Uprisings in Warsaw during WW2

During the time that Warsaw, Poland was occupied by the Nazis in World War 2, there were two armed uprisings that frequently get confused.

The first was in 1943, and is called the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Knowing that their fate was sealed, imprisoned Jews rose up in the artificially imposed Ghetto areas to fight against the impending liquidation of the ghetto and all it's inhabitants. It was a fight to the death as it had no chance of succeeding. Weapons were limited, number were few, the Allies had not even landed on the continent of Europe. The main fighting lasted from April 19 to May 16 of 1943.

The second WW2 Warsaw Uprising was in 1944 when the supposed "allied forces" (Soviet army) were within reach. It's aim was the liberation of the city of Warsaw from Nazi control before the Soviets came in. It was only supposed to last only a few days and was part of Operation Tempest, a nationwide rebellion. It started August 1st, 1944, when at 5pm Home Army soldiers simultaneously attacked German-held positions throughout the city. The Rising peaked on August 5, 1944 with the most positions captured. However, rather than withdrawing from the city, the Germans instead sent reinforcements to it. And rather than helping the inhabitants with the fight against the Germans, the Soviet Army sat on the other side of the Vistula River and watched. Himmler had given the order to kill all of the city's inhabitants, not take prisoners, and level Warsaw as an example for the rest of Europe, and that is what the German army tried to do.

If you want to know more about the second rising, I'd recommend this site: Warsaw Uprising 1944. The paintings and drawings in particular are eerie. It goes into great detail on the time line, the atrocities that occurred, the attempts at help by the Western Allies that were thwarted by the Soviets and even eye-witness reports that will make your hair stand on end. I find it too depressing to go into too much detail, that's why I've limited my post to the bare bones details.

However, what inspired this post was the latest political commentary by Craig Young of GayNZ, who in his attempt to equate Jews and Homosexuals, has confused both Uprisings.

Quite by coincidence, I was reading a book about medieval and Enlightenment era Jewish ghettos in Eastern Europe recently. The term 'gay ghetto' has fallen out of use now, but should we consider a more critical use when it comes to barebacking?

Until the Nazi Holocaust destroyed them forever, East European Jewish ghettos served as rich and vibrant social networks, sources of community media, areas of worship and commerce, culture and educational achievement. When the Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation came along in the nineteenth century, Jews were no longer automatically restricted to particular residential areas, and moved out of the areas in question as they acquired entry to professions and social mobility. When the term 'gay ghetto' came into use back in the seventies, I suspect that the earliest models were that sort of ghetto as a centre for political activism, social networks and community building.

However, the term 'ghetto' is a double-edged one, largely due to the tragedy that was the Holocaust, due to discriminatory Nazi residential and employment discrimination policies that herded Jews back into the ghettos that many of them had previously abandoned, and sealed them off. Granted, they could still become the site of heroic resistance to Nazi barbarism, as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising proved in 1944.

Craig has confused the two Uprisings in Warsaw, prompted most likely by the latest news items commemorating the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 (the commemorations for the Ghetto Uprising were earlier this year) and has also misunderstood what the Warsaw Ghetto actually was. The Polish Jews were not herded "back into the ghettos", the ghettos were created by walling off a small portion of the city of Warsaw, thus separating those that would be imprisoned in there from the rest of the city. The separation of those people from the general population was not about "discriminatory Nazi residential and employment discrimination policies", though maybe he should win an award for the euphemism of the day; the separation was part of the Nazi human extermination policy. It was done in stages, where first Warsaw Jews and Jews brought in from elsewhere were placed in the ghetto temporarily before transportation the the death camps, which were initially assumed to be work camps. It also has to be remembered that pre-WW2 Warsaw had a 33% Jewish population - the Jewish population was not a small minority in Warsaw.

However, beyond the confusion of the two Uprisings, the question he seems to be asking is if the term "ghetto" has meaning for homosexuals today. There is that pesky problem of "negative connotations" and more equating via "Jewish communities before us" as if Jewish communities had paved the way for homosexual communities. Give me a break!

So, what might the negative sense of 'ghetto' mean for us? In New Zealand, it may not be so relevant to many metropolitan lesbians and gay men. We've had about fifteen years of national anti-discrimination laws, and school anti-bullying policies are starting to address issues of homophobic harrassment and educational retention for younger members of our communities. Added to which, it's hard to think of a particular geographically marked gay district in any New Zealand city, even in the case of Ponsonby.

Again, though, what about elsewhere? As with Jewish communities before us, we face the dilemma about which of our traditions to keep, and which to discard, as the product of oppression and marginalisation, which does not serve us well now. As a community, we tend to have a libertarian ethos about many things, which should be questioned on some fronts.

The irony is that is that National MP, Mr Williamson got a rebuke for asking why there were no fat people in concentration camps. Yet the above goes far beyond that simple opinion of Mr Williamson's. I suppose the difference is that the above is not on TV, being presented to a wide audience. More's the pity.

Related Link: Barebacking and the Ghettoised Gay ~ GayNZ