“The greatest act of armed Jewish resistance during the Holocaust occurred in the Warsaw ghetto. Simcha Rotem, the last surviving fighter of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, has passed away at the age of 94. This is his lesson for the next generations. May his memory be a blessing,”
The last surviving fighter from the doomed 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising by Jewish partisans against the Nazis died Saturday in Israel aged 94, President Reuven Rivlin said.
Simcha Rotem, who went by the nom-de-guerre Kazik, served in the Jewish Fighting Organization that staged the uprising as the Nazis conducted mass deportations of residents to the death camps.
“This evening, we part from Kozik, the young man who became Simcha Rotem, the last of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. Kozik went back to the ghetto in 1942, at the age of 18, three months after his parents sent him to Radom so he could escape the fate of most Polish Jews. He heard what was happening in the ghetto and had to be there,” Rivlin said in a statement.
“When he got there, he found himself wandering amongst the ruins, searching in vain for voices and faces. He only found death and destruction. ‘I sat in those ruins,’ he said in his testimony, ‘not knowing exactly where I was, but I knew I was in the ghetto. ….I imagined that I was the last Jew in the ghetto, or in all of Warsaw.’
“Kozik was not the last Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto. He joined the uprising and helped save dozens of fighters, including two of its leaders, Antek Zukerman and Zvia Lubetkin,” Rivlin said.
by AFP and Ynet
