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On Passover eve, April 19, 1943, a group of young Polish Jews, members of socialist and Zionist youth groups, launched an armed uprising against the German troops that were massing to liquidate the surviving residents of the Warsaw Ghetto. It was a mad, hopeless act of desperation and defiance: fewer than 600 teenagers, armed with pistols and hand grenades, taking on elite units of the world's most feared army. Few had any hope of surviving, much less stopping the Nazi killing machine.

But they hoped to be remembered, and perhaps to inspire others. And in that, they succeeded. Theirs was the first urban uprising in German-occupied Europe. Holding out for 27 days, they slowed the Nazi butchers and showed others what it meant to rise up and fight back.

It is better, Winston Churchill once said, to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

Jewish leaders are often bashed for too-often invoking the Holocaust, but they are right to insist: Never forget.

So far as I know, the first account of the uprising was Leon Uris' Mila 18, an affecting book even today, though Uris' prose style is distinctly of 2-generations ago. If you've never read it, you should; you'll be more than adequately repaid for the trouble.

Read Elie Wiesel's Night, too, an account of his experiences as a teenager swept into a Nazi concentration camp. Read, especially, Wiesel's Nobel acceptance speech.

Do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have perished? Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf? I do not. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions. And yet, I sense their presence. I always do — and at this moment more than ever. The presence of my parents, that of my little sister. The presence of my teachers, my friends, my companions ...

This honor belongs to all the survivors and their children and, through us, to the Jewish people with whose destiny I have always identified.

I remember: it happened yesterday, or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

I remember he asked his father, "Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?"

And now the boy is turning to me. "Tell me," he asks, "what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?" And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

And then I explain to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.

The world did know, and did choose to remain silent. It knew no later than 1938, when Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again was published. It is hardly believable that the diplomats never saw over the course of years what Wolfe saw in a single summer in the early- to mid-30's, or that anyone who read the book could have failed to understand.

It was just so much easier to look away — a strategy which then, and still, only encourages the depredations of the mad. Never forget.

Bob Felton
www.CivilCommotion.com
The Intersection of Religion, Law, and Politics