IN the Muranow district of Warsaw, once the beating heart of Europe’s largest Jewish community, the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes stands on the eastern edge of a large square.

It depicts defiant Jewish insurgents in the midst of their incredible uprising against the Nazis that began on April 19 1943.  

Ironically, the materials used to construct this anti-fascist monument were procured by Nazi architect Albert Speer in 1942. He had planned to erect a monument for the victorious Third Reich on the ruins of Warsaw.  

Since 2013, the square’s western side has housed the Polin Museum which describes the 1,000-year history of Polish Jews. They first settled in Warsaw in the early 1400s.

In 1930s Warsaw, the mainly Yiddish-speaking Jews comprised one-third of the city’s entire population, by far Warsaw’s biggest minority. But in its streets, you would also hear German, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Czech, Romani and Polish being spoken.

Today most districts of Warsaw are strikingly monocultural, but back then it was a cosmopolitan city, with a rich cultural mix coexisting in an increasingly threatening economic and political atmosphere.

Especially from the mid-1930s, Warsaw’s 375,000 Jews battled constantly not only with poverty and discrimination but with frequent outbreaks of street violence and calls to boycott Jewish shops.

Their resistance to anti-semitism and fascism did not start in 1943. The Jewish Workers Bund and the left wing of the Polish Socialist Party fought together against Poland’s far right throughout the 1930s.

The Ghetto Heroes Monument was unveiled in a mass ceremony in April 1948, close to the streets where several early battles in that uprising had taken place — Zamenhofa, Mila, Nalewki and Gesia.

For three weeks in 1943, a United Jewish Combat organisation led by left-wing forces — Bundists, zionists and communists — aged from 13-43, with precious few weapons, fought a guerilla war against their occupiers, incarcerators, tormentors and murderers.

The Nazis were forced to retreat several times. On the first occasion, they simply abandoned their dead and wounded, and insurgents seized their weapons.

By the time the Nazis blew up Warsaw’s Great Synagogue, on Tlomackie Street on May 16 and proclaimed the ghetto’s total liquidation, the insurgents had ensured that the Nazis paid a high price for their inevitable victory.

Two years later as the war was coming to its end, the battle over its history, over who should tell the story of the fate of the Jews under Nazism and those who collaborated with them, and how to interpret it, was only just beginning.

This week the official ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the uprising will be hosted at the monument by leaders of Poland’s PiS (Law and Justice) government, whose xenophobic Catholic-nationalism and authoritarian practices stand in sharp contrast to the ideals of freedom, dignity and humanity held by the ghetto resisters.

But since the political map of Europe in 2023 shows a marked shift towards the xenophobic, ethno-nationalist right, the platform will most likely include several political figures who stoke racism and division within their own European nations.

They will pay their hypocritical respect to the Jewish freedom fighters of 1943, then return home to enact policies that discriminate against minorities and refugees.

It is hard to imagine any British government representatives there offering an honest reckoning with the failures of the British state during the 1930s and ’40s.

When credible reports reached Britain in 1942 of mass murder of Jews under Nazi occupation, British politicians and civil servants colluded in labelling such reports as “exaggerated.” They failed to respond to demands for extraordinary action.

In September 1942, on the third anniversary of the war, Szmul Zygielbojm, a Jewish Workers Bund representative on Poland’s government-in-exile in London, spoke at a large Labour Party rally in Caxton Hall.

Quoting reports from underground resistance networks, Zygielbojm described the first use of poison gas by the Nazis as a weapon of mass murder: 40,000 Jews were killed at Chelmno in seven weeks.

In November 1939, Zygielbojm, a leading Polish Jewish trade unionist, had been personally hunted by the Nazis after an open act of defiance against the occupiers in Warsaw.

His comrades hid him, obtained false papers, and then sent him to western Europe in January 1940 with a mission to alert the West to the fate of Jews under Nazi occupation. Based in London from March 1942, he passed on reports smuggled out of the ghettoes to those who had the power to act.

On the day the uprising broke out, British and US diplomats opened the Bermuda conference. They spent 11 days discussing why they could not take any action to rescue the Jews in the ghettoes or offer sanctuary to them.

This compounded the British government’s reluctance to respond to the vast majority of requests for asylum it received from Jews in Continental Europe through the 1930s.

For Zygielbojm the Bermuda conference failure was a crushing blow. On May 11 1943, after hearing that the ghetto had finally been liquidated he wrote a series of letters, then committed suicide at his flat in London, aged 48.

The letters made clear that was an act of protest against the passivity of the Allied powers that were allowing the extermination of the Jews in Poland. His courageous act still did not shift British government policy.

How fitting then, that on April 19 this year, as the area around the monument will have a strict security ring, permitting entry for invited guests only, a “grassroots commemoration” organised by anti-racists, anti-fascists and community groups in Warsaw, will gather instead by the Zygielbojm memorial — a sculpture of a shattered world — 200 yards away.

I will be there among a seven-strong delegation of the Jewish Socialists Group from Britain.

There will be readings, poetry, songs and a march to the Umschlagplatz memorial, marking the place from which the Nazis deported Jews to death camps.

The readings will especially feature the words of Marek Edelman, also a Bundist, the last surviving member of the united command group that led the uprising, and who chronicled it in The Ghetto Fights, a searing memoir written in Polish in 1945 and translated into Yiddish and English in 1946.

Edelman, a lifelong Jewish socialist and anti-zionist, was drawn into the argument over how to interpret the uprising. He countered zionist attempts that tried to claim the Warsaw Ghetto fight as a fight for Jewish “national honour” which prefigured the fight for Israeli independence.

Edelman asserted that it was a fight “for dignity and freedom, not for territory, nor for a national identity.” No nationalist lessons could be drawn from it, “only general lessons for humanity.”

He equally strongly rejected zionist narratives that attempted to draw a sharp distinction between a young, brave, determined elite leading the armed resistance, and a supposedly submissive population who accepted their fate.

Edelman spoke of the “courage” of Jews who chose to stay with their families, even when staying together meant that the strong accompanied the weak to a certain death.

“It is an awesome thing,” he said, “going so quietly to one’s death… more difficult than to go out shooting.”

For Edelman, the armed rebellion grew out of so many acts of passive resistance within a humiliated population treated as sub-human.

When the occupiers denied them their right to education, culture and knowledge, they established clandestine schools, newspapers and welfare institutions, and held concerts and poetry readings.

He believed it was these acts of resistance to whatever threatened their right to a dignified life that sustained the people for two-and-a-half years in the ghetto, and culminated in rebellion.

David Rosenberg is on the national committee of the Jewish Socialists Group.