Mila 18 in the Warsaw Ghetto
Memorial at Mila 18
honors Jewish heroes of Warsaw
Pictured above is the memorial stone
to the Jewish heroes who died in the Warsaw Ghetto in a house
at Mila 18 during the resistance against the SS in April and
May 1943. It sits on top of a mound of rubble, where the house
at this address once stood; it is turned slightly toward Mila
street which is to the left. The street is still named Mila,
but #18 is no longer an address there.
The last hold-outs in the Warsaw Ghetto
resistance were 120 Jewish fighters who were hiding in a bunker
in the house at #18 on Mila Street, which intersects with Zamenhofa
Street. On May 8, 1943 after the fighting between SS soldiers
and the Jews had been going on for almost three weeks, the Mila
18 bunker was attacked by the SS. For two hours, Ukrainian and
Latvian SS soldiers bombarded the entrance to the house, and
then threw tear gas into the bunker to force the occupants out.
Unwilling to surrender, many of the resistance fighters took
their own lives. Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw
resistance, died that day in the Mila 18 bunker, along with 100
of his comrades.
A family of Jews surrenders
to the SS soldiers
The battle of the Warsaw Ghetto finally
ended at 8:15 p.m. on May 16 when the German Commander, Jürgen
Stroop, declared victory by blowing up the Tlomacki Synagogue
outside the walls of the Ghetto. The Nazis reported that around
5,000 to 6,000 Jews who were hiding in buildings in the Ghetto
were blown up or burned to death. A total of 631 bunkers were
destroyed, with Mila 18 being the last one to surrender.
An SS soldier searchs
a Jew captured during the fighting
The photograph below shows the spot on
Mila street where the house once stood. Beyond the trees in the
foreground, you can see the grass covered mound of rubble with
a memorial stone on the top of it. Today there is nothing left
of the house; after the fighting stopped, the SS brought in slave
laborers to completely demolish all the remaining buildings in
the area of the former Ghetto, which the Germans planned to make
into a huge city park. Instead, the spot where Mila 18 once stood
is now in the middle of a neighborhood of new buildings.
Path around mound shows
size of house at #18 Mila Street
Just below the steps, in the photo above,
you can see a path around the mound. This path is an outline
of the actual building which stood at Mila 18. As you can see
by the size of the mound, the building was very small. The photo
above was taken from the street which is at right angles to Mila
street. The actual entrance to the house at number 18 Mila street
was formerly in the spot shown in the photo below. The house
was set very close to the street. A row of trees has been planted
where the sidewalk in front of the house used to be.
The former location
of house #18 on Mila Street in Warsaw
The photograph below shows what the bunkers
under the buildings in the Warsaw Ghetto looked like. The old
photos on this page were taken by the SS and put into three photo
albums by Jürgen Stroop, the SS commander who led the fight
against the Jewish resistance movement. One of these photo albums
is now stored in the National Archives in Washington, DC.
Jews in Warsaw Ghetto
hid in underground bunkers
This page was last updated on October
20, 2008
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