Today in Labor History January 18, 1943: The start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the summer of 1942, over a quarter million Jews were deported from the ghetto to Treblinka and murdered. In response, the remaining Jews began building bunkers and smuggling weapons and explosives into the ghetto. On January 18, 1943, when the Nazis began their second deportation of the Jews, the armed insurgency began. They fought with whatever they could smuggle into the ghetto: handguns, gasoline bottles and a few other weapons. They inflicted enough casualties on the Nazis that the deportation was halted within a few days. Only 5,000 Jews were removed, instead of the 8,000 planned. They knew from the start that the uprising was doomed. Most of the Jewish fighters did not expect to survive. Rather, they saw their resistance as a battle for their honor and a protest against the world's silence. Marek Edelman, one of the few survivors, said their inspiration to fight was "not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths."

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