THE WARSAW Walls w why.. th

Peeking through a window of the house where she was hiding, the terrified girl saw buildings burning to a soundtrack of gunfire. The blaze was in the Warsaw Ghetto, a one-square-mile prison home to 70,000 Jews forced to live there by the Nazis.

It was 75 years ago today that a few hundred Jewish militiamen stood up to the combined might of Third Reich, knowing that Heinrich Himmler had ordered their community liquidated.

It was the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a month-long last ditch attempt to survive.

Only weeks earlier 12-year-old Janina Dawidowicz had escaped.

She is believed the UK’S last living witness to the defiant stand against the Nazi’s warped anti-semitic ideology.

Her moving testimony stands as a lesson to anybody today who is intent on dehumanising people on the basis of race, religion or colour.

Speaking at her North London home, now aged 88, she recalls: “I knew there had been an uprising, I could hear the gunshots and see the fire from the windows of the flat where I was hidden.”

But it was only when smugglers came to sell food that she could get snatched details of what was happening.

“I heard one woman talk about the ‘thoughtless Jews’ and how they had started an uprising in what was left of the ghetto,” she says. “They were complaining that they could not keep the windows open on a beautiful April day, because the Jews were burning.”

At least 13,000 Jews died in that struggle, many burned to death or suffocated as the Nazis torched buildings.

The alternative was to be deported by trains to the death camps at Treblinka and Auschwitz.

Death, Janina says, stalked the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto. Those who were not rounded up on to the cattle carriages to the gas chambers faced starvation, disease or execution, just going to school. Inside the ghetto, rations were “calculated so that sooner or later, more likely sooner, you would starve to death”.

She says: “If you went out in the morning you saw people lying dead in the street. They were the same people you had seen for months – first standing, then so hungry they had to lean and then lying dead in the street.”

Disease ravaged the crowded ghetto and medical facilities were basic and overstretched. “Babies were born and died on the pavement,” Janina says.

“The hospitals in the ghetto were so crowded that the living often had to share beds with dead bodies.”

Janina was nine when the Second World War broke out. She had previously lived a charmed life, her family owning a flour mill in the town of Kalisz.

But after the Nazi’s seized their home she, mother Celia and father Marek, ended up in a poor neighbourhood favoured by the Jewish population.

As more people fled the occupation, the area became even more crowded and it soon became clear that the growing number of Jewish families was no accident.

Janina explains: “When we arrived there was no ghetto, but walls were being built across streets, not enclosing anything. We realised too late... eventually, they met and we were in a trap.

“There were checkpoints and gates and everywhere you were being watched. Soon Jews from all over Europe were the e bega train belie been

“N goin Janin belon But, them

“So Trebl to w stori

Th were

Th