character
of the resistance. The Stalinist swine and the bourgeois nationalist and
religious leaders are engaged in a systematic campaign of falsification intended
to obscure or deny the class struggle content of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt. While
a few middle-class elements did participate, they fought under the inspiration,
guidance, organization and leadership of the workers.
“Workers and the working intelligentsia are the heart and soul
among the masses of fighting Jews who arose gun in hand against Nazi
atrocities,” states an appeal of the Polish Labor Movement issued on the second
day of the revolt. “Almost all underground publications, as well as the reports
of the government representative, speak of the Jewish Fighter Organization which
began and led the struggle... both the appeal of the Polish Labor Movement and
some newspapers indicate that the organization consisted chiefly of workers,
most of them young.” (S. Mendelsohn, The Battle of the Warsaw
Ghetto.)
Underground Manifesto
An underground manifesto from Poland, issued by the Fighter Units,
proclaims, “Our activity will still make it possible for a certain number of
people to be spared... We live in full realization that it is our duty to
proudly continue our glorious heritage of Socialist struggle.” (PM, April
18.)
That struggle is continuing, inspired by the example of the Jewish
workers of Warsaw. In Lodz, the biggest Polish industrial center, 130,000 Jewish
workers went on a general strike, halting temporarily the Nazi extermination
drive there. Armed rebellions have flared up through all the labor camps. A full
scale armed resistance was carried on for a month by the Jews of Bialystok,
where 30,000 died in struggle and where the “German losses were high despite the
heavy armaments, tanks and fire-throwers thrown into the battle.” (PM,
April 18.)
Since the Warsaw battle, the British government has closed the last
door of refuge for the Jews, in Palestine, while the American State Department
and Roosevelt shed crocodile tears in public but deny haven to the Jews in any
United States territory. Roosevelt could only mumble evasive statements about
“military necessity” and “post-war” plans when asked to intercede with the
British government to open Palestine once more for Jewish refugees. And on
British soil, Jewish soldiers who resisted the anti-Semitic attacks imposed on
them in the armed forces of the reactionary Polish exiled regime are
court-martialed and given prison sentences.
Now it should be clear to the Jewish people everywhere, and to all
the workers, that the capitalist “democracies” will not save the Jews from
fascist barbarism. As the Jewish workers of Warsaw have demonstrated, only the
workers themselves in revolutionary struggle will fight fascism to the
death.
All honor to the brave Jewish worker dead, who have shown the
workers everywhere the revolutionary road to freedom and socialist emancipation
from capitalist reaction and fascism. When tens of millions shall rise in the
manner of the heroic 40,000 worker-fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, the forces of
Nazism and capitalism will be swept away like chaff before the irresistible
might of their onslaught.
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