Leon Weinstein | A Holocaust survivor raised a fist to death - Los Angeles Times
I was in a newspaper forum just the other day when someone remarked that if the Jews had sufficient firearms in Warsaw the Holocaust would have been different. Would you believe someone actually wrote a response back saying how much worse that would have made the situation, and since they were all going to die anyway there was no need to defend themselves.
The ghetto was surrounded by an 11-foot-high brick wall, barbed wire and guards. More than 400,000 Jews had been forced inside the 3.5-square-mile area. By early 1943, an estimated 300,000 of them had been shipped to Treblinka, a death camp in northeast Poland.
Nazis rationed food for those who remained and many died of starvation. Disease killed thousands more. Weinstein feared constantly for Natalie and Sima and was certain he would die.
He joined the ghetto resistance. "If we were going to die," Weinstein says, "we would do it on our own terms. We would die standing proud, on our feet, making a statement to the world. We would take as many of those bastards as we could kill."
He helped organize and train resistance fighters. On occasion, using his forged papers, he talked his way out of the ghetto and smuggled weapons back inside.
I was in a newspaper forum just the other day when someone remarked that if the Jews had sufficient firearms in Warsaw the Holocaust would have been different. Would you believe someone actually wrote a response back saying how much worse that would have made the situation, and since they were all going to die anyway there was no need to defend themselves.