Sirens wailed, church bells tolled and yellow paper daffodils of remembrance dotted the crowd on Thursday as Polish and Jewish leaders extolled the heroism and determination of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising fighters on the 75th anniversary of their ill-fated rebellion.
Polish President Andrzej Duda led ceremonies in Warsaw.
Representatives of the highest state authorities, including Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Israeli Ambassador to Poland Anna Azari, World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder, and representatives of the Jewish community gathered in front of the Ghetto Heroes Monument.
Addressing the crowd, much of which was wearing yellow paper daffodils – a symbol of the uprising – Duda said, "We bow our heads low to their heroism, their bravery, their determination and courage. Most of them died ... as they fought for dignity, freedom and also for Poland, because they were Polish citizens."
Noting the courage and heroism of those who took part, Duda also asserted that anyone talking about the "responsibility or co-responsibility of the Polish state for the Holocaust" hurt the memory of the fallen, a reference to a new Polish law that makes it a criminal offense to accuse Poland or the Polish people of complicity in the Holocaust.
Lauder said: "Just five years after these brave young Polish Jews rose up against Nazi tyranny and every Jewish community throughout the world was destroyed, the Jewish State of Israel rose from the ashes. The Jewish people lifted themselves up from what was essentially their grave to achieve their 2,000-year-old dream, to establish a modern Jewish state in their eternal homeland."
"Jews, Catholics, Poles, Americans. All free people should stand together now to make sure that our children and grandchildren never know the true horrors that took place right here," Lauder said.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was an act of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. It started on April 19, 1943, when the residents of the ghetto refused to surrender to the police, who then ordered the ghetto burned. The uprising ended on May 16, 1943.
Around 6,000 resistance fighters died in the uprising, and the majority of those who survived were transported to Nazi-run concentration camps, many of which were located in occupied Poland.
At a separate ceremony at Warsaw's Town Hall, three Holocaust survivors – Helena Birenbaum, Krystyna Budnicka and Marian Turski – were given honorary citizenship of the city.
Hundreds of people also attended a grass-roots commemoration that was essentially a boycott of the official state observances.
Many people there expressed anger at Poland's conservative government, which seems to tolerate anti-Semitism despite its official denunciations of the phenomenon.
"I am not attending the official ceremonies this year because the government is supporting the rise of a dangerous nationalism," said Tanna Jakubowicz-Mount, a 72-year-old psychotherapist who carried photos of a grandmother and aunt who were executed by the Germans. "We cannot agree to this."
The alternative observances began with Yiddish singing and daffodils placed at the monument to a Jewish envoy in London, Szmul Zygielbojm, who committed suicide after the revolt was crushed to protest the world's indifference to the Holocaust.
Participants then paid homage to the victims at several memorial sites in the area of the former ghetto, including at Umschlagplatz, the spot where Jews were assembled before being transported to the Treblinka death camp.
There, one by one, people spoke Thursday about family members killed by Hitler's regime.
