30 November, 1993

Schindler’s List released. I haven’t watched that movie in forever. I should watch it again.

Schindler's List is a 1993 American epic historical drama film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Steven Zaillian. It is based on the 1982 historical fiction novel Schindler's Ark by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally. The film follows Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II. It stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as SS officer Amon Göth and Ben Kingsley as Schindler's Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern.

April 19, 1943

On the eve of Passover, Polish Jews rise up against Nazi Germany in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The Germans had sent troops into the Warsaw ghettos to begin the final round up of the Jews there, to be transported to various concentration camps for their eventual execution. The insurgents used Molotov cocktails and hand grenades, which were thrown at the troops and their tanks. They set fires wherever they could and generally created havoc over the next month. 17 Nazis were killed, but over 13,000 Jews were killed and 50,000 sent to the concentration camps anyway.

In mere words, it sounds as if the Jewish effort was futile and a waste of time. It was not. It was the strongest action of resistance to date by the people who were being executed en masse by the Third Reich. They fought and showed that the days where they would willingly accept their own destruction were over.

In 2012, April 19 is Holocaust Remembrance Day.