Białystok Ghetto Revolt

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Map of Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland

Jewish resistance and uprisings against the Nazis took place at numerous locations throughout Poland, including in about 100 ghettos, labor camps and killing centers. The odds against success were significant and Nazi retaliation vicious.

   Besides the Białystok, Warsaw, Minsk and other ghetto uprisings, there was resistance and uprisings in some Nazi concentration camps including Kruszyna (1942), Minsk Mazowiecki (1943), and Janowska (1943), among others. In several dozen camps, prisoners organized escapes to join partisan units.

   There were also Jewish revolts in the killing centers of Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz. At Treblinka in August 1943 and Sobibor in October 1943, prisoners stole weapons and attacked the SS staff and guards. Several dozen prisoners eluded their pursuers and survived the war. In October 1944 at Auschwitz-Birkenau, members of the Jewish Special Detachment (Sonderkommando – Jews forced into many horrible tasks in the gas chambers and crematoria) mutinied against the SS guards, aided by five women who supplied them with explosives to blow up the crematorium. Nearly 250 died during the fighting.

   While the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the largest and most well-known revolt in the ghettos, visiting Bialystok we learned about an armed rebellion that occurred there in 1943.

   Białystok was over 40 percent Jewish before the War; 25 years earlier the number was almost 70 percent with Jews having an even larger role in business and manufacturing, particularly the textile industry. Jewish labor was also prominent in that industry and elsewhere in the region, and many of the workers aligned with the Bund (Jewish labor movement, socialist, anti-religious and yiddishist).

   We spent one day visiting Jewish sites of memory in Białystok, including the Ghetto Uprising Memorial at Mordechaj Tenenbaum Square, the memorial to the destruction of the Great Synagogue, and the extremely large Bagnowska Jewish Cemetery (6,000 matzevot), which is undergoing renovation (we had to climb over a wall to get in and crawl on our bellies to get out, but that’s another story).

   Tragedy came quickly after the Nazi occupation of Białystok in June 1941. On the 27th, the Germans murdered about 2,000 Jews, most of them burned alive in the Main Synagogue, which was destroyed, while the rest were shot. In the first month of the German occupation, 5,000 Jews perished. At the end of July, they enclosed 45,000 Jews into the ghetto, essentially an open-air prison and source of forced labor for Nazi projects.

   Underground resistance cells began organizing in the ghetto but conflicts among different factions of the Jewish resistance – Bundists, Zionists and Communists – worked against a unified resistance. Two years later, however, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, who had earlier been a member of the Jewish Combat Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto, communist Daniel Moszkowicz, left-wing Zionist Haika Grossman, along with others were able to create a united front.  So, when German police and military units began the final liquidation of the Ghetto in August 1943, 300 armed resistance fighters responded. They planned to break through the German units, and make a hole in the Ghetto wall allowing as many as possible to escape to the forest. Though they resisted for five days, their numbers and arms were insufficient to upend the Nazis’ plan and its force of 3,000 soldiers and police along with armored cars and light tanks. Some were able to escape to nearby Knyszyńska Forest, however, and there form part of a Polish partisan resistance force. Tenenbaum and Moszkowicz died. Grossman escaped, eventually becoming a member of the Israeli Knesset. A two-minute video about the uprising is here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSTSA1mAiZw

   Every year, on the day that the ghetto uprising started, a ceremonial commemoration of the event takes place by The Heroes of the Ghetto Uprising monument.




Białystok Cemetery, containing 6,000 matzevot, many damaged or destroyed in the post-War period.

Image of the Synagogue and Memorial Plaque

BiałystokSynagogue Memorial placed over stones in the shape of the Star of David.

Mordechaj Tenenbaum

Memorial to the Ghetto Uprising in Mordechaj Tenenbaum Square in Białystok.


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