On Sunday, April 19, at noon, high school students gathered in Bolesławiec’s market square to hand out yellow paper daffodils—the flowers received on the anniversary of the ghetto uprising by its hero, Marek Edelman. A total of 105 high school students took part in the campaign. This year, as in previous years, thanks to volunteers, thousands of people in Poland and abroad are wearing the yellow symbolic flower on their clothes. At II LO, the following activities were planned last week on this occasion: an exhibition commemorating the Holocaust and a special history lesson—a lecture by Anna Lisiak.
The high school students undertook the difficult task of commemorating the heroic resistance of Polish Jews against the fascist executioners. They were concerned about how they would be received by society, but the residents of Bolesławiec did not disappoint and responded kindly to the young people and the campaign they organized.
In 1942, nearly 300,000 Warsaw Jews were deported to Treblinka, while 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 struggle lasted three weeks. The Germans razed the ghetto to the ground, methodically burning one house after another, killing the 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. A few managed to escape through the sewers from the burning ghetto. One of them was the last commander of the ŻOB, Marek Edelman, who died in 2009.