Today our President Shimon Peres, himself born in Poland, stood with Polish President Lech Kaczyński at Treblinka. It was the first of several ceremonies to mark the 65th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which has been called "the first urban mass rebellion against the Nazi occupation of Europe." I took these photos at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. The first evokes the heroism of the 19-year-old who led the escape of roughly 80 fighter-survivors through the Warsaw sewers. They emerged in a nearby forest or in safe houses on the "Aryan side" of the ghetto walls. Most joined up with the Polish resistance partisans.
And lest we forget, or never knew, there WERE several thousand Poles who risked or sacrificed their life to save Polish Jews. They are some of the many Righteous Gentiles honored by this garden and with trees bearing their names at Yad Vashem.
