An account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Warsaw’s leading Holocaust scholar

Mark, Bernard. Powstanie w Ghetcie Warzawskien. Moscow: Nakladem Zwiazku Patrioto´w Polskich W ZSRR, 1944.

18mo.; 72 pages; age-toned; stamp that reads “PRESIDIUM OF THE NATIONAL COUNCIL in the capital city of Warsaw / Department of Health and Social Welfare of the State Social Welfare Home for Adults in 3 Warsaw, ul. Wójtowska No. 18” on final page; annotated “3577” on both title and final pages; illustrated oliver wrappers; rubbed; frayed; soiled; edgewear.

The ghetto uprisings during World War II were a series of armed revolts between 1941 and 1943 against the Nazi regime in the newly established Jewish ghettos across occupied Europe. Following the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Polish Jews were targeted from the outset. Within months inside occupied Poland, the Germans created hundreds of ghettos.They were part of the German official policy of removing Jews from public life with the aim of economic exploitation. The combination of excess numbers of inmates, unsanitary conditions, and lack of food resulted in a high death rates. In most cities the Jewish underground resistance movements coalesced almost instantly, although ghettoization severely limited their access to resources.

Armed resistance was offered in over 100 locations on either side of the Polish-Soviet border of 1939, overwhelmingly in eastern Poland. Some of these uprisings were more massive and organized, while others were small and spontaneous. The best known and the biggest of all Jewish uprisings during the Holocaust took place in the Warsaw Ghetto between April 19 and May 26, 1943. In the course of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 56,065 Jews were either killed on the spot or captured and transported aboard Holocaust trains to extermination camps before the ghetto was razed to the ground. The resistance held out against the Nazis for a day longer than all of Poland did during the initial invasion.

Born in Lomza, Bernard Mark (1908–66) studied law at Warsaw University. Prior to World War II, he published articles in Polish and Yiddish on literary history and edited left-wing periodicals. Between 1932 and 1939, he published a two-volume work in Yiddish entitled Geshikhte fun di Sotsiale Bavegungen in Poyln [“The History of Social Movements in Poland,” 1938–39]. During the war, he lived in the Soviet Union, where he was active on the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,and in the Związek Patriotów Polskich ["Polish Patriots' Union”]. While in Moscow, he published Powstanie w Ghetcie Warzawskien, one of the earliest accounts on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was a theme Mark, who was appointed director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, returned to after the war, with the Yiddish-language Dokumenten un Materialen vegn Oyfshtand in Varshever Geto [1953] and Der Oy fshtand in Varshever Geto [1963].