President Shimon Peres of Israel has paid homage to the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II. In Warsaw, Peres and his Polish counterpart, Lech Kaczynski, led a crowd of 1,000 gathered beneath the granite Monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto in ceremonies honoring the Jews rose up and fought against German troops for three weeks who in April and May 1943. Poland's chief rabbi Michael Schudrich read out the Kaddish. Afterwards, Peres, Kaczynski and survivors of the ghetto uprising placed wreaths at the foot of the monument, which was flanked by two large iron menorahs. Peres praised the young fighters, who he said displayed "a heroism that our children will proudly carry with them in their hearts.”
"The majority of the uprising fighters died, murdered in cold blood. They lost the fight, but from the point of view of history, there has never been such a victory," Peres said. "A victory of men over human bestiality, of pure souls over fallen ones. Yes, the Germans won, thanks to thousands of soldiers shooting without thought and gassing bunkers," the Israeli president said, adding: "What did those terrible Nazis leave to the generations that followed? Only shame, a curse and damnation."
Later, the two presidents met with former ghetto fighters and Holocaust survivors and attended a concert by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at Warsaw's national opera house. On Monday, Peres and Kaczynski both attended a commemoration ceremony at the former Nazi death camp Treblinka. They lit candles at the memorial to the 800,000 people murdered there. Several hundred young Israelis also took part, with four of them accompanying elderly Holocaust survivors to light candles in a ceremony marked by prayers and songs. It ended with the ritual blowing of a shofar.
After invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis established ghettos in a number of places, herding in the country's Jewish population, and later created a network of death camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Half of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust were Polish. Prior to World War II, Poland was home to 3.5 million Jews.
