82 years after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, its last living fighter bears witness

Michael Smuss, the last known living fighter from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, experienced unthinkable horrors during the Holocaust, confronting death every day as he experienced starvation and torture. But looking back 80 years after the end of the war, and 82 years since he participated in its most famous act of Jewish resistance, he seems to see a purpose in everything he went through.

“I thank God for saving me. He pulled me out of there for a reason — so I could tell people about what happened,” Smuss said.

A former artist and master of languages, the 99-year-old Smuss was lucid-minded and sharp-tongued as he shared his journey to hell and back from his apartment in the central Israeli city of Ramat Gan. At various points in his story, he cringed with pain, got choked up with emotion, or grasped this reporter’s palm strongly with his own worn hand.

Born in 1926 in Danzig, Poland, Smuss was six years old when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and forbade Jews from learning in school.

“I saw them come into my school and talk to my teacher, at which point I was sent home,” Smuss said. “After that, my father started teaching me the German language and history, which proved incredibly important for my survival later on.”

When Smuss was 12, his family moved to Lodz, and a year later, shortly after his bar mitzvah, the Nazis invaded Poland. They took over Lodz, and Smuss and his father were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto, while his mother, who had a German passport, remained in the city with his sister.

“When my father and I arrived in Warsaw, there were Jews coming from villages all over Poland, more than 400,000 people crammed into a small area,” Smuss said. “We were taken into a room in an apartment divided into smaller areas by sheets. We had a tiny corner with two mattresses on the floor and nothing else.”

In the ghetto, the Jews were starved and  — on average, nine people would share a normal-sized room — while awaiting deportation to concentration camps and extermination centers.

The Germans put the stronger Jews to work, and Smuss was assigned to the Hermann Brauer shop on Nalewki Street in the heart of the ghetto fixing old Nazi helmets taken from the bodies of dead soldiers so they could be reused.

Meanwhile, Smuss connected with the Jewish resistance in Warsaw and risked his life smuggling weapons into the ghetto and taking letters out.

“To clean the blood out of the helmets, I needed a certain thinner that was also good for making Molotov cocktails,” Smuss said. “I would ask for as much thinner as I could get to use in bombs that we put on rooftops all over the ghetto.”

Meanwhile, Smuss was also involved in gathering weapons from a group of Italian soldiers sent to the Warsaw Ghetto as punishment for failing to defeat British forces in North Africa.

“They were brought to Warsaw in their desert shorts, and they were freezing their balls off,” Smuss said. “We had piles of warm clothes from people who had been taken away already, and we were able to trade them for their Beretta guns.”

The uprising

By April 1943, when Michael was 17, there were only 40,000 Jews left in the ghetto and the underground was preparing for an uprising when the Nazis came to liquidate them.

“From the roof of a building near the gate, we could see that the Germans were preparing to come in,” Smuss said. “They had Polish policemen with loudspeakers telling Jews to come out. And we were waiting for them, prepared.”

On the first day of the uprising, the Jewish resistance caught the Germans completely off guard.

“We had some Polish Jews who had previously fought in the army against Germany, and they thought of everything,” Smuss said. “They were shooting from the balconies with the Italian Berettas, protected by helmets and beds they had set up as shields. When the Germans spread out over the ghetto, they were sitting ducks. Their leaders had no idea what to do. It was a perfect ambush.”

Nonetheless, the Jewish fighters knew their fight was far from over. After several days of successfully repelling the onslaught, the Germans, led by commander Jürgen Stroop, changed strategy and spent a month systematically burning down every building in the ghetto.

“They went from one building to the other, until they came to the last building where I was with my father and our group of fighters. We had nowhere to go,” Smuss said.

After the ghetto was liquidated, Stroop prepared a report with more than 50 photos to gloat about his victory to the Nazi leadership. In one, you can see Smuss and his father raising their hands in surrender before a Nazi officer.

As a show for the media, the last group of resistance fighters was put on a train headed for the Treblinka death camp instead of being killed on the spot, Smuss said.

At this point, death was almost certain for everyone, but Smuss received a lucky break.

The cattle cars they were riding in were supposed to hold 100 people each, but since some weren’t full, the engineer had the idea to go to the Warsaw airport to pick up another 350 Jewish workers to make his murderous trip more cost-efficient.

Some time later, the train was stopped by Luftwaffe (German Air Force) officials who were angry that their skilled laborers were taken without permission. After some argument, the train was brought back to the airport, and the workers were released.

At the same time, other contractors came by, seeking 100 more workers who could operate factory machinery.

“We didn’t know how to, but we volunteered,” Smuss recalled. “We were covered with dirt and filth, but at that point, we would have volunteered for anything, whether it was cutting hair or playing in a symphony orchestra, you understand?”

Smuss and his partners were taken by truck to the Budzyń concentration camp, which they would leave every morning to work in a plane factory.

“I was young, and I wasn’t willing to die at that point,” Smuss said. “We were the only ones who didn’t get sent to Treblinka, where everyone else was killed. I felt like God was smiling at me.”

The death march and liberation

A year later, in 1944, Smuss was sent from Budzyń to the Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he was again put to work in a factory. One day in April 1945, as the Allies were closing in and German defeat was near, Nazi officers gave everyone an extra serving of bread and some coffee with extra-strong stimulants, and told them that they were about to be released to the Allies in exchange for German POWs. The remaining survivors sang with joy as they boarded a train headed for freedom.

“It was a lie, of course,” Smuss said. “It was part of Hitler’s final solution plan to kill us all.”

The train was destined for the crematoriums of Dachau, but once again, Smuss was saved by a mishap. The train was accidentally bombed by American jets, and 133 Jews were killed. The train was brought back to Flossenbürg, and Smuss was forced to help cremate the bodies.

After that, the remaining inmates were taken on a six-day death march toward Dachau, walking without food or water with the knowledge that they would be shot if they stopped.

“Fortunately, it was raining during the march, so we took the water that soaked into our berets and squeezed it into our mouths,” Smuss said. “In places where they didn’t have rain during their death marches, many more people died of dehydration.”

Smuss recalled the hatred of the residents of the cities they walked through.

“In some places, they threw potatoes ahead of us, yelling at us to leave as quickly as possible,” he said.

As American troops drew closer, many German soldiers fled, and Smuss and two friends snuck into a barn along the side of the road.

“The owner came with a gun and told us to get out,” Smuss said. “Two of us couldn’t get up to respond, but the other guy started yelling at him hysterically. Eventually, he let us in and brought us milk to drink. We drank until we were unconscious.”

Smuss and his friends were brought to the hospital, where they recovered under the care of the US Army and German doctors.

Later on, Smuss returned to Lodz, where he found his mother and sister. Fearing for their safety there, they went to a displaced persons camp and, in 1950, traveled by sea to New York.

In New York, Smuss got married and had children, and in 1979, he moved to Israel, where he lives to this day. Since then, he has developed a name as an artist with his highly-regarded “Reflections of a Survivor” paintings.

Smuss continues to speak to groups about the horrors he saw during the Holocaust and to serve as an inspiration for others.

“I’ve dedicated my life to helping to make sure this never happens again,” he said. “I’ve gone to Poland with students many times, and I continue to speak about it.”

“When our planes flew over Auschwitz for the first time, it was an unbelievable experience,” Smuss said. “During the Shoah, we didn’t have an army of our own. Today, we have a country with God watching over us and an air force protecting us. I’m very grateful for that.”