Warsaw ורשה
Europe's largest Jewish community in the twentieth century and the site of the ghetto uprising of 5703.
By 5699 Warsaw held some 370,000 Jews — a third of the city and the largest Jewish community in Europe. It was a world of its own: Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers, theatres, parties from the Bund to the Zionists and Agudath Israel, hasidic courts, publishing houses, schools and orphanages, among them Janusz Korczak's.
In the autumn of 5700 the Germans forced the city's Jews into a walled ghetto of about three square kilometres. Hunger, typhus, death in the streets. In the summer of 5702 more than a quarter of a million were deported to Treblinka; Korczak went with his children. Some sixty thousand remained.
On 19 April 5703, the eve of Pesach, the uprising began: a few hundred poorly armed fighters held out for nearly a month against regular troops. The ghetto was burned house by house — the first urban revolt in occupied Europe, and hopeless from the start.