On April 19th, 1943, Nazi SS units moved into the Warsaw Ghetto in order to deport its remaining Jewish population. They were lightly armed, with not many armored vehicles; many expected no resistance, that they would herd the Jewish away to the trains that would take them to a dark fate at Treblinka. Instead, what they met completely contravened these expectations. At 7:30 pm, Jewish fighters of mainly two organizations, the ZZW (Jewish Military Union) and ZOB(Jewish Combat Organisation), together with members of the Armja Krajowa, the Polish Home Army (the main umbrella group of Polish resistance fighters), drove the Germans back from the Ghetto, destroying two of their vehicles. While these men and women understood they had little chance of reconquering the pre-war Poland that had been taken from them four years prior, they did recognize that this was their chance to reject being shepherded into the gas chambers with no resistance. They chose to take a stand against what would befall them, and to die with their humanity preserved. 

After the invasion of Poland in 1939, the occupying Germans had sought to impose their racial laws on the local Polish population and deny them any avenue of resistance. This included the restriction of some services, such as certain railroad cars, to Germans(marked by the sign Nur fur Deutsche, or only for Germans) and the roundup of prominent Polish religious and political leaders. Furthermore, Jews in the Polish occupied area(mostly under the administrative control of the General Government) were herded into ghettos, sectors of a city that were designed to restrict their movement. 

Now, Jewish ghettos are not new to Europe. As far back as 1516, the Venetian Republic established its own Jewish ghetto to segregate the Jewish population from the rest of the city's inhabitants. 

However, the ghettos of Poland to house the Jews stand out in that they were intentionally designed to degrade the humanity of the Jewish Pole. In time, the Jews of Venice developed various synagogues and made a living by becoming merchants. Although not treated on equal terms, their economic activity that was vital to the Venetian state gave them leverage to advocate for their rights. The Polish Jews of these ghettos had no such opportunity. Restricted into tight spaces and rounded up in stages to be transferred to the infamous concentration camps, the Jews of Poland faced an entity with control over their lives that regarded them as an inferior race with not even the slightest human quality. As the debate over the treatment of Jews in German-occupied Europe concluded that their extermination was the best course of action at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, and the infamous executions and tortuous killings began to be conducted en masse at these camps, reports began to trickle in of the fate that awaited the Jews of Poland's ghettos. 

To stop, or at least delay this fate, Jews within the Ghetto began to equip themselves with weapons. Forming the above-mentioned organizations to resist Nazi rule, they received assistance in whatever possible way from the Polish Home Army, which sent to them a variety of small arms. However, the transfer of these weapons to the Ghetto was limited as the Germans had closed off most areas of access, and in the end, the support of the Polish resistance was insufficient. This did not stop the determination of the ZZW and ZOB to fight off the Germans and prove to them the humanity of not only the Jews, but every race and kind that the Nazis despised. During the brave Uprising, posters printed by the ZOB would repudiate the bigoted racial laws of Nazi Germany by noting, "All people are equal brothers; Brown, White, Black and Yellow. To separate peoples, colors, races, is but an act of Cheating!" 

However, this act of courage would soon falter against the might of the brutal occupying forces. After the Jewish fighters began to use the urban environment and sewers of the ghetto to their advantage, the Germans employed flamethrowers to burn or suffocate them, killing many innocent civilians. Additionally, given that the Germans also severely outgunned the Jewish as they enacted their ground assault to retake the ghetto, organized resistance effectively collapsed when most of the ZZW and ZOB's commanders were killed. 

However, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising need not be viewed as a total failure. Its consequences and significance should still be remembered. By resisting against the oppressive regime and attempting to liberate themselves through arms, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto gave hope to all of those in similar situations -- from the Koreans under the Japanese yoke or the Africans under the yoke of Jim Crow and Apartheid. Furthermore, the deported survivors of the uprising at Warsaw to Treblinka helped form another Jewish paramilitary that would free the prisoners of the camp in a breakout later that year. Finally, the cooperation, however limited, that the Jewish and Polish fighters exhibited -- even going as far as to hoist the Polish red-and-white flag alongside the flag of the ZZW at their stronghold in Muranowski Square -- was an inspiration to many Polish, who would go on to instigate the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, in which Jews incarcerated at a concentration camp near the city were freed by the Home Army.