On April 19, 1943, an armed uprising broke out in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was the first urban uprising in German-occupied Europe. Several hundred fighters from the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) took part in it. The uprising lasted until mid-May 1943. Samuel Willenberg wrote the following about the arrival of transports with insurgents from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka in his camp memoirs:
A very strange-looking transport reached Treblinka one fine day in April. The freight cars were in terrible condition, their boards knocked out of place all over. Ukrainians lay on the roofs, armed with a variety of weapons, all cocked and ready. They fired the moment anyone even peeped out of one of the cars. Apparently, the Jews had engaged their guards in a pitched battle en route. The Germans chose this occasion to inaugurate a new method of stripping new arrivals destined for extermination. […] That same day, people in the last transport informed us of the rebellion that had broken out in the Warsaw Ghetto. The news struck our ears like thunder. We were aware, to be sure, that a faction of Jews in the Polish capital was ready for a life-and-death war with the Germans. Lying on our bunks, isolated and locked up in the camp, we took great interest in anything going on outside. Warsaw was the center of our quiet hopes and dreams. And now, with no preliminaries, we were told that the embers of rebellion had burst into flame in the half-deserted streets of the Warsaw Ghetto, and that the staccato of machine gun fire intermingled with the thunder of hand grenades. […] People in subsequent transports from the Warsaw Ghetto updated us: the Ghetto uprising had continued, Jews were heroically fighting the Germans and inflicting heavy casualties on them. We learned that the Germans had begun to torch the Ghetto house by house and heard about people leaping from the upper stories of burning houses, and heroic battles in which women and children joined.
In April and May, nearly 7,000 Jews captured during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were deported to the Treblinka II Extermination Camp.
On April 19, the Director of the Treblinka Museum, Dr. Edward Kopówka, together with the staff, honored the memory of the uprising participants by laying flowers at the memorial stone dedicated to the Martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto on the grounds of the Extermination Camp.
Quote source, Samuel Willenberg, „Revolt in Treblinka”, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw 2000, pp. 125-127.
