The Bravest Battle; The 28 Days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Los Angeles, California: Pinnacle Books, 1978. First Printing [Stated]. Mass market paperback. Good. [20], 458, [2] pages. Illustrations. Cover has some wear and soiling. Includes Preface, Acknowledgments, Prologue, Epilogue, Notes, and Bibliography. The daily sufferings of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II have been the subject of a number of fictional and nonfictional works. But this is the first attempt at a full-scale account of the twenty-eight-day armed uprising that grew out of such conditions. This is the first full-scale, step-by-step account of the climactic twenty-eight-day struggle of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews against their Nazi exterminators. Seldom, if ever, in history has a single armed conflict produced greater heroism or more explosive political consequences. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising ended two thousand years of Jewish submission to discrimination, oppression, and finally, genocide. It marked the beginning of an iron militancy rooted in the will to survive, a militancy that was given form and direction by the creation of the state of Israel. For twenty-eight days (according to official German calculation, but actually longer) some fifteen hundred fighters, armed with little more than pistols and homemade bombs and supported by about sixty thousand civilians passively resisting in hidden bunkers, fought off several thousand Nazi soldiers equipped with rifles, artillery, tanks, armored cars, flamethrowers, and aircraft. Whole nations fell under the German yoke in a far shorter period. Nothing has been fictionalized. All quotations and descriptions, as well as thoughts attributed to characters in this book, come from the writings of the persons involved. Daniel Halperin Kurzman (27 March 1922, San Francisco - 12 December 2010, Manhattan), was an American journalist and writer of military history books. He studied at the University of California in Berkeley, served U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946, and completed his studies at Berkeley with a Bachelor's degree in political science. In the early 1950s, Kurzman worked in Europe and in Israel for American newspapers and news agencies, thereafter becoming correspondent of the NBC News in Jerusalem. In 1960 he published his first political book, a biography of the Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi. In the 1960s, Kurzman worked as a foreign policy correspondent for The Washington Post. In 1965 he received the George Polk Award for external reporting. He left the Washington Post and focused on researching and writing Modern History, especially military history nonfiction. Derived from a Kirkus review: By the spring of 1943, the ghettoized Jewish population was less than a tenth of its size before the Nazi occupation, and 1500 fighters finally prepared for battle. One group, the ZOB, was composed of leftists and left-wing Zionists, while the more conservative ZZW had ties, including weapons supply lines, to the Polish Home Army. Events are reconstructed through the eyes of participants (Kurzman conducted 500 interviews and reproduces conversational detail extensively). The closeups include not only Jewish leaders but the commander of the Nazi butchers, SS General Jurgen Stroop, and Walther Tobbens, a German industrialist who hated to see his slave-labor supply disappear, as well as Polish Home Army captain Iwanski, who gave crucial help to the Jews. The book focuses so closely on the day-to-day, bunker-by-bunker sequence of the four-week uprising, however, that the shape of events remains rather elusive. The fight is seen here as purgative violence and bridged the way to the creation of the State of Israel. Within this controversial framework, the bravery of the insurgents and the horror of the extermination are commemorated in existential detail.