`Romeo And _Mice
Review

TOM TUGEND
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

$r)ING

Polis j
from their homes in t
Warsaw Ghetto.

n April 18, 1943, as the
vaunted German army
marched in to liquidate the
Warsaw Ghetto, a few hun-
dred Jewish resistance fighters, armed
with pistols, rifles and horrie-made
Molotov cocktails, confronted the Nazi
soldiers and held them at bay for almost
a month.
The ghetto fighters "chose to live and
die honorably in a dishonorable world
and to take control of their own destiny
when the world had abandoned them,"
says filmmaker Jon Avnet.
Avnet, as director, executive producer
and co-writer, has been the driving force
behind the miniseries Uprising, which
will air in two segments, 9-11 p.m.
Sunday and Monday, Nov. 4-5, on
NBC.
The completion of Uprising wraps up
an intensive seven-year campaign by
Avnet, a successful commercial filmmak-
er, against the "canard" that all six mil-
lion Jews went without protesting to
their deaths during the Holocaust.
The closest current analogy to the
ghetto fighters, in Avnet's mind, is rep-
resented by the passengers aboard
United Airlines Flight 93 who, on Sept.
11, rushed the terrorists of their
hijacked plane despite the near certainty
that they would all die.
Cleaving closely to the actual facts,
the makers of Uprising based their story
mainly on the memoirs of the few who
survived the destruction of the ghetto.
The film starts at the beginning of
1943, when the 450,000 Jews once
crammed into the Warsaw Ghetto had
been reduced to 60,000 by deportations,
starvation and disease. Among this rem-
nant was the nucleus of the Zydowska
Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB), the Jewish
Fighters Organization.
Except for a handful of "older" leaders
in their mid-20s, most of the fighters
were between 18 and 21 years of age.
Their attempts to enlist the help of the
Judenrat, the Jewish Council appointed
by the Nazis, failed, and the ZOB drew
first blood on Jan. 18, attacking German
soldiers escorting a column of deportees.
The Nazis returned in force, with
tanks and artillery, on April 18, and
their commander promised that the
entire ghetto would be liquidated by.
April 20, as a birthday present to Hitler:

TERROR on page 76

