Students from II LO, together with the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, are organizing an event to commemorate the 72nd anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising. Paper daffodils will be handed out that day: flowers associated with Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Jewish Combat Organization. In previous years, thanks to volunteers, thousands of people in Poland and abroad wore the yellow symbolic flower on their clothes. Volunteer recruitment continued until the beginning of March.
“Forty-two people signed up, and there are still applicants. I did not expect such interest,” says the event’s initiator and volunteer coordinator, historian Barbara Sykulska. “For me, the most important thing about this event is that students learn as much as possible about the Ghetto Uprising, because information about it is scarce nowadays. I invite everyone from Bolesławiec to Bolesławiec Market Square this Sunday. At II LO, the following events have been planned this week to mark the occasion: an exhibition commemorating the Holocaust, the ‘Smoke over the Ghetto’ action, a special history lesson, and a lecture by Anna Lisiak,” the teacher adds.
In 1942, nearly 300,000 Warsaw Jews were deported to Treblinka; 60,000 remained in the ghetto. When fascist forces began the final liquidation of the ghetto on April 19, 1943, members of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) resisted them. The unequal battle lasted three weeks. The Germans razed the ghetto to the ground, methodically burning one house after another, killing residents and deporting them to camps. In a bunker surrounded by the Germans, uprising leader Mordechaj Anielewicz took his own life along with a group of several dozen ŻOB fighters on May 8. A few people managed to escape through the sewers from the burning ghetto. One of them was Marek Edelman, the last commander of ŻOB, who died in 2009.