Captured Hehalutz fighters photograph

A well-known Holocaust photograph depicts three Jewish women who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, took shelter in a bunker with a weapons cache, and were forced out by SS soldiers.

Jürgen Stroop, the SS officer who commanded the suppression of the uprising, admired the bravery of female combatants and included the photograph in one of the copies of his official report.

The Germans had to set the ghetto on fire, pump poison gas into bunkers, and blast the Jews out of their positions in order to march them to the Umschlagplatz and deport them to Majdanek and Treblinka.

[1] During the suppression of the uprising, Stroop sent daily communiqués to Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger in Kraków; Propaganda Company 689 and Franz Konrad took photographs to document the events.

Another copy of the report, which did not include this photograph, was entered into evidence at the Nuremberg Trials, and is held by the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

As the final liquidation of the ghetto approached, Zdrojewicz and her colleagues deserted their jobs and descended into the sewers, stockpiling arms to resist the Nazis.

Zdrojewicz and Bluma's sister, Rachela Wyszogrodzka, the woman on the left of the photograph, were marched to the Umschlagplatz and deported to Majdanek concentration camp.

[14] Jürgen Stroop later described the bravery of the Jewish women who took up arms:[12][15] Agile as acrobats, shooting with a pistol in each hand ... dangerous in hand-to-hand contact ... when a woman like this was caught, she appeared scared as a rabbit, thoroughly despairing, and suddenly, when a group of our men was nearby, she pulled out a grenade hidden in her skirt or in her pants and threw it at them with a string of curses on her lips ...

In these instances we suffered losses, so that I ordered that these women not be held nor allowed to approach, but to finish them off with submachine guns.The photograph is known as a famous representation[16] of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.