The Białystok Ghetto Uprising: The Forgotten Revolt After Warsaw

We have all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but many do not know that just three months later in the Białystok Ghetto Uprising, Jews took up arms against the Germans.

From Occupation to Oppression

In June 1941, the Germans seized Białystok from the Russians. Located in northeastern Poland, the city had originally been under Soviet control according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

In the very first days of the German occupation, a massacre took place. Arthur Nebe, head of the Berlin police, along with a murder squad and a Ukrainian auxiliary unit, rounded up a thousand Jews, locked them inside a synagogue, and burned them alive. Another four thousand Jews were also murdered. Years later, Arthur Nebe was hanged on Hitler’s orders after a personal falling-out.

By August 1941, all 50,000 Jews of Białystok were forced into a small section of streets that became the Białystok Ghetto. They were starved and subjected to forced labor. In February 1943, 10,000 Jews were deported to extermination camps, while 2,000 elderly who could not board the trains were shot on the spot. By August 1943, the Germans decided to liquidate the ghetto. The Jews, determined not to go like sheep to the slaughter, resolved to resist.

The Uprising of August 1943

The revolt was led by Mordechai Tenenbaum, who had been one of the organizers of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising months earlier. The fighters possessed only a single machine gun, several dozen pistols, Molotov cocktails, and bottles of acid.

When the Germans entered the ghetto with tanks and machine guns, the fighters had little chance of victory, but they fought with everything they had. For three days, they resisted fiercely, showering the Germans with their modest arsenal.

Seventy-two fighters were holed up in a well-concealed bunker at 7 Chmielna Street with significant supplies of weapons and food. They could have held out much longer, but after an informant’s betrayal — or for reasons unknown, the Germans ambushed the bunker and killed everyone inside.

Elsewhere, fighters held out for another day before being overwhelmed. Leaders Tenenbaum and Daniel Moszkowicz committed suicide rather than be captured.

Survivors and Resistance in the Forests

One bunker at 9 Fabryczna Street, hidden beneath a cotton factory, was never discovered by the Germans. Fighters remained there for two months until the time was right to escape. Dozens fled, joining others who had broken out during the uprising. Together they linked up with the Armia Krajowa, the large Polish partisan organization active in the Białystok region.

The Story of Ewa Kracowska

One survivor of the uprising was Ewa Kracowska, who later received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Poland from President Bronisław Komorowski “for outstanding service in strengthening Polish-Jewish relations.”

When she returned home after the war, she found no trace of her extended family. Polish squatters had moved into her house, slammed the door in her face, and she slept in a city park until deciding to leave.

Though she married a partisan she had met during the fighting, she kept her maiden name “Kracowska,” hoping one day a surviving family member might recognize it. For seventy years she waited. In 2013, a niece named Ida Kracowska noticed the name and reached out. They were reunited that August, when Ewa, then in her nineties, visited Białystok for the 70th anniversary of the uprising.

Ewa Kracowska later died at age 93 in her home in Ramat Gan, Israel. She was the last known survivor of the Białystok Ghetto.