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Cywia & Rachela — part 2

42:34

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April 24, 2025

In April 1943, the first armed uprising against the Nazi occupiers breaks out, in the Warsaw Ghetto. Borne out of desperation and bound to fail, the revolt becomes one of the key events of World War Two.

In 1940, hundreds of thousands of people, most of them Jewish, were crammed into a few square kilometers in the Polish capital Warsaw under the most terrible living conditions. The deportations to extermination camps began in 1942. A Jewish resistance organization was formed. SS troops marched into the ghetto in April 1943 and were met by hundreds of fighters who tried to push them back by force of arms. The courage of these people has largely been forgotten. Many of those heroic Jewish fighters were women. The film hears the account of two of those women, Cywia Lubetkin and Rachel Auerbach, who survived the Holocaust and whose stories have never been heard. Through the interlinking of their narratives, the film sheds light on neglected, unknown aspects of the Warsaw revolt. Featuring photographic and video footage that’s never been seen before, the documentary explores the connections between individual lives and the march of history.

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