Legislation is under consideration in the House of Representatives seeking a congressional gold medal to recognize “the group of heroic participants in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising who led an armed resistance against Nazi occupiers and fought to preserve and protect the Jewish culture.”

H.R. 9104 was introduced Sept. 30 by Rep. William R. Keating, D-Mass.

Established in November 1940 by German authorities within the new General Government territory of occupied Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II and the Holocaust.

At its peak, as many as 460,000 Jews were detained there. From the ghetto, Jews were transferred to Nazi concentration camps. At least 254,000 ghetto residents were moved from Warsaw to the Treblinka extermination camp.

Historical accounts report that the total death toll among the prisoners of the ghetto is estimated to be at least 300,000 killed by bullet or poisonous gas combined with 92,000 victims of starvation and disease.

According to historical accounts, Jan. 18, 1943, German troops entered the ghetto to remove additional residents. Some 600 Jews were shot and 5,000 others removed from their residences. Their forced removal was temporarily halted by a small group of resisters. 

German troops reentered the ghetto in April and met fierce resistance by hundreds of insurgents armed with handguns and Molotov cocktails, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. An estimated 13,000 Jews were killed during the uprising, many of them burnt alive or suffocated when German troops burned the ghetto in May 1943. Wikipedia writes, “Of the remaining 50,000 residents, almost all were captured and shipped to the death camps of Majdanek and Treblinka.”

The uprising is considered the largest by Jews against their Nazi oppressors during World War II. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum calls the uprising “one of the most significant occurrences in the history of the Jewish people.”

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