In the center, rising in bronze, is Nathan Rapoport’s monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Mordechai Anielewicz stands at the front, grenade in hand, the fighters massed behind him. The monument was unveiled on April 19, 1948, the fifth anniversary of the uprising, on the ground where the ghetto once stood.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, where nearly 400,000 Jews were packed into 1.3 square miles, where the official ration was 184 calories a day, where bodies lay in the streets each morning waiting to be collected—
there was a man who made people laugh.
Nobody knew his first name.
Some said Moishele.
Others said Itzik.
Most…
