Remembering the Holocaust
Remembering the HolocaustIsrael news photo: Flash 90

A memorial was held Sunday night in the city of Yahud to mark 67 years since the Bialystok ghetto uprising. The uprising was the second largest to take place during the Holocaust, smaller only than the more famous Warsaw ghetto battle.

Yaakov Kagan, head of the Bialystok community organization in Israel, spoke to Arutz Sheva's Hebrew-language news service about the event.

“Bialystok was a city where 70% of the population was Jewish,” Kagan began. “There were more than 100 synagogues there. The Germans came and put all the Jews from Bialystok and the surrounding area in a ghetto. More than 200,000 Jews entered the ghetto,” he recalled.



By February 1943 only 15,000 Jews remained in the ghetto. Plans to liquidate the ghetto were postponed due to armed resistance. However, the liquidation proceeded in August.

With nothing to lose, hundreds of the Polish Jews in the ghetto decided to do what they could to fight the Nazi army, despite the fact that their only weapons were a few dozen pistols, some Molotov cocktails and acid, and a single machine gun. The rebel fighters were led by Mordechai Tenenbaum and Daniel Moszkowicz.

The Jewish resisters aimed to open a hole in the German lines, allowing ghetto residents to flee to the forest. The battle lasted five days, during which more than 300 Jews were killed each day as they fought with their meager weapons store against Nazis in tanks and armored cars.

The battle ended on August 20, 1943. Moszkowicz and Tenenbaum committed suicide as their last stronghold fell.

While the uprising was quickly crushed, the Bialystok rebels were surprisingly successful in their goal of slowing the Nazi war machine, Kagan said. “They caused great damage,” he noted.

Kagan recalled the story of one young Jewish man, Yitzchak Melamed, who decided to fight back when Nazi soldiers came for him, his wife, and their young children. “He threw acid on them that he had saved after working in a battery factory,” Kagan said. “He hit the Nazi soldiers. One was blinded and began shooting in every direction, and killed two of his fellow soldiers.”

Melamed managed to escape, but returned after the Nazis threatened to murder ten thousand Jews if he did not turn himself in. His punishment was death by hanging in the town square.

“The rope ripped twice before they managed to hang him,” Kagan said. His body was left hanging for a week, in order to frighten other residents of the ghetto.

Other ghetto residents fought secretly, assisting partisan fighters in the nearby forest.

An estimated 300-400 Jews from Bialystok survived the Holocaust out of a pre-war population of roughly 60,000. Of those, 200 survived the concentration camps, several dozen fought with the partisans, and dozens more hid on the Polish side of the city.

Many of the survivors settled in Yahud, where they named a section of town after Bialystok. One road is named after Yitzchak Melamed.

The survivors also built a memorial to the Jews of Bialystok who were slain in the Holocaust.