Members of the Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities have united to pray there will never again be another Shoah, at a commemoration held at the Great Synagogue in Sydney to mark the 80th anniversary of one of the greatest acts of Jewish heroism in history—the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The Shoah commemoration on 30 May was organised by the NSW Council of Christians and Jews and featured an address by the highly respected historian of the Holocaust, Emeritus Professor Konrad Kwiet, currently resident historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum.
Professor Kwiet reflected upon the formidable courage shown by the Jewish community in Warsaw in April and May 1943 in their resistance to Nazi aggression.
“Escaping the ghetto walls was impossible. The Polish and German police had sealed off the ghetto and the only escape route was through the sewer system,” Professor Kwiet explained in his moving address.
“Its man-holes were covered in rubble and yet every now and then, the Germans dropped in poisoned gas.
“Children were often sent into tunnels of the sewer system to transport food in and out of the ghetto and many didn’t survive the journey.”
“To survive, many were forced to drink the thick, slimy water of the sewer. Babies were suffocated or poisoned and many people died from the fumes of poisoned gas entering from the man-holes above.”
Read the article by Michael Kenny in The Catholic Weekly.