← Back to Reviews
in
Uprising (2001)
Lookback/Review by Markdc
One of the most peculiar ironies of the Second World War lies in the fact that the conflict witnessed the greatest display of Jewish military activity in history and yet has, more than any other event, cemented in the minds of many people the ultimate image of Jewish weakness and passivity. This is because of the wildly erroneous belief that during the Holocaust, six million Jews allowed themselves to be exterminated without offering any resistance to their murderers. Unfortunately, this pernicious belief has been perpetuated over the years by Jews as well as Gentiles and promoted in popular Holocaust films such as Schindler’s List. Although it’s true that most of the Nazis’ Jewish victims didn’t resist, it’s also true that most of the Nazis’ non-Jewish victims didn’t resist either. (The latter group includes three million Soviet prisoners of war, who possessed military training and combat experience.) But it’s important to know that many Jews did, in fact, resist the Nazis in different ways, including by force of arms. For example, Jews in German-occupied Europe attacked Wehrmacht units in the countryside as partisans or launched revolts in the ghettos and even the death camps. And these acts of martial courage against hopeless odds was just the tip of the iceberg. Well over a million Jews served in the militaries of Allied nations, particularly the United States and the Soviet Union. And Jewish scientists, a number of them refugees from Europe such as Albert Einstein, were crucial in the creation of the atomic bomb—though this devastating weapon ended up being used against Japan instead of Germany. In recent decades, scholars of the Holocaust have done much work to eradicate the myth of Jewish passivity, but it still persists to a frustrating degree. For example, after the Polish parliament passed a law in 2018 which criminalized statements that suggested any responsibility on the part of Poland for Nazi crimes during World War II, many Jews in Israel reacted with anger, for they viewed such legislation as an attempt to whitewash Polish complicity in the Holocaust. In response, Andrzej Zybertowicz, an adviser to Polish president Andrzej Duda, claimed the outcry from Israelis was rooted in a “feeling of shame at the passivity of the Jews during the Holocaust.”
One person who sought to dispel this stubborn myth was Jewish-American filmmaker Jon Avnet, who has written, produced, or directed several successful movies, including Risky Business and Fried Green Tomatoes. In 2001, Avnet made a television film called Uprising, which focused on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The revolt, which lasted from April 19-May 16, 1943, was the first major act of resistance to take place in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War and the largest to be carried out by Jews. For nearly a month, an army of around a thousand Jewish fighters, most of them with little training and no combat experience, held off a highly-trained and lavishly equipped German force that was several times larger and became a symbol of righteous courage and fortitude for Jews and Gentiles alike. Avnet talked about Uprising during a 2018 interview he gave to Cindy Grosz of The Forward, a Jewish media outlet. In Grosz’s piece, which ran on April 19 (the 75th anniversary of the uprising), the director spoke of his deep pride in the film, saying, “It is my first project relating to my own identity. I was taught that Jews went to their deaths ‘like a lamb to its slaughter.’”
Uprising begins with Nazi Germany’s September 1939 invasion of Poland, which falls after several weeks of fighting. Almost as soon as German troops march into the Polish capital of Warsaw, the city’s Jews, like the rest of their coreligionists in the areas of the country under Nazi domination, experience acts of humiliation, discrimination, and violence at the hands of the conquerors as well as Polish Gentiles. (Note: the Soviet Union also invaded Poland, but the movie makes no mention of this.) In the fall of 1940, the 350,000 Jews living in Warsaw are forced to reside in a confined area comprising just 3.5 square miles that becomes known as the Warsaw Ghetto. Also, Jews from other parts of Poland and Nazi-occupied Europe are moved into the ghetto, whose population eventually swells to well over 400,000. A formidable brick wall is soon built around the ghetto, and because so many people are forced to live in such a tiny space and subsist on a meager food allowance, thousands begin dying of starvation, disease, and maltreatment.
The Germans set up the Judenrat (Jewish Council)—led by Adam Czerniakow—and the Jewish Police—led by Captain Josef Szerynski—to carry out their orders, which include requiring Jews over a certain age to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David on it, rounding up Jews for forced labor, and ensuring that no Jews leave the ghetto and go into the “Aryan” (Gentile) section of Warsaw without special permission. Szerynski and his officers perform their duties with gusto and are frequently brutal in their treatment of fellow Jews. However, Czerniakow sincerely cares about the people under his authority and tries to help them under terrible conditions that only grow worse over time.
After a failed attempt to transport themselves and a group of young Jews to the British Mandate of Palestine, Zionist leaders Mordechai Anielewicz, Mira Fruchner, Yitzhak Zuckerman, and Zivia Lubetkin join forces with anti-Zionist leaders like Marek Edelman to form a resistance organization called the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa in Polish, or ZOB). ZOB couriers, such as Simcha Rotem, Frania Beatus, and Arie Wilner, sneak into the “Aryan” side to establish contact with the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK), the main Polish resistance organization, and acquire weapons, ammunition, and explosives. Anielewicz and Zuckerman attempt to enlist the support of the Judenrat, but Czerniakow refuses, fearing that the existence of an underground group will cause the Germans to mete out harsh collective punishment on the entire ghetto population. Meanwhile, Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels sends Dr. Fritz Hippler to Warsaw to make an anti-Semitic propaganda film called The Eternal Jew.
In 1942, Czerniakow’s German superior, SS Commissar Heinz Auerswald, informs him that Jews will soon be transported to work camps in the east, so the Judenrat must deliver a daily quota of evacuees. Guessing their fate and unable to continue doing the bidding of the Germans, Czerniakow kills himself by ingesting cyanide. The mass deportations, which are filmed by Hippler and his crew, take place in July-September and involve the transport of nearly 300,000 of Warsaw’s Jews. The deportees include all the children from a school and orphanage run by Janusz Korczak, a famous Jewish pediatrician and author. Zuckerman orders a ZOB member named Zygmunt to follow the trains in order to discern their true destination.
Shortly after the deportations have concluded, a distraught Zygmunt returns to the ghetto and tells ZOB leaders that the Jews were taken to the Treblinka death camp, and, upon arrival, most of them were murdered in gas chambers disguised as showers. Around this time, the ZOB gains some new members, including Calel Wasser, a Jewish policeman who defects to the resistance out of guilt and shame over his collaboration with the Nazis, and Tosia Altman, a woman who has recently lost her entire family. Because of her Polish appearance, Altman becomes a courier, and Wasser, whom Anielewicz initially distrusts, proves his allegiance to the ZOB by helping her out of a sticky situation and executing his former boss, Captain Szerynski. Over the next few months, the ZOB continues acquiring weapons and launches small attacks against the Germans and their collaborators (both Jewish and Gentile).
On January 18, 1943, acting on the orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, Colonel Ferdinand von Sammern, the SS and Police Leader of Warsaw, carries out another mass deportation in the ghetto. However, the ZOB offers armed resistance for the first time, and around two dozen Germans are killed or wounded. Although many ZOB fighters fall in battle, the Jewish underground receives a huge boost in confidence after the SS are forced to halt the deportation and begin constructing bunkers and digging tunnels in preparation for the ultimate showdown with the Germans. Impressed by this show of resistance, the Poles in the AK begin sending the ZOB arms and ammunition. However, these shipments are jeopardized after Arie Wilner, one of ZOB’s chief couriers, is arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. Because of his Polish appearance, Zuckerman leaves the ghetto and takes Wilner’s place on the “Aryan” side. Rotem and Wasser secure Wilner’s release by bribing the Gestapo, and he’s taken to ZOB headquarters, where he tells Anielewicz that he didn’t give the Germans any useful information.
On April 19, 1943, the SS under von Sammern’s command return to the Warsaw Ghetto in force to deport the remaining Jews, but ZOB fighters attack the Germans with rifles, machine guns, pistols, and Molotov cocktails and force them to withdraw while Hippler and his crew document the whole thing on film. On the first night of the uprising, the Jews celebrate their (brief) victory by hoisting the Zionist and Polish flags atop the roof of a building. Shortly afterward, Himmler sacks von Sammern and replaces him with Major-General Jurgen Stroop. On the following morning, SS troops re-enter the ghetto, but Jewish fighters drive them back once more, and Stroop orders his men to raze the ghetto block-by-block and destroy bunkers and sewers.
On Easter Sunday, in the “Aryan” side, Yitzhak Zuckerman receives terrible news: the Germans have intercepted a shipment of weapons intended for the ZOB and discovered an important tunnel that they had dug under Muranowski Street. He orders Tosia Altman to take a batch of explosives to Anielewicz. She puts the explosives in an Easter basket and, posing as a Polish Catholic, attends Mass at a church near the ghetto wall while waiting for nightfall. Meanwhile, in the ghetto, Anielewicz and other ZOB fighters are trapped in a building but manage to escape after Wasser sacrifices himself by rushing out and diverting the Germans’ attention. Anielewicz and his group of fighters go to a spacious bunker owned by a Jewish underworld kingpin at 18 Mila Street (“Mila 18”) and set up a new command center there. Later that night, Altman arrives and delivers the basket of explosives. Anielewicz sends Rotem and Zygmunt to go to Zuckerman and see if he has managed to acquire any more weapons from the Poles. He also orders Zivia Lubetkin and Marek Edelman to find an escape route through the sewer system. Rotem and Zygmunt reach a safe house on the “Aryan” side and meet Frania Beatus and Zuckerman there. They hire the services of a Polish sewage worker, and he and Rotem enter the sewers to get the fighters out of the ghetto safely.
The Germans find the bunker at Mila 18 and, after being ambushed by a group of Jewish fighters, block all the exits and pump poison gas inside. Anielewicz orders Altman and some other fighters to find a way into the sewers. After much effort, they succeed in this endeavor, and Altman goes back to inform Anielewicz but can’t find him. She and a group of ZOB fighters and civilians manage to escape through the sewer system, but others, including Anielewicz, Fruchner, and Wilner, die inside the bunker. Later that evening, Rotem re-enters the ghetto and finds nothing but fire and rubble. Believing all the Jews have died, he collapses in sorrow, but Altman finds him, and they have a joyful reunion. Rotem leads Altman and her group through the sewers, and, to their surprise and joy, they run into Lubetkin and Edelman.
Jurgen Stroop’s superior, General Krueger, tells him he has learned from an SS informant that some ZOB leaders survived the fighting in the ghetto and plan to use the sewers to escape to the “Aryan” side and join up with Polish partisans. Stroop has his men flood the sewers with water and weld the grates shut. The fighters in the sewers manage to find an opening at Prosta Street but no one is waiting for them aboveground. Rotem leaves the sewers and meets up with Zuckerman and Beatus, who hire trucks to come and transport everybody to safety. But the trucks don’t arrive, so Zuckerman hires another truck under false pretenses. When that truck arrives, he takes the driver hostage and forces him to go to the opening at Prosta Street. Altman, Lubetkin, Edelman, and 37 other Jews emerge from the sewer landing and board the truck, but because there are SS close by, they are forced to abandon a dozen Jews at another landing. The group of 40 Jews are driven to the forest, where the ZOB will continue to fight the Germans as partisans.
Uprising, which runs approximately three hours without commercial breaks, aired on NBC over the course of two consecutive nights, November 4-5, 2001. The reaction from professional critics was generally positive. For example, Julie Salamon of the New York Times called Uprising, a “careful, intelligent account of the Jewish guerrilla fighters in Warsaw.” She went on to praise the movie’s style and structure: “Mr. Avnet and his co-screenwriter, Paul Brickman, have designed their film as a quasi-documentary, with written information periodically appearing on-screen to situate viewers. Step by step, they lay out the scenario showing the swift transformation of a middle-class Jewish society in Warsaw into a society of quarantined outcasts. The film vividly shows the process by which the Germans prepared the city's Jews for death, first by crowding them into one isolated section of the city, where many would die of starvation and beatings.” Variety’s Steven Oxman wrote, “An accomplished, highly realistic docudrama, ‘Uprising’ lands viewers in the Warsaw Ghetto of World War II, where a small group of Jewish resistance fighters took arms against the Nazis. It is a Holocaust story from a different angle and it unquestionably succeeds in documenting the heroism of those involved.” Jon Carman of the San Francisco Chronicle called Uprising “a solid network effort about heroism in a most immoral world.” Uprising won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Coordination. The film also received Primetime Emmy nominations in the cinematography, supporting actor, and sound editing categories but failed to win any of them. In addition, Leelee Sobieski, who plays Tosia Altman, was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Miniseries or a Motion Picture Made for Television but Judy Davis won that year for Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows. Though not as popular as other Holocaust films, such as Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful, Uprising appears to be highly regarded; for example, it enjoys a perfect 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Were it not for one significant problem, Uprising would easily rank as one of the finest movies ever made about the Holocaust. But before I tackle that problem though, allow me to first discuss the things that I like about Avnet’s movie—and, make no mistake about it, there is much to like here. For starters, it was a brilliant move on Avnet’s part to film Uprising as a docudrama, complete with captions providing character and place names, dates, and brief but informative paragraphs to accompany the historical events unfolding onscreen. This filmmaking technique turns the Warsaw Ghetto into a microcosm for the entire Holocaust and allows the viewer to understand how, step-by-step, the Nazis carried out the “Final Solution”, which began with discrimination and ended in extermination. The production design is outstanding. To recreate the Warsaw Ghetto, Avnet and his crew built a gigantic, four-story set the size of three football fields in the city of Bratislava, Slovakia and gave attention and care to the minutest detail; as a result, one feels as though he or she has been placed directly in this hell on Earth as it existed circa 1943.
The cast, which consists of veteran Hollywood actors and a variety of lesser-knowns, is excellent. Hank Azaria and David Schwimmer, arguably best known for starring in sitcoms such as The Simpsons and Friends, play Mordechai Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman respectively, and they do a great job of presenting the contrasting characters of the two ZOB commanders. Azaria plays Anielewicz as a loud, impetuous hothead who possesses great courage and daring but whose recklessness sometimes needlessly endangers his life as well as the lives of others. Zuckerman, on the other hand, is someone whose quiet, cautious nature allows him to focus on the bigger picture. Not surprisingly, this difference in personalities sometimes causes the two men to clash. For example, early in the film, Anielewicz kills a group of German soldiers after one of them murders a Jewish violinist purely for sadistic pleasure and is on the verge of murdering another. Afterward, Zuckerman berates Anielewicz for acting impulsively and says all actions by the resistance movement must be carefully coordinated. When Anielewicz replies that he’s sick and tired of being “passive,” Zuckerman corrects him by pointing out that they’re not being passive, but “prudent.”
Donald Sutherland, who turned in memorable performances in films such as M*A*S*H and Ordinary People and is probably best known for portraying President Coriolanus Snow in The Hunger Games series, plays Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Judenrat, as a man who uses every ounce of his inner strength to help his fellow Jews while meeting the impossible demands of the SS until he finally reaches a point where he can no longer do so. One of the things I love most about Uprising is how it shows the conflict between people like the elderly Czerniakow, who represent the older generation of Jews, and Anielewicz and Zuckerman, who represent the younger generation. Near the beginning of the movie, Anielewicz waylays the Judenrat chairman on the street and asks that he and the other council members provide the resistance with funds. Czerniakow adamantly denies this request and argues that any act of armed resistance will bring about harsh German reprisals on all the Jews of the ghetto. After Anielewicz chastises him for negotiating with the Germans, Czerniakow justifies his actions by saying, “I try to minimize the harm.” A few scenes later, Anielewicz and Zuckerman confront Czerniakow and make another request for financial assistance so that the ZOB can purchase arms. When the Judenrat leader asks what they will do with those arms, Anielewicz boldly replies, “Jewish honor.” A disgusted Czerniakow says, “Jewish honor. Father who is hiding his son, he is not honorable. Rabbi who is teaching a child his lessons is not honorable. A mother who is taking care of her children and many more! She is not honorable either! No! For you, honor can only come out of a barrel of a gun. You talk about Jewish honor. I talk about Jewish responsibility.” After Zuckerman tells Czerniakow about the gassing of Jews, including his parents, the Jewish elder argues that if the greatest armies in the world couldn’t defeat the Wehrmacht, then a bunch of untrained Jews with pistols don’t have a prayer. Czerniakow and his colleagues in the Judenrat represent the “old” Jew of Europe while Anielewicz and Zuckerman represent the “new” Jew of Israel. Although the word “Zionist” is never uttered in Uprising, the film has Zionist undertones. Most of the leaders of the resistance, including Anielewicz, Zuckerman, Fruchner, and Lubetkin, are Zionists. And in one of several speeches Anielewicz gives to fire up the troops, he alludes to the future state of Israel: “The spirit of our deaths will shape the soul of a new generation...a new nation of Jews.”
Jon Voight, the only member of the cast who has ever won an acting Oscar, is terrific as SS Major-General Jurgen Stroop, a truly monstrous human being who enjoys drinking Jewish wine almost as much as he enjoys murdering Jewish people. His German accent is terrible (and the same goes for Azaria and Schwimmer’s Polish accents), but I’ve known of only a few American actors who can do foreign accents convincingly. Throughout his career, Voight has appeared in movies that deal with social justice issues, such as Midnight Cowboy, Coming Home, and Rosewood, and Uprising is a particularly fine jewel in his cinematic crown. Cary Elwes plays Dr. Fritz Hippler as a skilled propagandist who strives to be the Frank Capra of the German film industry. When SS soldiers are being attacked by Jewish fighters in the ghetto during one of the movie’s exhilarating battle scenes, Hippler arrives with his crew. Stroop asks him what he’s doing, and Hippler replies that Goebbels has ordered him to film the operation for posterity. “Victory will outlast us,” he says. After Stroop protests, “This is not victory!”, Hippler delivers my favorite line of the movie: “It depends where you put the camera.”
My favorite performance in Uprising is by Leelee Sobieski, who plays Tosia Altman as someone who has lost everyone dear to her and carries out her work as a courier for the resistance with a grim fatalism. There’s a scene that takes place when she and Arie Wilner, a fellow courier, are on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw. Several Polish Gentiles are walking toward them, so Wilner kisses Altman on the cheek so that the pair will appear as a loving Polish couple as opposed to two Jews conspiring to resist the Germans. Afterward, Wilner apologizes, saying he was “just being protective,” but Altman replies, “If you'd like to be my boyfriend, that's all right with me. I'll be going on these missions, and if I don't come back, I'd like somebody to know that I didn't come back.” This scene is especially poignant when you consider that Wilner perishes in the Mila 18 bunker and a caption at the end of the film informs the viewer that Altman was captured by the Germans a week after the uprising ended and died while in Gestapo custody.
In his review for Uprising, David Nussair of Reel Film Reviews ever-so-gently criticizes the movie’s “one-sided nature,” writing, “While there's no doubt that the Nazis were awful people, isn't it at least possible that even a fraction of those fascist soldiers were just following orders? Every Nazi here is portrayed as evil incarnate.” I feel the need to note here that not every Nazi was depicted in this fashion; the movie does show one act of compassion from a German. During the first mass deportation, Tosia Altman unsuccessfully tries to join her mother, who’s bound for Treblinka, and an SS soldier aims his rifle at the back of her head and slowly squeezes the trigger. But before he can get a shot off, a second SS soldier lowers the rifle and offers his comrade a cup of coffee. The Poles in Uprising don’t come off looking much better than the Germans. The movie does a good job of depicting the anti-Semitism that pervaded Polish society before and during World War II. For example, there’s a scene that takes place in the “Aryan” section of Warsaw where a group of Jews are riding in the back of a German Army truck on their way to perform forced labor, and a Polish child taunts them, saying, “Hey Jew, what are you selling today?” The film also shows the constant danger that ZOB couriers faced on the “Aryan” side from Polish blackmailers who sought to extort money and valuables from Jews under threat of handing them over to the Gestapo. Although the AK sells weapons, ammunition, and explosives to the ZOB, these shipments cease after a time because the leaders of the Polish resistance place the needs of their people above those of the Jews, whom they look down upon. And the Polish sewer workers and truck drivers whom the ZOB pay for their services either perform badly or not at all. Furthermore, when the Jewish fighters discuss their plans, they always have to take into account the very real possibility that members of the Polish underground, who are often as anti-Semitic as the Nazis, will betray them to the SS.
In his review, Nusair also writes, “Still, the folks that comprise the Warsaw ghetto are awfully decent, free of flaws, which forces us to identify with them not as people but as victims-turned-fighters.” This is also not entirely accurate. The Jewish policemen are generally depicted as harsh enforcers who are more than willing to beat fellow Jews for failing to comply with Nazi orders. Also, Josef Szerynski, their captain, commits a truly despicable act. Near the beginning of the film, the Nazis take 23 Jewish men, women, and children hostage and hold them at a nearby prison in response to the roughing up of a Polish policeman. The SS demand that the Judenrat pay the exorbitant sum of 230,000 zlotys by a specified time, or the hostages will be executed. Czerniakow tells Szerynski and his men to collect the ransom money from the family members of the hostages. The police captain orders Calel Wasser to get a beautiful ring from a woman whose young son is being held at the prison. The woman willingly hands over her ring, a treasured family heirloom, to Wasser out of the belief that it will be used to help pay for the ransom. But Wasser instead hands over the jewelry to Szerynski, who gives it to his daughter as a birthday present. This particularly shameful act looks even worse when you consider that all the hostages, including the woman’s son, are killed by the Germans, even though Czerniakow manages to collect the ransom money by the appointed deadline.
Uprising has many memorable characters, and I especially liked the Jewish fighters; these people are true badasses, and you can’t help but root for them. Three fighters in particular stand out: Tosia Altman, Calel Wasser, and Simcha Rotem. I admire Altman’s toughness and ability to think quickly on her feet. In one of my favorite scenes, she’s acting as a courier on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw when two Polish men come up to her and threaten to report her to the Gestapo if she doesn’t give them 3,000 zlotys. Instead of surrendering to fear and submitting to the blackmailers’ demand, Altman bursts out laughing and says, “Let's go. I want to see the little room.” When one of the blackmailers asks, “What little room?”, Altman replies, “The room the Gestapo reserves for pathetic crooks who waste their time turning in fellow Poles. I understand those thugs are given the full treatment.” (The blackmailers back down.) I love how Calel Wasser makes the journey from hateful Jewish policeman to heroic ghetto fighter; he’s the only character in the entire movie who undergoes a complete transformation. And Simcha Rotem provides Uprising with some much-needed comic relief. For example, during a scene where the ZOB leaders are debating the best way to resist, he suggests taking the SS hostage and forcing them “to listen to German folk music really loud until they lose their minds and give up.” (On second thought, having heard German folk music myself, I think Rotem’s idea might have worked.) In another scene, he bursts into the bunker that serves as ZOB headquarters while dressed in an SS uniform and, in a humorously high-pitched German voice, shouts, “You are all under arrest! Put down your bombs and return immediately to the Umschlagplatz [collection point]!” Then he raises his arm in a Nazi salute and proclaims, “Heil Shitler!” (Rotem’s conduct here is funny but also unwise. If he actually did that in real life, then he was awfully lucky somebody didn’t mistake him for a real SS officer and shoot him.)
One of the things I love most about Uprising is how it shows that heroism doesn’t always have to involved armed resistance. Two of the most heroic acts shown in the movie don’t feature a single firearm or explosive. The first is performed by Adam Czerniakow. Early in the film, the Gestapo offers him a certificate that will allow him to leave the ghetto and travel to Palestine, but he refuses. It’s worth noting that Anielewicz, Zuckerman, and other ZOB leaders decide to form a resistance group after they are unsuccessful in their attempt to get themselves and a group of young Zionists to Palestine. Although this doesn’t take anything away from the courage these fighters show in the uprising later in the film, Czerniakow’s decision to turn down a chance to get to Palestine and instead perform a thankless job that will win him no praise is truly remarkable. The second act of unarmed heroism is performed by Janusz Korczak, the famous pediatrician and author who runs the children’s orphanage and school in the Warsaw Ghetto. During the first mass deportation, all the children under Korczak’s care are ordered to board the train for Treblinka. Since he can’t prevent this from happening, the pediatrician decides to accompany them to the death camp. And when an SS officer tries to stop him, he replies, “Then kill me here and now in front of the children.” The officer relents, and Korczak boards a boxcar with his charges. Korczak could have saved his own life, and his decision to sacrifice it in order to be with “his” children in their final moments is profoundly touching and noble.
And now we come to the movie’s significant problem—namely, it perpetuates a grave historical crime, which is rooted in the politics of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. To understand this crime, a quick history lesson is warranted.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Poland, with its 3.3 million Jews, possessed the second largest Jewish community in the world after the United States, and Warsaw had more Jews than any other urban center except for New York City. Polish Jewry was incredibly diverse, and its members carried on raging ideological battles—Left versus Right, Zionist versus anti-Zionist, nationalist versus assimilationist, religious versus secular. Within the Zionist camp, the Socialist Zionists, who believed in waging “class struggle” on behalf of the proletariat and looked to the Soviet Union of Communist dictator Joseph Stalin for inspiration and guidance, fought bitterly with the Zionist Revisionists, who supported free market capitalism, advocated for a militant nationalism, and modeled themselves after Rightwing authoritarian regimes that were relatively free of anti-Semitism, such as the Polish government of Josef Pilsudski and the Italian Fascist government of Benito Mussolini before the latter forged an alliance with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. The acrimony between the Leftwing and Rightwing factions of Zionism reached a boiling point after the 1933 assassination of Chaim Arlozoroff, a prominent Socialist Zionist leader, in Palestine. The British arrested two Zionist Revisionists for the crime and put them on trial, but although they were acquitted, the Socialist Zionists blamed the Zionist Revisionists for Arlozoroff’s murder while the latter accused the former of perpetrating a blood libel.
During the Holocaust, many Jews of various ideological worldviews managed to set aside their differences in order to fight the common German enemy, who marked all of them for extermination regardless of their political beliefs. For example, in the Vilna Ghetto, Jewish fighters formed a resistance group called the United Partisan Organization, which included everybody from Zionist Revisionists on the Right to Socialist Zionists and Communists on the Left. But the bitter ideological battles of the prewar years prevented this type of unity from forming in the Warsaw Ghetto. As a result, two resistance organizations were founded. The first was the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), which was made up of Socialist Zionists, anti-Zionist Socialists of the Bund, and Communists. The second was the Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, or ZZW), made up of Zionist Revisionists and Jewish fighters who weren’t affiliated with any group. Led by a man named Pawel Frenkel, the ZZW was better armed and trained than the ZOB. This is because, unlike their Leftwing counterparts, the Zionist Revisionists had sought and received weapons and military instruction from the Polish army during the prewar period, and after the German invasion and the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto, they began preparing for armed resistance at a much earlier date.
Before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began, Frenkel established ZZW headquarters at a tall apartment building at 7 Muranowski Street, and he and his fighters dug a tunnel connecting the cellar of that building to the cellar of another apartment building at 6 Muranowski Street, which was on the other side of the ghetto wall in “Aryan” Warsaw. The ZZW, not the ZOB, fought what was arguably the greatest battle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which took place at Muranowski Square. On the first and second days of the uprising, ZZW fighters raised the Zionist and Polish flags on the roof of the tallest building in the area, and to many Jews and Gentiles alike, they served as a powerful symbol of anti-Nazi resistance. Heinrich Himmler called Jurgen Stroop and told him to “bring down those two flags at all costs.” The “battle for the flags” lasted for four bloody days, and during the uprising, Stroop referred to the ZZW as the “main Jewish combat group.” After the uprising was over, Stroop created an album consisting of his daily reports, his summary report from May 16, 1943, photos of the SS military operation in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the names of German casualties that he titled The Jewish Quarter in Warsaw No Longer Exists; this album has served as the main primary source for information on the uprising. After the war, Stroop was tried and hanged for crimes against humanity, and during his trial, he wrote, “Muranowski Square was the place that the ghetto fighters defended with the greatest stubbornness.”
During the uprising, Yitzhak Zuckerman and another Zionist leader named Adolf Berman (not mentioned in Avnet’s film), who were on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw, issued communiques describing the fighting in the ghetto. These communiques served as the basis for a number of broadcasts by Polish underground radio as well as news pieces by Western media outlets such as the New York Times. In them, Zuckerman and Berman presented the ZOB as the sole Jewish resistance organization in the uprising and ignored the role of ZZW. They even credited ZOB fighters with raising the flags over Muranowski Square; this was a blatant case of stolen valor, for Zuckerman and Berman knew full well that only ZZW fighters could have performed this heroic feat since the anti-Zionist Bund, a vital part of ZOB, would never have allowed the Zionist flag to be hoisted above any building. Unfortunately for the members of ZZW, they had no representatives in “Aryan” Warsaw and thus had no way of telling their side of the story. This problem was compounded by the fact that Frenkel and all the other ZZW commanders were killed in combat with the Germans. After the war was over, Zuckerman, Zivia Lubetkin, and other ZOB leaders settled in Palestine and created a history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that gave their resistance organization the central role in the fighting while minimizing the role played by the ZZW or omitting it altogether. Because Socialist Zionists enjoyed political dominance in the State of Israel during its first three decades of existence, this distorted version of events became the widely accepted history of the uprising. (In postwar Poland, this false narrative was promoted by Marek Edelman, a leader of the Bund, and the country’s Communist rulers, who favored the Leftwing ZOB.) As if that weren’t bad enough, when, decades after the uprising, the role of ZZW gained greater attention, Poles and Jews alike exploited the heroic deeds and sacrifices of that organization’s members for their own personal gain. Jews falsely claimed to have been involved in the fighting at Muranowski Square while Poles falsely claimed to have provided crucial assistance to the ZZW before and during the uprising. One of the latter group, a man named Henryk Iwanski, was even awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
When he made Uprising, Jon Avnet perpetuated the historical crime discussed above by focusing on the ZOB and leaving out any reference to the ZZW. As a result, the heroic deeds that the ZZW performed, such as hoisting the Zionist and Polish flags over Muranowski Square and digging the tunnel that connected the building at Muranowski 7 to the one at Muranowski 6, are falsely attributed to the ZOB. While I have no proof that the omission of the ZZW from the movie was a deliberate choice on Avnet’s part, circumstantial evidence seemingly points in this direction. In the 2018 Forward article on Uprising and its director, which was mentioned above, Cindy Grosz writes this of Avnet: “He wanted the project to be as accurate as possible. He researched for over five years, spoke with over 250 survivors and read thousands of pages of diaries, essays and books. He also worked with some of the survivors, including Marek Edelman, whose stories were shared in the film.” Given the mountain of evidence—which include books, eyewitness accounts, and the daily reports from Jurgen Stroop’s album—that confirms the presence of ZZW fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, there is virtually no way Avnet could have done all the research that Grosz details in her piece and not learned about the crucial role played by ZZW members. Whatever Avnet’s motivations, the absence of the ZZW from Uprising is a disgraceful travesty that severely undermines the movie’s credibility as well as Avnet’s stated desire to “give voice to those who no longer have voices.” Given the essential contribution that the ZZW made to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, making a movie about the revolt and leaving out this organization is akin to making a documentary about the Beatles and leaving out Paul McCartney. Midway through Uprising, during a scene in which Mordechai Anielewicz is giving one of his inspirational speeches, he says, “With all the Jewish groups [emphasis mine] finally under one banner, with one purpose, perhaps we can save some lives or remove a few Germans from the face of the Earth. But this much I promise you, we will live with honor. And we will die with honor. Jewish honor.” To anyone who knows the true story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, this otherwise thrilling statement rings hollow and false.
However, despite what I have just written, I’m going to recommend Uprising because of its laudable depiction of Jews resisting Nazi evil. But I’m also recommending this film for another reason: My hope is that people will watch it and be inspired to read about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; then, perhaps, they will learn about the ZZW and its heroism and thus obtain a fuller, more accurate picture of this incredible true event. Whether they fought under the banner of the ZZW or the ZOB, all the Jews who bled and sacrificed for honor and dignity deserve admiration and respect, because in the final analysis, though they lost the battle for the Warsaw Ghetto, they won the battle for history.
Lookback/Review by Markdc
One of the most peculiar ironies of the Second World War lies in the fact that the conflict witnessed the greatest display of Jewish military activity in history and yet has, more than any other event, cemented in the minds of many people the ultimate image of Jewish weakness and passivity. This is because of the wildly erroneous belief that during the Holocaust, six million Jews allowed themselves to be exterminated without offering any resistance to their murderers. Unfortunately, this pernicious belief has been perpetuated over the years by Jews as well as Gentiles and promoted in popular Holocaust films such as Schindler’s List. Although it’s true that most of the Nazis’ Jewish victims didn’t resist, it’s also true that most of the Nazis’ non-Jewish victims didn’t resist either. (The latter group includes three million Soviet prisoners of war, who possessed military training and combat experience.) But it’s important to know that many Jews did, in fact, resist the Nazis in different ways, including by force of arms. For example, Jews in German-occupied Europe attacked Wehrmacht units in the countryside as partisans or launched revolts in the ghettos and even the death camps. And these acts of martial courage against hopeless odds was just the tip of the iceberg. Well over a million Jews served in the militaries of Allied nations, particularly the United States and the Soviet Union. And Jewish scientists, a number of them refugees from Europe such as Albert Einstein, were crucial in the creation of the atomic bomb—though this devastating weapon ended up being used against Japan instead of Germany. In recent decades, scholars of the Holocaust have done much work to eradicate the myth of Jewish passivity, but it still persists to a frustrating degree. For example, after the Polish parliament passed a law in 2018 which criminalized statements that suggested any responsibility on the part of Poland for Nazi crimes during World War II, many Jews in Israel reacted with anger, for they viewed such legislation as an attempt to whitewash Polish complicity in the Holocaust. In response, Andrzej Zybertowicz, an adviser to Polish president Andrzej Duda, claimed the outcry from Israelis was rooted in a “feeling of shame at the passivity of the Jews during the Holocaust.”
One person who sought to dispel this stubborn myth was Jewish-American filmmaker Jon Avnet, who has written, produced, or directed several successful movies, including Risky Business and Fried Green Tomatoes. In 2001, Avnet made a television film called Uprising, which focused on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The revolt, which lasted from April 19-May 16, 1943, was the first major act of resistance to take place in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War and the largest to be carried out by Jews. For nearly a month, an army of around a thousand Jewish fighters, most of them with little training and no combat experience, held off a highly-trained and lavishly equipped German force that was several times larger and became a symbol of righteous courage and fortitude for Jews and Gentiles alike. Avnet talked about Uprising during a 2018 interview he gave to Cindy Grosz of The Forward, a Jewish media outlet. In Grosz’s piece, which ran on April 19 (the 75th anniversary of the uprising), the director spoke of his deep pride in the film, saying, “It is my first project relating to my own identity. I was taught that Jews went to their deaths ‘like a lamb to its slaughter.’”
Uprising begins with Nazi Germany’s September 1939 invasion of Poland, which falls after several weeks of fighting. Almost as soon as German troops march into the Polish capital of Warsaw, the city’s Jews, like the rest of their coreligionists in the areas of the country under Nazi domination, experience acts of humiliation, discrimination, and violence at the hands of the conquerors as well as Polish Gentiles. (Note: the Soviet Union also invaded Poland, but the movie makes no mention of this.) In the fall of 1940, the 350,000 Jews living in Warsaw are forced to reside in a confined area comprising just 3.5 square miles that becomes known as the Warsaw Ghetto. Also, Jews from other parts of Poland and Nazi-occupied Europe are moved into the ghetto, whose population eventually swells to well over 400,000. A formidable brick wall is soon built around the ghetto, and because so many people are forced to live in such a tiny space and subsist on a meager food allowance, thousands begin dying of starvation, disease, and maltreatment.
The Germans set up the Judenrat (Jewish Council)—led by Adam Czerniakow—and the Jewish Police—led by Captain Josef Szerynski—to carry out their orders, which include requiring Jews over a certain age to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David on it, rounding up Jews for forced labor, and ensuring that no Jews leave the ghetto and go into the “Aryan” (Gentile) section of Warsaw without special permission. Szerynski and his officers perform their duties with gusto and are frequently brutal in their treatment of fellow Jews. However, Czerniakow sincerely cares about the people under his authority and tries to help them under terrible conditions that only grow worse over time.
After a failed attempt to transport themselves and a group of young Jews to the British Mandate of Palestine, Zionist leaders Mordechai Anielewicz, Mira Fruchner, Yitzhak Zuckerman, and Zivia Lubetkin join forces with anti-Zionist leaders like Marek Edelman to form a resistance organization called the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa in Polish, or ZOB). ZOB couriers, such as Simcha Rotem, Frania Beatus, and Arie Wilner, sneak into the “Aryan” side to establish contact with the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK), the main Polish resistance organization, and acquire weapons, ammunition, and explosives. Anielewicz and Zuckerman attempt to enlist the support of the Judenrat, but Czerniakow refuses, fearing that the existence of an underground group will cause the Germans to mete out harsh collective punishment on the entire ghetto population. Meanwhile, Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels sends Dr. Fritz Hippler to Warsaw to make an anti-Semitic propaganda film called The Eternal Jew.
In 1942, Czerniakow’s German superior, SS Commissar Heinz Auerswald, informs him that Jews will soon be transported to work camps in the east, so the Judenrat must deliver a daily quota of evacuees. Guessing their fate and unable to continue doing the bidding of the Germans, Czerniakow kills himself by ingesting cyanide. The mass deportations, which are filmed by Hippler and his crew, take place in July-September and involve the transport of nearly 300,000 of Warsaw’s Jews. The deportees include all the children from a school and orphanage run by Janusz Korczak, a famous Jewish pediatrician and author. Zuckerman orders a ZOB member named Zygmunt to follow the trains in order to discern their true destination.
Shortly after the deportations have concluded, a distraught Zygmunt returns to the ghetto and tells ZOB leaders that the Jews were taken to the Treblinka death camp, and, upon arrival, most of them were murdered in gas chambers disguised as showers. Around this time, the ZOB gains some new members, including Calel Wasser, a Jewish policeman who defects to the resistance out of guilt and shame over his collaboration with the Nazis, and Tosia Altman, a woman who has recently lost her entire family. Because of her Polish appearance, Altman becomes a courier, and Wasser, whom Anielewicz initially distrusts, proves his allegiance to the ZOB by helping her out of a sticky situation and executing his former boss, Captain Szerynski. Over the next few months, the ZOB continues acquiring weapons and launches small attacks against the Germans and their collaborators (both Jewish and Gentile).
On January 18, 1943, acting on the orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, Colonel Ferdinand von Sammern, the SS and Police Leader of Warsaw, carries out another mass deportation in the ghetto. However, the ZOB offers armed resistance for the first time, and around two dozen Germans are killed or wounded. Although many ZOB fighters fall in battle, the Jewish underground receives a huge boost in confidence after the SS are forced to halt the deportation and begin constructing bunkers and digging tunnels in preparation for the ultimate showdown with the Germans. Impressed by this show of resistance, the Poles in the AK begin sending the ZOB arms and ammunition. However, these shipments are jeopardized after Arie Wilner, one of ZOB’s chief couriers, is arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. Because of his Polish appearance, Zuckerman leaves the ghetto and takes Wilner’s place on the “Aryan” side. Rotem and Wasser secure Wilner’s release by bribing the Gestapo, and he’s taken to ZOB headquarters, where he tells Anielewicz that he didn’t give the Germans any useful information.
On April 19, 1943, the SS under von Sammern’s command return to the Warsaw Ghetto in force to deport the remaining Jews, but ZOB fighters attack the Germans with rifles, machine guns, pistols, and Molotov cocktails and force them to withdraw while Hippler and his crew document the whole thing on film. On the first night of the uprising, the Jews celebrate their (brief) victory by hoisting the Zionist and Polish flags atop the roof of a building. Shortly afterward, Himmler sacks von Sammern and replaces him with Major-General Jurgen Stroop. On the following morning, SS troops re-enter the ghetto, but Jewish fighters drive them back once more, and Stroop orders his men to raze the ghetto block-by-block and destroy bunkers and sewers.
On Easter Sunday, in the “Aryan” side, Yitzhak Zuckerman receives terrible news: the Germans have intercepted a shipment of weapons intended for the ZOB and discovered an important tunnel that they had dug under Muranowski Street. He orders Tosia Altman to take a batch of explosives to Anielewicz. She puts the explosives in an Easter basket and, posing as a Polish Catholic, attends Mass at a church near the ghetto wall while waiting for nightfall. Meanwhile, in the ghetto, Anielewicz and other ZOB fighters are trapped in a building but manage to escape after Wasser sacrifices himself by rushing out and diverting the Germans’ attention. Anielewicz and his group of fighters go to a spacious bunker owned by a Jewish underworld kingpin at 18 Mila Street (“Mila 18”) and set up a new command center there. Later that night, Altman arrives and delivers the basket of explosives. Anielewicz sends Rotem and Zygmunt to go to Zuckerman and see if he has managed to acquire any more weapons from the Poles. He also orders Zivia Lubetkin and Marek Edelman to find an escape route through the sewer system. Rotem and Zygmunt reach a safe house on the “Aryan” side and meet Frania Beatus and Zuckerman there. They hire the services of a Polish sewage worker, and he and Rotem enter the sewers to get the fighters out of the ghetto safely.
The Germans find the bunker at Mila 18 and, after being ambushed by a group of Jewish fighters, block all the exits and pump poison gas inside. Anielewicz orders Altman and some other fighters to find a way into the sewers. After much effort, they succeed in this endeavor, and Altman goes back to inform Anielewicz but can’t find him. She and a group of ZOB fighters and civilians manage to escape through the sewer system, but others, including Anielewicz, Fruchner, and Wilner, die inside the bunker. Later that evening, Rotem re-enters the ghetto and finds nothing but fire and rubble. Believing all the Jews have died, he collapses in sorrow, but Altman finds him, and they have a joyful reunion. Rotem leads Altman and her group through the sewers, and, to their surprise and joy, they run into Lubetkin and Edelman.
Jurgen Stroop’s superior, General Krueger, tells him he has learned from an SS informant that some ZOB leaders survived the fighting in the ghetto and plan to use the sewers to escape to the “Aryan” side and join up with Polish partisans. Stroop has his men flood the sewers with water and weld the grates shut. The fighters in the sewers manage to find an opening at Prosta Street but no one is waiting for them aboveground. Rotem leaves the sewers and meets up with Zuckerman and Beatus, who hire trucks to come and transport everybody to safety. But the trucks don’t arrive, so Zuckerman hires another truck under false pretenses. When that truck arrives, he takes the driver hostage and forces him to go to the opening at Prosta Street. Altman, Lubetkin, Edelman, and 37 other Jews emerge from the sewer landing and board the truck, but because there are SS close by, they are forced to abandon a dozen Jews at another landing. The group of 40 Jews are driven to the forest, where the ZOB will continue to fight the Germans as partisans.
Uprising, which runs approximately three hours without commercial breaks, aired on NBC over the course of two consecutive nights, November 4-5, 2001. The reaction from professional critics was generally positive. For example, Julie Salamon of the New York Times called Uprising, a “careful, intelligent account of the Jewish guerrilla fighters in Warsaw.” She went on to praise the movie’s style and structure: “Mr. Avnet and his co-screenwriter, Paul Brickman, have designed their film as a quasi-documentary, with written information periodically appearing on-screen to situate viewers. Step by step, they lay out the scenario showing the swift transformation of a middle-class Jewish society in Warsaw into a society of quarantined outcasts. The film vividly shows the process by which the Germans prepared the city's Jews for death, first by crowding them into one isolated section of the city, where many would die of starvation and beatings.” Variety’s Steven Oxman wrote, “An accomplished, highly realistic docudrama, ‘Uprising’ lands viewers in the Warsaw Ghetto of World War II, where a small group of Jewish resistance fighters took arms against the Nazis. It is a Holocaust story from a different angle and it unquestionably succeeds in documenting the heroism of those involved.” Jon Carman of the San Francisco Chronicle called Uprising “a solid network effort about heroism in a most immoral world.” Uprising won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Coordination. The film also received Primetime Emmy nominations in the cinematography, supporting actor, and sound editing categories but failed to win any of them. In addition, Leelee Sobieski, who plays Tosia Altman, was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Miniseries or a Motion Picture Made for Television but Judy Davis won that year for Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows. Though not as popular as other Holocaust films, such as Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful, Uprising appears to be highly regarded; for example, it enjoys a perfect 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Were it not for one significant problem, Uprising would easily rank as one of the finest movies ever made about the Holocaust. But before I tackle that problem though, allow me to first discuss the things that I like about Avnet’s movie—and, make no mistake about it, there is much to like here. For starters, it was a brilliant move on Avnet’s part to film Uprising as a docudrama, complete with captions providing character and place names, dates, and brief but informative paragraphs to accompany the historical events unfolding onscreen. This filmmaking technique turns the Warsaw Ghetto into a microcosm for the entire Holocaust and allows the viewer to understand how, step-by-step, the Nazis carried out the “Final Solution”, which began with discrimination and ended in extermination. The production design is outstanding. To recreate the Warsaw Ghetto, Avnet and his crew built a gigantic, four-story set the size of three football fields in the city of Bratislava, Slovakia and gave attention and care to the minutest detail; as a result, one feels as though he or she has been placed directly in this hell on Earth as it existed circa 1943.
The cast, which consists of veteran Hollywood actors and a variety of lesser-knowns, is excellent. Hank Azaria and David Schwimmer, arguably best known for starring in sitcoms such as The Simpsons and Friends, play Mordechai Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman respectively, and they do a great job of presenting the contrasting characters of the two ZOB commanders. Azaria plays Anielewicz as a loud, impetuous hothead who possesses great courage and daring but whose recklessness sometimes needlessly endangers his life as well as the lives of others. Zuckerman, on the other hand, is someone whose quiet, cautious nature allows him to focus on the bigger picture. Not surprisingly, this difference in personalities sometimes causes the two men to clash. For example, early in the film, Anielewicz kills a group of German soldiers after one of them murders a Jewish violinist purely for sadistic pleasure and is on the verge of murdering another. Afterward, Zuckerman berates Anielewicz for acting impulsively and says all actions by the resistance movement must be carefully coordinated. When Anielewicz replies that he’s sick and tired of being “passive,” Zuckerman corrects him by pointing out that they’re not being passive, but “prudent.”
Donald Sutherland, who turned in memorable performances in films such as M*A*S*H and Ordinary People and is probably best known for portraying President Coriolanus Snow in The Hunger Games series, plays Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Judenrat, as a man who uses every ounce of his inner strength to help his fellow Jews while meeting the impossible demands of the SS until he finally reaches a point where he can no longer do so. One of the things I love most about Uprising is how it shows the conflict between people like the elderly Czerniakow, who represent the older generation of Jews, and Anielewicz and Zuckerman, who represent the younger generation. Near the beginning of the movie, Anielewicz waylays the Judenrat chairman on the street and asks that he and the other council members provide the resistance with funds. Czerniakow adamantly denies this request and argues that any act of armed resistance will bring about harsh German reprisals on all the Jews of the ghetto. After Anielewicz chastises him for negotiating with the Germans, Czerniakow justifies his actions by saying, “I try to minimize the harm.” A few scenes later, Anielewicz and Zuckerman confront Czerniakow and make another request for financial assistance so that the ZOB can purchase arms. When the Judenrat leader asks what they will do with those arms, Anielewicz boldly replies, “Jewish honor.” A disgusted Czerniakow says, “Jewish honor. Father who is hiding his son, he is not honorable. Rabbi who is teaching a child his lessons is not honorable. A mother who is taking care of her children and many more! She is not honorable either! No! For you, honor can only come out of a barrel of a gun. You talk about Jewish honor. I talk about Jewish responsibility.” After Zuckerman tells Czerniakow about the gassing of Jews, including his parents, the Jewish elder argues that if the greatest armies in the world couldn’t defeat the Wehrmacht, then a bunch of untrained Jews with pistols don’t have a prayer. Czerniakow and his colleagues in the Judenrat represent the “old” Jew of Europe while Anielewicz and Zuckerman represent the “new” Jew of Israel. Although the word “Zionist” is never uttered in Uprising, the film has Zionist undertones. Most of the leaders of the resistance, including Anielewicz, Zuckerman, Fruchner, and Lubetkin, are Zionists. And in one of several speeches Anielewicz gives to fire up the troops, he alludes to the future state of Israel: “The spirit of our deaths will shape the soul of a new generation...a new nation of Jews.”
Jon Voight, the only member of the cast who has ever won an acting Oscar, is terrific as SS Major-General Jurgen Stroop, a truly monstrous human being who enjoys drinking Jewish wine almost as much as he enjoys murdering Jewish people. His German accent is terrible (and the same goes for Azaria and Schwimmer’s Polish accents), but I’ve known of only a few American actors who can do foreign accents convincingly. Throughout his career, Voight has appeared in movies that deal with social justice issues, such as Midnight Cowboy, Coming Home, and Rosewood, and Uprising is a particularly fine jewel in his cinematic crown. Cary Elwes plays Dr. Fritz Hippler as a skilled propagandist who strives to be the Frank Capra of the German film industry. When SS soldiers are being attacked by Jewish fighters in the ghetto during one of the movie’s exhilarating battle scenes, Hippler arrives with his crew. Stroop asks him what he’s doing, and Hippler replies that Goebbels has ordered him to film the operation for posterity. “Victory will outlast us,” he says. After Stroop protests, “This is not victory!”, Hippler delivers my favorite line of the movie: “It depends where you put the camera.”
My favorite performance in Uprising is by Leelee Sobieski, who plays Tosia Altman as someone who has lost everyone dear to her and carries out her work as a courier for the resistance with a grim fatalism. There’s a scene that takes place when she and Arie Wilner, a fellow courier, are on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw. Several Polish Gentiles are walking toward them, so Wilner kisses Altman on the cheek so that the pair will appear as a loving Polish couple as opposed to two Jews conspiring to resist the Germans. Afterward, Wilner apologizes, saying he was “just being protective,” but Altman replies, “If you'd like to be my boyfriend, that's all right with me. I'll be going on these missions, and if I don't come back, I'd like somebody to know that I didn't come back.” This scene is especially poignant when you consider that Wilner perishes in the Mila 18 bunker and a caption at the end of the film informs the viewer that Altman was captured by the Germans a week after the uprising ended and died while in Gestapo custody.
In his review for Uprising, David Nussair of Reel Film Reviews ever-so-gently criticizes the movie’s “one-sided nature,” writing, “While there's no doubt that the Nazis were awful people, isn't it at least possible that even a fraction of those fascist soldiers were just following orders? Every Nazi here is portrayed as evil incarnate.” I feel the need to note here that not every Nazi was depicted in this fashion; the movie does show one act of compassion from a German. During the first mass deportation, Tosia Altman unsuccessfully tries to join her mother, who’s bound for Treblinka, and an SS soldier aims his rifle at the back of her head and slowly squeezes the trigger. But before he can get a shot off, a second SS soldier lowers the rifle and offers his comrade a cup of coffee. The Poles in Uprising don’t come off looking much better than the Germans. The movie does a good job of depicting the anti-Semitism that pervaded Polish society before and during World War II. For example, there’s a scene that takes place in the “Aryan” section of Warsaw where a group of Jews are riding in the back of a German Army truck on their way to perform forced labor, and a Polish child taunts them, saying, “Hey Jew, what are you selling today?” The film also shows the constant danger that ZOB couriers faced on the “Aryan” side from Polish blackmailers who sought to extort money and valuables from Jews under threat of handing them over to the Gestapo. Although the AK sells weapons, ammunition, and explosives to the ZOB, these shipments cease after a time because the leaders of the Polish resistance place the needs of their people above those of the Jews, whom they look down upon. And the Polish sewer workers and truck drivers whom the ZOB pay for their services either perform badly or not at all. Furthermore, when the Jewish fighters discuss their plans, they always have to take into account the very real possibility that members of the Polish underground, who are often as anti-Semitic as the Nazis, will betray them to the SS.
In his review, Nusair also writes, “Still, the folks that comprise the Warsaw ghetto are awfully decent, free of flaws, which forces us to identify with them not as people but as victims-turned-fighters.” This is also not entirely accurate. The Jewish policemen are generally depicted as harsh enforcers who are more than willing to beat fellow Jews for failing to comply with Nazi orders. Also, Josef Szerynski, their captain, commits a truly despicable act. Near the beginning of the film, the Nazis take 23 Jewish men, women, and children hostage and hold them at a nearby prison in response to the roughing up of a Polish policeman. The SS demand that the Judenrat pay the exorbitant sum of 230,000 zlotys by a specified time, or the hostages will be executed. Czerniakow tells Szerynski and his men to collect the ransom money from the family members of the hostages. The police captain orders Calel Wasser to get a beautiful ring from a woman whose young son is being held at the prison. The woman willingly hands over her ring, a treasured family heirloom, to Wasser out of the belief that it will be used to help pay for the ransom. But Wasser instead hands over the jewelry to Szerynski, who gives it to his daughter as a birthday present. This particularly shameful act looks even worse when you consider that all the hostages, including the woman’s son, are killed by the Germans, even though Czerniakow manages to collect the ransom money by the appointed deadline.
Uprising has many memorable characters, and I especially liked the Jewish fighters; these people are true badasses, and you can’t help but root for them. Three fighters in particular stand out: Tosia Altman, Calel Wasser, and Simcha Rotem. I admire Altman’s toughness and ability to think quickly on her feet. In one of my favorite scenes, she’s acting as a courier on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw when two Polish men come up to her and threaten to report her to the Gestapo if she doesn’t give them 3,000 zlotys. Instead of surrendering to fear and submitting to the blackmailers’ demand, Altman bursts out laughing and says, “Let's go. I want to see the little room.” When one of the blackmailers asks, “What little room?”, Altman replies, “The room the Gestapo reserves for pathetic crooks who waste their time turning in fellow Poles. I understand those thugs are given the full treatment.” (The blackmailers back down.) I love how Calel Wasser makes the journey from hateful Jewish policeman to heroic ghetto fighter; he’s the only character in the entire movie who undergoes a complete transformation. And Simcha Rotem provides Uprising with some much-needed comic relief. For example, during a scene where the ZOB leaders are debating the best way to resist, he suggests taking the SS hostage and forcing them “to listen to German folk music really loud until they lose their minds and give up.” (On second thought, having heard German folk music myself, I think Rotem’s idea might have worked.) In another scene, he bursts into the bunker that serves as ZOB headquarters while dressed in an SS uniform and, in a humorously high-pitched German voice, shouts, “You are all under arrest! Put down your bombs and return immediately to the Umschlagplatz [collection point]!” Then he raises his arm in a Nazi salute and proclaims, “Heil Shitler!” (Rotem’s conduct here is funny but also unwise. If he actually did that in real life, then he was awfully lucky somebody didn’t mistake him for a real SS officer and shoot him.)
One of the things I love most about Uprising is how it shows that heroism doesn’t always have to involved armed resistance. Two of the most heroic acts shown in the movie don’t feature a single firearm or explosive. The first is performed by Adam Czerniakow. Early in the film, the Gestapo offers him a certificate that will allow him to leave the ghetto and travel to Palestine, but he refuses. It’s worth noting that Anielewicz, Zuckerman, and other ZOB leaders decide to form a resistance group after they are unsuccessful in their attempt to get themselves and a group of young Zionists to Palestine. Although this doesn’t take anything away from the courage these fighters show in the uprising later in the film, Czerniakow’s decision to turn down a chance to get to Palestine and instead perform a thankless job that will win him no praise is truly remarkable. The second act of unarmed heroism is performed by Janusz Korczak, the famous pediatrician and author who runs the children’s orphanage and school in the Warsaw Ghetto. During the first mass deportation, all the children under Korczak’s care are ordered to board the train for Treblinka. Since he can’t prevent this from happening, the pediatrician decides to accompany them to the death camp. And when an SS officer tries to stop him, he replies, “Then kill me here and now in front of the children.” The officer relents, and Korczak boards a boxcar with his charges. Korczak could have saved his own life, and his decision to sacrifice it in order to be with “his” children in their final moments is profoundly touching and noble.
And now we come to the movie’s significant problem—namely, it perpetuates a grave historical crime, which is rooted in the politics of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. To understand this crime, a quick history lesson is warranted.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Poland, with its 3.3 million Jews, possessed the second largest Jewish community in the world after the United States, and Warsaw had more Jews than any other urban center except for New York City. Polish Jewry was incredibly diverse, and its members carried on raging ideological battles—Left versus Right, Zionist versus anti-Zionist, nationalist versus assimilationist, religious versus secular. Within the Zionist camp, the Socialist Zionists, who believed in waging “class struggle” on behalf of the proletariat and looked to the Soviet Union of Communist dictator Joseph Stalin for inspiration and guidance, fought bitterly with the Zionist Revisionists, who supported free market capitalism, advocated for a militant nationalism, and modeled themselves after Rightwing authoritarian regimes that were relatively free of anti-Semitism, such as the Polish government of Josef Pilsudski and the Italian Fascist government of Benito Mussolini before the latter forged an alliance with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. The acrimony between the Leftwing and Rightwing factions of Zionism reached a boiling point after the 1933 assassination of Chaim Arlozoroff, a prominent Socialist Zionist leader, in Palestine. The British arrested two Zionist Revisionists for the crime and put them on trial, but although they were acquitted, the Socialist Zionists blamed the Zionist Revisionists for Arlozoroff’s murder while the latter accused the former of perpetrating a blood libel.
During the Holocaust, many Jews of various ideological worldviews managed to set aside their differences in order to fight the common German enemy, who marked all of them for extermination regardless of their political beliefs. For example, in the Vilna Ghetto, Jewish fighters formed a resistance group called the United Partisan Organization, which included everybody from Zionist Revisionists on the Right to Socialist Zionists and Communists on the Left. But the bitter ideological battles of the prewar years prevented this type of unity from forming in the Warsaw Ghetto. As a result, two resistance organizations were founded. The first was the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), which was made up of Socialist Zionists, anti-Zionist Socialists of the Bund, and Communists. The second was the Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, or ZZW), made up of Zionist Revisionists and Jewish fighters who weren’t affiliated with any group. Led by a man named Pawel Frenkel, the ZZW was better armed and trained than the ZOB. This is because, unlike their Leftwing counterparts, the Zionist Revisionists had sought and received weapons and military instruction from the Polish army during the prewar period, and after the German invasion and the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto, they began preparing for armed resistance at a much earlier date.
Before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began, Frenkel established ZZW headquarters at a tall apartment building at 7 Muranowski Street, and he and his fighters dug a tunnel connecting the cellar of that building to the cellar of another apartment building at 6 Muranowski Street, which was on the other side of the ghetto wall in “Aryan” Warsaw. The ZZW, not the ZOB, fought what was arguably the greatest battle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which took place at Muranowski Square. On the first and second days of the uprising, ZZW fighters raised the Zionist and Polish flags on the roof of the tallest building in the area, and to many Jews and Gentiles alike, they served as a powerful symbol of anti-Nazi resistance. Heinrich Himmler called Jurgen Stroop and told him to “bring down those two flags at all costs.” The “battle for the flags” lasted for four bloody days, and during the uprising, Stroop referred to the ZZW as the “main Jewish combat group.” After the uprising was over, Stroop created an album consisting of his daily reports, his summary report from May 16, 1943, photos of the SS military operation in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the names of German casualties that he titled The Jewish Quarter in Warsaw No Longer Exists; this album has served as the main primary source for information on the uprising. After the war, Stroop was tried and hanged for crimes against humanity, and during his trial, he wrote, “Muranowski Square was the place that the ghetto fighters defended with the greatest stubbornness.”
During the uprising, Yitzhak Zuckerman and another Zionist leader named Adolf Berman (not mentioned in Avnet’s film), who were on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw, issued communiques describing the fighting in the ghetto. These communiques served as the basis for a number of broadcasts by Polish underground radio as well as news pieces by Western media outlets such as the New York Times. In them, Zuckerman and Berman presented the ZOB as the sole Jewish resistance organization in the uprising and ignored the role of ZZW. They even credited ZOB fighters with raising the flags over Muranowski Square; this was a blatant case of stolen valor, for Zuckerman and Berman knew full well that only ZZW fighters could have performed this heroic feat since the anti-Zionist Bund, a vital part of ZOB, would never have allowed the Zionist flag to be hoisted above any building. Unfortunately for the members of ZZW, they had no representatives in “Aryan” Warsaw and thus had no way of telling their side of the story. This problem was compounded by the fact that Frenkel and all the other ZZW commanders were killed in combat with the Germans. After the war was over, Zuckerman, Zivia Lubetkin, and other ZOB leaders settled in Palestine and created a history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that gave their resistance organization the central role in the fighting while minimizing the role played by the ZZW or omitting it altogether. Because Socialist Zionists enjoyed political dominance in the State of Israel during its first three decades of existence, this distorted version of events became the widely accepted history of the uprising. (In postwar Poland, this false narrative was promoted by Marek Edelman, a leader of the Bund, and the country’s Communist rulers, who favored the Leftwing ZOB.) As if that weren’t bad enough, when, decades after the uprising, the role of ZZW gained greater attention, Poles and Jews alike exploited the heroic deeds and sacrifices of that organization’s members for their own personal gain. Jews falsely claimed to have been involved in the fighting at Muranowski Square while Poles falsely claimed to have provided crucial assistance to the ZZW before and during the uprising. One of the latter group, a man named Henryk Iwanski, was even awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
When he made Uprising, Jon Avnet perpetuated the historical crime discussed above by focusing on the ZOB and leaving out any reference to the ZZW. As a result, the heroic deeds that the ZZW performed, such as hoisting the Zionist and Polish flags over Muranowski Square and digging the tunnel that connected the building at Muranowski 7 to the one at Muranowski 6, are falsely attributed to the ZOB. While I have no proof that the omission of the ZZW from the movie was a deliberate choice on Avnet’s part, circumstantial evidence seemingly points in this direction. In the 2018 Forward article on Uprising and its director, which was mentioned above, Cindy Grosz writes this of Avnet: “He wanted the project to be as accurate as possible. He researched for over five years, spoke with over 250 survivors and read thousands of pages of diaries, essays and books. He also worked with some of the survivors, including Marek Edelman, whose stories were shared in the film.” Given the mountain of evidence—which include books, eyewitness accounts, and the daily reports from Jurgen Stroop’s album—that confirms the presence of ZZW fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, there is virtually no way Avnet could have done all the research that Grosz details in her piece and not learned about the crucial role played by ZZW members. Whatever Avnet’s motivations, the absence of the ZZW from Uprising is a disgraceful travesty that severely undermines the movie’s credibility as well as Avnet’s stated desire to “give voice to those who no longer have voices.” Given the essential contribution that the ZZW made to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, making a movie about the revolt and leaving out this organization is akin to making a documentary about the Beatles and leaving out Paul McCartney. Midway through Uprising, during a scene in which Mordechai Anielewicz is giving one of his inspirational speeches, he says, “With all the Jewish groups [emphasis mine] finally under one banner, with one purpose, perhaps we can save some lives or remove a few Germans from the face of the Earth. But this much I promise you, we will live with honor. And we will die with honor. Jewish honor.” To anyone who knows the true story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, this otherwise thrilling statement rings hollow and false.
However, despite what I have just written, I’m going to recommend Uprising because of its laudable depiction of Jews resisting Nazi evil. But I’m also recommending this film for another reason: My hope is that people will watch it and be inspired to read about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; then, perhaps, they will learn about the ZZW and its heroism and thus obtain a fuller, more accurate picture of this incredible true event. Whether they fought under the banner of the ZZW or the ZOB, all the Jews who bled and sacrificed for honor and dignity deserve admiration and respect, because in the final analysis, though they lost the battle for the Warsaw Ghetto, they won the battle for history.