Thirty Years After: A Re-assessment of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943

Abstract

On April 12, 1973, The Jewish Quarterly, in association with the Committee for Jewish Culture, presented a lecture by Reuben Ainsztein on the 30th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The lecture took place at the John Power Hall, St Jame's Square, London, with Mr David Astor, editor of The Observer, in the chair. It was preceded by the reading of a chapter from Katzenelson's poem, ‘The Song of the Murdered Jewish People’, in an English translation, given by the Israeli actor, Ilan Reichler ben Neria. Mr Ainsztein, who is the author of a two-volume work on the ‘Jewish participation in the Polish and Soviet Resistance Movement during World War II’, shortly to be published by Elek, reminded his audience of ‘the conspiracy of silence surrounding Polish-Jewish relations during the years of the Final Solution’, As far back as 1958 that silence was broken for the first time by an article he had written which, thanks to Mr Astor, had been published in The Twentieth Century. Prior to that, and since then, M...