On the uprising in the ghetto of Warsaw – Ofer Aderet in Haaretz:

‘This year, the public will get to view a never-before-seen piece of history: the sole known documentation of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that is not propaganda photos taken by the Nazis.
The photographs were taken by Leszek Grzwaczewski, a Polish firefighter who served in the unit that doused the flames the Germans had lit while quashing the revolt. Last month, Grzwaczewski's family found film negatives in their home containing 48 pictures, 33 of which documented the ghetto. Twelve of them had been submitted in the past to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw; the remaining 21 photos had never been made public.’

(…)

‘The pictures show smoke billowing over the ghetto, its streets and its courtyards. They also depict burned-out buildings and the Polish firemen who had been dispatched by the Germans to put out the blaze. One of the photos captures Jews who had been arrested by the Germans and are being deported, to their deaths. The photos are low-quality; some of them are blurry and seem as if they were taken hastily and covertly.’

(…)

‘In a journal in which Grzwaczewski documented his experience, he wrote: “The photographs of the people being dragged out [from the bunkers] will stay with me for the rest of my life. Their faces, unconscious… hungry, frightened, filthy, worn-out figures… So many people, who had been shot, some of them still alive, falling on the corpses of others who had been liquidated.” A year after witnessing these events, he fought against the Nazis in the Polish Warsaw Uprising. He died in 1993.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began with the liquidation of the ghetto on April 19th, 1943, and continued for approximately one month. Hundreds of armed Jewish fighters from the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB) led by Mordechai Anielewitz and the Jewish Military Union (ZZW) headed by and Paweł Frenkiel participated in the revolt.
Tens of thousands of residents of the ghetto took part in the revolt as well, albeit more passively, by hiding and making it more difficult for the Germans to locate and deport them. At the height of the revolt, a group of rebels succeeded in flying a Zionist flag alongside the flag of Poland from one of the rooftops. Although several Nazi soldiers were killed by Jewish gunfire, the uprising was cruelly suppressed by setting fire to the ghetto.’

Read the article here.

The uprising is quite a good example that the Jews didn’t behave like sheep, as too often has been said. There are other less known uprisings as well, from Sobibor to Auschwitz, And let's not forget, sheepish behavior is a side effect of the civilization process, of (most) education, of nurture.

I didn’t know that Polish firemen were told to extinguish the fire, after it had done its deadly work, I believed that the Nazis let the fire rage, but yes that might have been dangerous for the city and for the reason the Nazis themselves.

Another reason to go back to the Polin Museum in Warsaw, where the pictures are on display.