- Michael Smuss, the last survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, has died.
- He was a member of the Jewish resistance during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw.
- He became a painter in Israel, where he processed the trauma of the Holocaust.
Michael Smuss, the last survivor of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, has died at the age of 99. He fought against Nazi soldiers using Molotov cocktails, later became a painter. His death was confirmed on Thursday by his wife in Israel. TASR informs about it according to the AP agency.
Smuss was born in 1926 in the then Free City of Gdansk. Later he moved to Łódź and Warsaw. He was six years old when the Nazis banned Jewish children from going to school. In 1940, he became one of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were forcibly imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto. In the ghetto, which at its peak housed about half a million people, Smuss joined the Jewish resistance and was active in the underground group, the Jewish Fighting Organization, led by Mordechai Anielewicz.
While working on the restoration of helmets used by Nazi soldiers in battle, he had access to a thinner that could also be used to make firebombs. He stole it as much as he could and handed it to the resistance. The bottles were then placed on the roofs of all the houses near the entrance to the ghetto.
When the Nazis entered the ghetto on April 19, 1943 with the intention of razing it to the ground, hundreds of Jews took up arms in a desperate attempt to defend themselves. On that day, Smuss threw bottles at Nazi soldiers from the roofs of houses. The uprising was suppressed on May 16, only a handful of people survived it – including Smuss.
Nazi soldiers arrested him and sent him to the Treblinka extermination camp. Before he arrived, they themselves sent him back because they needed laborers for forced labor. He subsequently spent some time in other camps before surviving the death march in the spring of 1945. After the end of World War II in Europe, Smuss went to the United States, where he started a family. He later moved to Israel, where he began to deal seriously with the trauma of the Holocaust. He started painting and met his second wife, Ruthy, AP adds.
