Poland honours Jewish fighters who escaped via sewers

Polish authorities have unveiled a monument in the nation's capital to Jewish fighters who escaped through the sewers after the doomed 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising against Nazi Germany.

"This place marks a historic link in Polish and Jewish resistance history," said Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski at a ceremony in central Warsaw.

The statue honours a group of around 50 fighters who made their way through the drain system on May 10, 1943 as German forces burned down the ghetto to crush the three-week revolt.

"We were ready to keep on fighting but we risked dying in the flames," said Symcha Rotem, 86, who now lives in Israel, at the ceremony.

Mr Rotem - then named Kazik Ratajzer - masterminded and led the escape and is also one of the last survivors of the 1943 uprising.

Among those who also escaped in the operation was Marek Edelman, the revolt's last commander, who passed away in 2009 in Warsaw.

Mr Rotem, Mr Edelman and many of the other Jewish fighters went on to take part in the ill-fated, two-month 1944 Warsaw uprising ordered by Poland's London-based government-in-exile.

After invading Poland in 1939, Nazi Germany isolated Polish Jews inside ghettos across the country, before beginning their systematic campaign of mass murder in the Holocaust.

On April 19, 1943, the Nazis began liquidating the Warsaw ghetto, where just 60,000 people remained after the vast majority of the 450,000 imprisoned there had died of hunger or disease or had been sent to the Treblinka death camp northeast of the city.

It was then that hundreds of poorly-armed young Jewish paramilitaries in the ghetto rose up, in Europe's first urban revolt against Nazi Germany.

An imposing monument was inaugurated in 1948 at the site of the last stand of those who were unable to escape.

Pre-war Poland was considered Europe's Jewish heartland. It had a thriving Jewish community of some 3.2 million, or around 10 per cent of the country's total population.

Polish Jews represented around half of the six million victims of Nazi Germany's "Final Solution".