Simcha Rotem

Simcha Rotem in April 2013

Simcha Rotem (born February 24, 1924 in Warsaw ; † December 22, 2018 in Jerusalem ) was a member of the Jewish underground in Warsaw under the code name Kazik Ratajzer and served as chief courier of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB), which led the Warsaw ghetto uprising against the National Socialists planned and carried out. Kazik was a pseudonym, a popular Polish name given to him by his comrades. He was considered the last resistance fighter in the Warsaw ghetto . After the war he emigrated to Israel, where he took the name Simcha Rotem.

Resistance in the Jewish Ghetto

Rotem joined the Zionist youth organization early on. When the National Socialists occupied Poland, he was 15 years old. In 1942 he became a member of the ghetto's resistance organization, the ŻOB . These and other organizations resisted deportations by the police and Waffen-SS as early as January 1943 , when it became clear where the transports were going.

On April 19, 1943, the rebellion of Jewish insurgents began, who resisted SS units. Kazik Ratajzer was one of the staff members of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB), which planned and carried out the ghetto uprising. He was in contact with the OOB officials outside the ghetto, organized money and looked for hiding places. When the situation of the rebels finally became hopeless in May 1943, Rotem led a few dozen comrades out through the sewer system. The survivors hid in forests near the capital.

The Germans laid the roughly three square kilometers large ghetto to rubble and ashes, many of the remaining residents died in the flames or were suffocated. The bloody suppression of the uprising sealed the fate of most of the Warsaw Jews who had survived until then, who made up a third of the population before the war. Thousands were shot or deported to death camps.

Awards and honors

• Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2013)
• Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (2003)
• Gold Medal of the Polish Army (Polish: Medal Wojska Polskiego) (2013)

Bibliography (German)

• Kazik. Memories of a ghetto fighter . Autobiography 1939–1945. From the Heb. by Ronit Mayer Beck. Berlin 1996 and Association A, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-86241-460-4

Web links

• Agnieszka Hreczuk: The last fighter. In: Jüdische Allgemeine, April 23, 2014 (accessed January 4, 2018)
• Simcha Rotem is dead. Warsaw Uprising fighter. In: tagesschau.de, December 23, 2018 (accessed January 4, 2018)
• Spiegel Online: Last resistance fighter in the Warsaw ghetto died. December 22, 2018 (accessed January 4, 2018)
• Corina Gall: "I saw the Jewish resistance in the ghetto in all its strength and splendor" In: NZZ from April 19, 2018 (accessed January 4, 2018)
• Interview by Claude Lanzmann with Simcha Rotem for the documentation Shoah , digital collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (accessed July 9, 2020)