During the official ceremony under the Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes, Polish President Andrzej Duda underlined that the anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Uprising was commemorated not only in Poland, but also in Israel and in other countries in which Polish Jews live. He reminded that the 1943 uprising was the first large-scale city uprising in German-occupied Europe.
He added that Polish Jews waited for the uprising to start since the very beginning of the war as they were tortured and suffering in closed ghettos. The president underlined that the anniversary is also the day in which the memory of participants in lesser-known uprisings in other ghettos in German-occupied Poland is honored.
“This was a fight to the very end. They had no right to capitulate, they could not surrender, they could not count on being treated as prisoners of war and could not count on being covered by any international conventions. They knew that any surrender to Nazi Germany meant death for them,” Duda said about the uprising’s participants.
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