Last surviving Warsaw Ghetto Uprising fighter dies

Keep our news free from ads and paywalls by making a donation to support our work!

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

The last survivor fighter from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest single act of Jewish resistance in World War Two, has died. Michael Smuss passed away, aged 99, in Israel on Thursday.

Born in 1926 in what was then Danzig, and is now the city of Gdańsk in Poland, Smuss and other Jews faced growing hostility in the 1930s. Danzig was an independent city-state, but had a majority-German population and a strong Nazi presence.

Smuss and his family fled to the Polish city of Łódź in 1938 and then, after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he and his father were sent to Warsaw. There, along with the rest of the city’s large Jewish population, they were forced to live in the newly established ghetto, amid increasingly horrendous conditions.

In 1943, the Germans began the liquidation of the ghetto, deporting its inhabitants to the gas chambers of the Treblinka extermination camp. That prompted Jewish underground fighters to launch an uprising that began on 19 April 1943.

Smuss, still a teenager, had by that stage already been working with the resistance, including helping obtain weapons and smuggle them into the ghetto.

Earlier this year, he told The Times of Israel how the Germans had assigned him to work fixing helmets taken from dead soldiers.

“To clean the blood out of the helmets, I needed a certain thinner that was also good for making Molotov cocktails,” he told the newspaper. “I would ask for as much thinner as I could get to use in bombs that we put on rooftops all over the ghetto.”

After 29 days of fighting, the uprising was brutally suppressed by the Germans. Thousands of Jews were killed during the uprising, with tens of thousands more deported to extermination camps afterwards. The ghetto was then razed to the ground.

In the picture below, included by German SS commander Jürgen Stroop in a report to Heinrich Himmler about the suppression of the uprising, Smuss can be seen underlined in red alongside his father.

Smuss and his father detained by the Germans after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Having narrowly escaped deportation to Treblinka, Smuss was held as a forced labourer at a number of different camps before finally being liberated by US troops in 1945.

After reuniting with his mother and sister, who had also managed to survive the war, Smuss decided to leave Poland, moving to the United States in 1950 and then to Israel in 1979. It was only there that for the first time he began to tell his wartime story, including as a self-taught artist.

Smuss remained active right to the very end of his life. Just last month, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit by Germany, in a ceremony hosted by the German embassy in Tel Aviv.

On Friday, Poland’s embassy in Israel also paid tribute to Smuss. “Today we are saying goodbye to the last fighter of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Michael Smuss,” they wrote. “After the war he lectured youth on the history of Polish Jews and expressed his memories through his art. His legacy endures.”

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Image credits: gerambtlv/X

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.