Białystok Ghetto Uprising was an insurrection in Poland's Białystok Ghetto, launched on the night of August 16, 1943 against the Nazi German occupation authorities during World War II. It was organized and led by Antyfaszystowska Organizacja Bojowa (Polish for Anti-Fascist Combat Organisation), a part of the Anti-Fascist Block. The Białystok Ghetto Uprising was the second largest ghetto uprising in Nazi occupied Poland, after the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of January 1943.
Until February 1943 there were approximately 15,000 people still living in the Białystok Ghetto. In February, the first wave of mass deportations to Treblinka extermination camp took place,[1] organized with the aim of liquidating the Ghetto during country-wide Aktion Reinhard. In spite of the outbreak of armed resistance among the local inhabitants, the deportations to concentration and extermination camps went ahead as planned. The final liquidation of the Ghetto was attempted on August 16, 1943 by regiments of the German SS reinforced by Ukrainian, Byelorussian and Latvian auxiliaries.[1] During the night of August 16, 1943, several hundred Polish Jews started an armed uprising against the troops carrying out liquidation of the Ghetto.[1]
The guerillas led by Mordechaj Tenenbaum and Daniel Moszkowicz were armed with only one machine gun, several dozen pistols, Molotov cocktails and bottles filled with acid. As with the earlier Warsaw Ghetto Uprising extinguished in May 1943, the Białystok uprising had no chances for military success. However, it was seen as a way to die in combat rather than in German camps. A Betar commander was Yitzhak Fkeischer.
The fights in isolated pockets of resistance lasted for several days, but the defence was broken almost instantly. The commanders of the struggle committed suicide after their bunkers ran out of ammunition. Most of the Jews from the Ghetto were then sent to camps in Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. Approximately 1,200 children were sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp and later to Auschwitz.
Several dozen guerillas managed to break through to the forests surrounding Białystok where they joined the partisan units of Armia Krajowa and other organisations and survived the war. It is estimated that out of almost 60,000 Jews who lived in Białystok before the war only several hundred survived the Holocaust.
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