Exhibition from the Anti-War Museum and Peace Library of Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg

Hitler’s extermination industry worked efficiently and without mercy. It is beyond our imagination to understand. This extermination work was ”very successful” in eastern Europe: Today there are no traces of that diverse Jewish culture in this part of Europe. There are photos of the Warsaw ghetto which document the extermination of the Jewish people form 1941 to 1945. The photos were taken by German soldiers and show the ”normal daily life” in the ghetto: hunger, harassment and extermination. Out of the nearly one million people who were forced to live in the confined space of the ghetto, scarcely anybody survived. From 1942 most of the inhabitants of the ghetto were deported to the German extermination camps in Belzec, Sobibor and Majdanek, where they were killed by gas.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was the largest armed uprising of Jews and Jewish women during World War II. On April 19th, 1943, the heroic fight of the Jewish resistance against the liquidation action planned by the SS and police forces began. On the day the uprising broke out, on Pesach, there were 50,000 people in the ghetto. There were 1,000 fighters. They fought against German soldiers who outnumbered them and had more weapons. Almost everyone lost their lives in combat and only a few fighters managed to escape.