April 19, 1943: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

The best-known photo from the Uprising, after its failure.

The boy has never been positively identified,

and there is no way to know if he survived the camps.

April 19, 1943: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising begins, the most famous resistance movement against an occupation of a nation by Nazi Germany.

The Nazis had invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, starting World War II. Overwhelmed, the country fell in 10 days, and the deportation of the country's Jews to concentration camps began -- first to use them as slave labor, and later to execute them in what became known to the Germans as "the Final Solution," and to the civilized world as "the Holocaust."

There were 2 main groups launching the Uprising, which would normally have been opposed to each other, but united in the face of a common enemy: The left-wing Jewish Combat Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ŻOB), and the right-wing Jewish Military Union (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, or ŻZW).

The ŻOB flag. The ŻZW flag was much the same,

but without the Star of David.

It was the largest single revolt by Jews during the War. Ultimately, the Uprising failed, due to being heavily outnumbered and outgunned: They killed 150 Germans, as opposed to losing 13,000 of their own people.

Don’t let anyone tell you that the Jews would have won if only they’d had guns. They had guns. And they had gasoline bombs -- what the Finns, in their recent Winter War with the Soviets, called Molotov cocktails. And they still got wiped out. 

Marek Edelman, of the ŻOB, the only Uprising commander to survive The War, said the point of the revolt was "not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths." He lived until 2009, at age 90.

By the time the Allies finally put an end to the Nazi state, 5.8 million Polish citizens had died during the War. About 90 percent of Jews living in Poland, around 3 million, died.

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April 19, 1943 was a Monday. Football was out of season. The NHL season ended 11 days earlier, as the Detroit Red Wings swept the Boston Bruins in 4 straight to take the Stanley Cup. And the baseball season began the following day. So there were no scores on this historic day.