Captured Hehalutz fighters photograph

During the summer of 1942, most of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were deported to Treblinka extermination camp. In January 1943, when the Germans resumed deportations, the Jewish Combat Organization staged armed resistance. Jews began to dig bunkers and smuggle weapons into the ghetto. On 19 April 1943, about 2,000 soldiers under the command of SS and Police Leader Jürgen Stroop entered the ghetto with tanks in order to liquidate the ghetto. They expected to quickly defeat the poorly armed Jewish insurgents, but instead the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the largest act of Jewish resistance against the Holocaust, dragged out for four weeks. The Germans had to set the ghetto on fire, pump poison gas into bunkers, and blast the Jews out of their positions in order to march them to the Umschlagplatz and deport them to Majdanek and Treblinka. The hopeless act of defiance became "one of the most significant occurrences in the history of the Jewish people", according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. One copy of the Stroop Report is held by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Warsaw. Another copy of the report, which did not include this photograph, was entered into evidence at the Nuremberg Trials, and is held by the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). ==People depicted==

. The only woman in the photograph who survived was the one at right, Małka Zdrojewicz. With other young women imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, she was forced to work in a brush factory. As the final liquidation of the ghetto approached, Zdrojewicz and her colleagues deserted their jobs and descended into the sewers, stockpiling arms to resist the Nazis. She later testified that she smuggled arms into the ghetto in her boots and kept a cache under her bed. During the uprising, women deployed Molotov cocktails and other improvised weapons. Zdrojewicz survived, but Rachela Wyszogrodzka did not. Zdrojewicz immigrated to Israel in 1946, married (changing her name to Horenstein), and had four children. Due to her injuries she was considered 75% disabled by the Israeli authorities. The original caption of the photograph was ("Hehalutz women captured with weapons"). Jürgen Stroop later described the bravery of the Jewish women who took up arms: ==Legacy==

s photoshopped onto the women's lapels The photograph is known as a famous representation of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. The photograph was used for the first day of issue cover for a Polish stamp commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The original cover was controversial, since the graphic designer added yellow badges to the left lapels of the women. In fact, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were forced to wear blue Stars of David on white armbands, and the combatants discarded their armbands because they considered them humiliating symbols of Nazi oppression. Because of the lack of historical accuracy, some people objected to the cover. The cover was reissued without the Star of David badges. ==References==