Before the war, Mila Street in Warsaw, Poland was almost entirely Jewish. According to Edna’s brother Yakov, ninety-nine percent of the residents were Jews; only the servants and housekeepers were Polish. The Szureks lived at number 18, occupying the first-floor flat.
In the basement below, their mother Shulamit organized what Yakov called “big weddings of important and wealthy people.” The space held everything required for celebration: tables, chairs, fine tableware, linens. When a prosperous Warsaw family needed to host a milestone event, they called on Shulamit, an “economist for weddings,” in her son’s words. Their father owned a leather factory.
The children played in the courtyard, attended Polish-language schools, kicked soccer balls with neighborhood friends. Little Edna learned to sing and dance, skills that would later save her life.
It was here, in this building, that would one day house the command bunker of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, that she came into the world.
And it was here, at Mila 18, that the Nazis forced Jewish families to live with the Szureks after the ghetto wall was sealed in November 1940. At its peak, the ghetto population approached 500,000, crammed into 2.4 percent of the city’s area. Across the district, seven people on average shared a single room.
The deportations began in the summer of 1942. Between July and September, approximately 260,000 Jews were transported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka. The trains left from the Umschlagplatz, a holding area at the edge of the ghetto.
Unlike other concentration camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka was a killing center, built for one purpose: the rapid extermination of human beings. Constructed in the summer of 1942 as part of Operation Reinhard, it was designed to murder the Jews of occupied Poland as efficiently as possible. There were no barracks, no labor details, no selections. Victims were separated by sex, stripped of their belongings, marched down a narrow path the Germans called the “Schlauch,” and gassed with carbon monoxide. Most were dead within hours of arrival. By the time the camp was dismantled in the fall of 1943, an estimated 900,000 people had been murdered there, second only to Auschwitz. Fewer than 70 survived.
When twenty-four-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz returned to Warsaw that autumn, he found only 60,000 Jews remaining. The ghetto that had once held nearly half a million people was all but empty. The time for deliberation was over.
In November 1942, Anielewicz was elected commander of the newly reorganized Jewish Combat Organization, the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, known as the ŻOB. The fighters were young, most in their twenties. They had pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails fashioned from bottles. They had almost no ammunition and no illusions. They knew they could not win. But they could choose how to die.
On January 18, 1943, the Germans entered the ghetto for a second mass deportation. This time, the Jews fought back. Anielewicz and his fighters ambushed the soldiers with concealed pistols, firing at close range. From apartment windows above, Zivia Lubetkin’s unit rained bullets down on the Germans below. The Nazis retreated. The deportation halted after four days.
It was a moral victory, not a military one. But for the first time, the Jews of Warsaw had drawn blood.
For the next three months, the remaining ghetto inhabitants prepared. They built bunkers beneath the streets, stockpiled what weapons they could smuggle through the sewers, and waited.
The Germans returned on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover and Hitler’s birthday, with 2,000 troops and tanks. They expected to liquidate the ghetto in three days. Instead, they met a force of roughly 750 fighters armed with pistols and homemade explosives. The Jews held them off. Then held them off again.
The uprising lasted twenty-seven days.
As the ghetto burned, the ŻOB command retreated to a bunker beneath Mila 18, the very building where Edna had been born, where her mother had once stored wedding linens in the basement. The bunker had been built by smugglers before the war: spacious, equipped with electricity, a well, multiple exits. Now it sheltered over 300 people, fighters and civilians alike.
On May 8, 1943, the Germans discovered the bunker. They pumped in poison gas. Rather than surrender, Anielewicz and most of his command took cyanide. He was twenty-four years old.
Zivia Lubetkin escaped through the sewers with a handful of survivors, emerging on the Aryan side caked in filth. Years later, she and her husband Yitzhak Zuckerman, Anielewicz’s deputy, would help found Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot, the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz, in northern Israel. Among the other founders was Edna’s brother Yakov. Edna and her future husband Harry were also members; it was there that they met.
Today, a memorial to the fighters stands on Mila Street in Warsaw, Poland, constructed from the rubble of Mila 18. In 1989, Edna returned to Warsaw and stood before it. The place of her birth had become a mass grave.
Survivors of the Jewish underground pose atop the ruins of the Mila 18 bunker in the former ghetto.
Among those pictured are Lodzia Hamersztajn (second from the right) and Szymon Rathajzer (later Simcha Rotem) (left). Both were members of the Zionist youth movement and the Jewish underground in Poland. Rathajzer’s nom de querre was Kazik.
Date: Circa July 1945
Locale: Warsaw, Poland
Variant Locale: Warszawa, Varshava, Warschau
Photo Credit:
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Leah Hammerstein Silverstein
Born at Mila 18 – the future site of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance
