Polish president hails last survivor of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Polish President Andrzej Duda has praised Simcha “Kazik” Rotem, the last survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who died at the age of 94 in Jerusalem.Rotem took part in the 1943 act of Jewish resistance, which took place in Nazi-occupied Poland in opposition to the Germans’ final effort to transport the ghetto population to concentration camps.Hundreds of Jewish fighters began their fight on April 19, 1943, after the Nazis began deporting the surviving residents of the Jewish ghetto they had set up after invading Poland.The insurgents preferred to die fighting instead of in a gas chamber at the Treblinka death camp where the Nazis had already sent more than 300,000 Warsaw Jews.During the revolt, Rotem fought and served as a negotiator between the ghetto residents and the so-called Aryan side.Duda’s office tweeted that Rotem was a “Hero of two nations: the Polish and the Israeli one. May his memory live on!”“This is the loss of a special figure, because ‘Kazik’ was a real warrior in the full sense of the word,” said Avner Shalev, the chairman of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum“He was a courageous and resourceful young fighter,” Shalev said.After Rotem’s death was announced on Saturday, Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both paid tribute, with Netanyahu writing on Twitter that he had “fought the Nazis, saved Jews ... and told his story of heroism to many Israelis”.Speaking at a 2013 ceremony in Poland to mark the 70th anniversary of the uprising, Rotem recalled that by April 1943 most of the ghetto’s Jews had died and the 50,000 who remained expected the same fate.Rotem said he and his comrades launched the uprising to “choose the kind of death” they wanted.“But to this very day I keep thinking whether we had the right to make the decision to start the uprising and by the same token to shorten the lives of many people by a week, a day or two,” Rotem said.Thousands of Jews died in Europe’s first urban anti-Nazi revolt, most of them burned alive, and nearly all the rest were then sent to Treblinka.Rotem survived by masterminding an escape through the drain system with dozens of comrades.Polish sewer workers guided them to the surface.He went on to participate in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising led by Polish resistance fighters against the Nazis.