Polish president pays tribute to late ghetto fighter

Simcha Rotem “Kazik” Ratajzer, the last surviving fighter in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, died on Saturday in Jerusalem at the age of 94.

As the veteran was laid to rest this week, President Andrzej Duda said in a letter that Ratajzer was “a man of great heart, courage and nobleness … a witness and a depositary of remembrance about the Holocaust.”

Duda added: “A hero of two nations – the Jewish and the Polish one has passed away, and a fighter in two uprisings started in Warsaw against Nazi Germany, who occupied Poland.”

Ratajzer also fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising by Poles against their Nazi German occupiers.

“On behalf of the Republic of Poland and the entire Polish nation, and in my own name, I bow my head in tribute to his deeds and his memory,” Duda said in his letter to those attending Ratajzer’s funeral.

More than 200 people gathered at Kibbutz Harel in central Israel to bid a final farewell to Ratajzer on Monday, Israel’s Ynet news website has reported.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which broke out on April 19, 1943 and lasted until May 16, was the first uprising in German Nazi-occupied Europe and the largest act of armed resistance by Jews in World War II. It is estimated that about 13,000 insurgents died in the ghetto during the revolt.

Some surviving Jewish combatants later fought in the Warsaw Uprising, launched by Poland's underground Home Army (AK) on August 1, 1944.

The Warsaw ghetto, established in April 1940, was the largest of the many ghettos which the Germans set up across Poland to isolate the Jewish population after invading the country in September 1939.

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Source: prezydent.pl, ynetnews.com