The People’s Uprising and the Fall of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 1942–June 1943

Examines the final year of the Warsaw ghetto, the uprising, and the people’s resistance to the Holocaust.

This riveting and dramatic account sheds light on the lives, choices, and experiences of the tens of thousands of Jews who were not part of the underground armed resistance but nonetheless supported the famed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Havi Ben-Sasson Dreifuss focuses on the final year of the Warsaw ghetto, from the Great Deportation in the summer of 1942 through the suppression of the uprising in mid-1943. Drawing on contemporary testimonies, diaries, and documents, she reveals how the broader Jewish population struggled to survive, maintain family and community life, and make impossible moral decisions in the face of fear, hunger, and violence.
Looking beyond the fighters themselves, the book offers a story of devastation, but also of resilience and human dignity.

Havi Ben-Sasson Dreifuss is professor of Jewish history and heads the Institute for the History of Polish Jewry and Israel-Poland Relations at Tel Aviv University.
She also serves as the director of the Center for Research on the Holocaust in Poland at Yad Vashem.