UTW 27

Mordecai Anielewicz, leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising

Art: 1994
Media: Ink on board
Size: 33 inches H x 46 7/8 W. [83.8 cm H x 46 7/8 W]; unframed

The wings were drawn at the Burke Museum, Univ. of Washington, Seattle. On the far lower left of the drawing: a small wing I drew at the Burke Museum one day.

Below the portrait of Mordecai are ink studies I did of several baby cockatiels that 'showed up' in my home while I was working on the drawing. An acquaintance, Rivka Weed, who knew I had pet birds,  asked me if I could take care of her two cockatiels for two weeks while she was to be out of town. I agreed and the birds came over. The birds had other plans, however.

When the baby birds were a few weeks old they had quills without the soft feathery part - they looked like baby dinosaurs. The parents hung upside down to feed the youngsters by regurgitating food into the beaks of the babies.  Amazing to watch! Two month later I loaded the cage - now with five birds - if memory serves - into the car of Ms. Weed - and off she and her expanded family went. I hope they're all doing well. Cockatiels live about twenty years.

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See this 7 min., 58 sec. video of an excerpt from a presentation with a class of 5th graders, Unity Point Elementary School, Carbondale, Illinois, 1996, with the artist talking about this drawing.

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Aniliewicz was born in 1919 or 1920. During the weeks of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, April-May 1943. About 700 - 900 starving and pitifully armed, with pistols, a few rifles and Molotov cocktails and whose ranks included children, youth, young adults and adults, fought back against the German and Austrian Nazi military forces and their Lithuanian and Polish Police and SS allies during the final "liquidation" of the ghetto and the remaining 50,000 Jewish men, women and child prisoners still alive in April.  The uprising began on April 19th.

The "liquidation" of these last Jewish prisoners, around 50,000 still alive, with the Nazi’s planned total destruction of the ghetto, was a birthday present for Hitler from Nazi General Juergen Stroop. Hitler's birthday was April 20. April 19 was also the first night of Passover, one of the most important Jewish religious holidays. Stroop was prosecuted and convicted of war crimes by a U.S. Military Court after the war for ordering the execution-murder of captured U.S. Army Air Corps officers. The execution wasn’t carried out. Later he was extradited to Poland, and convicted of crimes against humanity. He was executed in 1951. 

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Of Mordecai Anieliewicz and the resistance:

Trapped in a burning bunker in the headquarters of the Jewish Fighters Organization (the umbrella group of the different Jewish organizations that joined together to fight back) at Mila 18 (Mila was a street in the Jewish district), most of the young Jewish fighters in the bunker took their own lives rather than surrender to the Nazi's.

Minutes before Nazi soldiers entered the rooms at Mila 18, a handful of Jewish fighters managed to escape through a hidden passageway and several made their way outside of the ghetto through sewer lines, from which they eventually made their way to partisan units in forests outside the city. Some of those Jews who managed to make their way to sewers perished when the Germans gassed the sewers. Some of those at Mila 18 committed suicide, controlling their own deaths and choosing to die with dignity.

The Jewish men and women, teens and children who fought back didn't do so to win -  which was impossible  -  but to control their own deaths and die with dignity, something which was of great importance to them. Knowing that they might be able to kill some of their hated oppressors at the same time gave them a tremendous sense of mission. Their courage is a testament to our knowledge of them and helps keep memory alive.