Miła 18: The Bunker of the Uprising

Why is it significant?

Before you rises a grass-covered mound among modest residential blocks, crowned by a massive block of reddish field granite resting on cut stone steps. This small hill is no park feature; it is an undisturbed communal tomb created from the rubble of pulverized houses: the command shelter of Miła 18.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Before you rises a grass-covered mound among modest residential blocks, crowned by a massive block of reddish field granite resting on cut stone steps. This small hill is no park feature; it is an undisturbed communal tomb created from the rubble of pulverized houses: the command shelter of Miła 18. The inscriptions carved on the granite face speak to you in Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew.

By April 1943, barely sixty thousand people remained in the Warsaw Ghetto, working in slave-labour workshops or hiding in hollow walls. When German SS and police troops marched into the ghetto on 19 April, the eve of Passover, planning to clear the area in three days, they were met with pistol fire, home-made hand grenades and petrol bombs. It was the first armed urban uprising against Nazi occupation in all of occupied Europe, fought by teenagers and twenty-year-olds with scarce weapons.

Beneath the ruins of Miła 18, the Jewish Combat Organisation, known as ŻOB, established its primary underground headquarters. The shelter was an intricate labyrinth of cellars with wooden bunks, a well, battery-powered radios and six camouflaged exits leading into the ruined basements of neighboring tenements. The commander was Mordechaj Anielewicz, only twenty-four years old. The fighters harboured no illusions of military victory; their battle was waged for human dignity and the right to choose how they died.

For three weeks the fighters held off tanks and flamethrower units while the SS systematically torched the ghetto block by block. On 8 May 1943, German search squads discovered the shelter entrances and hurled poison gas canisters down the ventilation pipes. Refusing surrender and torture, Anielewicz and more than a hundred fighters chose suicide. Only a handful escaped through sewer tunnels to the Aryan side, among them Marek Edelman, who survived to become a world-renowned heart surgeon.

The bodies of the defenders remain beneath this mound, untouched since the war. Leave the memorial hill heading south down Zamenhofa street. In a few minutes, the avenue opens onto a wide public square dominated by a bronze monument of legendary scale.