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Moshe Arens, Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2011, 405 pages, (paperback).
Review Article by Dariusz Libionka and Laurence Weinbaum
"Whoever reports a saying in the name of its originator brings deliverance to the world." [Rabbi Chanina] Babylonian Talmud, Megillah, 15a.
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was a seminal event in Jewish history and memory. Often compared to Masada or Thermopylae, no military encounter of comparable magnitude has attracted such a degree of attention. Over time, and especially in recent years, researchers have enabled us to develop a more accurate and nuanced understanding of this struggle and its context.
Among the most elusive aspects of the uprising is the role played by the adherents of Vladimir Jabotinsky. In the 1930s, the New Zionist Organization (HaTzohar) and its youth movement, Betar, attracted a sizeable following in Poland. Though bereft of most of its prewar leadership (including Menachem Begin), the remnants of this organization eventually established their own armed underground group in the Warsaw ghetto, the Jewish Military Union (ZZW), which operated independently from the mainstream Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB). Led by Mordechai Anielewicz, the ZOB was a coalition of left-wing Zionist youth movements as well as the anti-Zionist Bund and the Communists. Its best-known veterans were Zivia Lubetkin, Antek Zuckerman and Marek Edelman, who, together with other surviving fighters, created the narrative upon which much of the popular knowledge of the uprising has been based. To the extent that the Revisionists figured in the accounts of their political rivals, it was referred to only minimally and sometimes disparagingly.
As Yad Vashem historian Nachman Blumental noted in 1965, the paucity of documentation left by the ZZW - of which there were but a handful of survivors -hardly made the historians' job easier. Consequently, piecing together an accurate picture ofthat group became a formidable challenge, all the more so since the information that did exist was entwined with competing ideologies. In December 1943, little more than half a year after the destruction of the ghetto and shortly before his own death, Emanuel Ringelblum, the great chronicler of life and death in the ghetto and no friend of the Revisionists, wrote: "And why is there no information on the...