Mordechai (Polish: Mordechaj) Anielewicz was born to a Polish-Jewish family of Abraham (Avraham) and Cyryl (Cirel) née Zaltman,[1] in the town of Wyszków near Warsaw where they met during the reconstitution of sovereign Poland.

[citation needed] Anielewicz travelled to Wilno and attempted to convince his colleagues to send people back to other Polish occupied territories to continue the fight against the Germans.

He then attempted to cross the Romanian border to open a route for young Jews to get to the Mandate of Palestine, but was caught and thrown into the Soviet jail.

[6] On top of extreme overcrowding, inadequate food supply and disease caused tens of thousands of deaths before deportation even began.

In October 1941, the German occupation administration in Poland issued a decree that every Jew, captured outside the ghetto without a valid permit, would be executed.

[7] After the first reports of the mass murder of the Jews spread at the end of 1941, Anielewicz began immediately to organize defensive Jewish groups in the Warsaw Ghetto.

[citation needed] In the summer of 1942, he visited the southwest region of Poland – annexed to Germany – attempting to organize armed resistance.

It was announced that 6,000 Jews were to be dispatched each day, irrespective of gender or age, to leave for labor camps to the east in the resettlement program.

[10] In October 1942, the Jewish resistance managed to establish contact with the Polish Home Army, which was able to smuggle a small number of weapons and explosives into the ghetto.

SS functionary Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg sent 850 soldiers (German and Ukrainian) to Warsaw with sixteen officers who accompanied a light tank and two armored cars.

On the contrary, Jews had a perfect knowledge of the environment, relied on a number of hiding places, and were difficult to target because of the interconnection of individual houses.

At 11:00 the next morning, soldiers under the command of SS General Jürgen Stroop entered the ghetto, where again they encountered hard resistance from approximately 750 Jewish defenders.

The smoke and heat from the fire forced a number of Jews to leave their shelters, and some chose to commit suicide by jumping from the windows of burning houses, or they escaped through the sewage lines that were still connected to the Gentile part of the city after the construction of the ghetto.

On 7 May, a group led by Zivia Lubetkin set out from the Command Bunkhouse under the Miła Street through a complex sewer system to find an escape route from the ghetto.

[17] With no surviving eyewitnesses to confirm Stroop's claims,[17] the fate of Anielewicz is unknown; it is assumed that he died on 8 May 1943, alongside his girlfriend and advisors, at the surrounded ŻOB command post at 18 Miła Street.

His body was never found and it is believed that it was buried in the ruins of the bunker (covered by the debris of Mila Street) – a site memorialized today as a gravesite – or carried off to nearby crematoria among the dead.

Countless had fought to their last breaths amid pure chaos, many succumbing to poison gas or taking their own lives to avoid capture.

Several days before the final suppression of the rebellion and shortly after the destruction of the Command Bunker, a rescue operation was carried out, during which about eighty Jewish fighters were transferred to a so-called Aryan section of the city and taken to safety.

Although the Germans planned to destroy the ghetto within three days, the struggles lasted for four weeks and they didn't suppress them definitively until 16 May 1943, when Operation Commander Jürgen Stroop symbolically ended the explosion of the Great Synagogue in Warsaw.