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Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s 80th anniversary remembered with daffodils, 3 presidents and an 11th commandment against ‘indifference’
WARSAW (JTA) — Exactly 80 years ago, a few hundred ragtag, half-starved Jews emerged from sewers in Warsaw to battle Nazis – and held them off for nearly a month rather than surrender themselves and their Jewish brethren to the Treblinka and Majdanek death camps.
On Wednesday, thousands of Poles and international visitors, including Polish President Andrzej Duda, Israeli President Issac Herzog and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, marked the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in a stirring Holocaust commemoration festooned with daffodils, the emergent symbol of the largest Jewish rebellion against the Nazis during World War II.
“As German federal president, I stand before you today and bow to the courageous fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Steinmeier told a few hundred politicians, Jewish leaders and others at the Ghetto Heroes Monument, marking the first time a German president has joined in the annual commemoration. “I stand before you today and ask for your forgiveness for the crimes committed here by Germans.”
This was also the first time leaders from all three countries came together for the official uprising ceremony to commemorate the fighters, none of whom are alive today. The last surviving fighter, Simcha Rathajzer-Rotem, also known as Kazik, died in December 2018. A handful of Warsaw Ghetto survivors who were not old enough to join the fighting remain, according to Holocaust scholars.
In another first, the three heads of state attended a commemorative service led by Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schdurich at Warsaw’s Nozyk Synagogue. By the end of the ceremony, which was conducted mostly in Hebrew and featured Polish-Jewish children singing the Polish and Israeli national anthems, many attendees had tears in their eyes.
“I just thought, the leaders are here, this is something we should do, it’s part of building relationships and collective memory that partnerships are built on,” Schudrich told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Earlier in the day, Polish President Duda called the fighters “the heroes of the Jews all over the world” and “the heroes of Poland and the Poles.”
Herzog, a day after Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, praised the fighters for sparking hope during one of humanity’s most tragic times. “In a world falling apart, in the shadow of death, under conditions of humiliation, famine, and forced labor, in the ghettos… they succeeded — mothers, fathers, children, grandfathers, and grandmothers — in upholding human morality, mutual responsibility, faith and basic humanity,” he said.
From left to right: German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Polish President Andrzej Duda and Israeli President Issac Herzog hold hands before the 80th anniversary commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in front of the city’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, April 19, 2023. (German Government Press Office/Getty Images)
Wednesday’s diplomatic tribute, which also included speeches by World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder and Marian Turski, a Lodz Ghetto survivor whose so-called 11th commandment — “Thou shalt not be indifferent” — became the slogan for programming by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews around the commemoration.
Eleven years ago, POLIN commissioned Jewish artist Helena Czernek to design a simple paper flower daffodil that has since been worn on the uprising’s anniversary to raise awareness of the day. The pin design was inspired by a commander of the uprising, Marek Edelman, who died in 2009. Each year he would receive a bouquet of daffodils to mark the anniversary date from an anonymous sender, and he would in turn place them on the city’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes — a large sculpture standing at the site of the uprising’s first battle.
The daffodil marker has since changed the landscape of Holocaust memory in Poland, according to POLIN museum spokeswoman Marta Dziewulska.
“Our research shows that since we began our educational programs around this event, including handing out the daffodils, the rise in general public knowledge about the uprising has been enormous,” said Dziewulska.
This year, thanks in part to financial support from Lauder, a billionaire heir to the Estee Lauder fortune and a major Republican donor, the daffodil campaign reached far more people than ever, both in Poland and beyond. Throughout the center of Warsaw, the paper daffodil was ubiquitous among pedestrians and cafe dwellers across generations. All crew members on LOT Polish airline flights wore them.
For the first time, the daffodils were also distributed to 150,000 people in 100 Jewish communities around the world. More than 3,000 volunteers gave out 450,000 paper daffodils in six cities across Poland, and over 7,000 schools, libraries and cultural institutions participated in the museum’s daffodil campaign, which includes films and educational materials about the uprising.
Helena Czernek designed the paper daffodil over a decade ago. (Dinah Spritzer)
Krystyna Budnicka, who was 11 at the time of the uprising, told journalists about her story on Monday. The fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) were armed with home-made grenades and Molotov cocktails. In the end, roughly 13,000 Jews were were burnt alive or suffocated as the Nazis burnt down the ghetto to quell the rebellion, sending the remaining some 50,000 Jews to be murdered further east.
Budnicka told the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza that “as the ghetto was burning, the underground was like a bread oven.”
But Budnicka and some of her 10 immediate family members, none of whom survived the Holocaust, had one advantage. Her brothers and father were observant Jews who happened to be carpenters. They had constructed a bunker to lead to the sewers so that eventually, at least she and her brother, who later died of typhus, were able to make it out.
Budnicka was later taken in by a Catholic orphanage while the war was still raging and hid her Jewish identity, changing her last name to Kuczer. Until the 1990s, she told almost no one of her travels. But today she is the ambassador of POLIN Museum.
Her recollection of life at the time is limited, except that she had hope for survival. The fighters slept during the day in bunkers the Nazis couldn’t easily find, and came out of the sewers to fight at night. She remembers hunger, being the only girl among many boys and dreaming about what bread tasted like, a distant memory.
Many decades later, after the end of the Communist dictatorship, a “Children of the Holocaust” association was formed in Poland. For the first time, Budnicka and many others started telling their stories out loud, and at schools.
“Now I feel that I have to do it,” she told Gazeta Wyborcza. “When I mention my loved ones at meetings, it’s like I’m erecting a monument to my family. They live then. I see them. It’s in order: my mother Cyrla, father Josef Lejzor, brothers Izaak, Boruch, Szaja, Chaim, Rafał.”
Budnicka is not the only Warsaw Ghetto survivor to ask the world to remember what she endured. Helena Birnbaum, 93, who also survived by hiding in a bunker, participated in this year’s March of the Living — an annual Holocaust remembrance event that brings thousands of participants from around the world to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She told reporters at the march on Tuesday why she flew all the way to Poland from Israel to talk about her ordeal.
“The importance of knowing about the Holocaust is to know the person in all situations, on the brink of death,” she said. “The importance of knowing that the Holocaust was life within death and not everyone died at once. The individual stories matter.”
An iconic photo from the Warsaw Ghetto shows Jews being led by Nazis in 1943. (U.S. Holocaust Museum/Wikimedia Commons)
The act of international unity in display at the official uprising ceremony comes at a time when Poland’s right-wing government continues to espouse a nationalist narrative that international scholars say downplays Polish antisemitism and violence towards Jews before, during and after World War II. Multiple Polish laws connected to Holocaust rhetoric and restitution payments caused diplomatic tensions between Poland and Israel for years, and the two only resumed more full relations last month. The rapprochement came after Israel’s foreign minister announced the resumption of Israeli student trips to Holocaust sites in Poland, which now could include sites that explain Nazi violence against non-Jewish Poles.
Six years ago, some Polish Jews who rejected their government’s patriotic narrative launched their own uprising commemoration, which has grown from a group of hundreds to nearly a thousand. During the alternative commemoration on Wednesday, which featured Yiddish songs sung by school children and recitations of poetry by Polish-Jewish authors, participants laid paper and real daffodils at Warsaw Ghetto monuments such as Umschlagplatz, where the Nazis deportee 350,000 Jews by train to Treblinka.
Patrycja Dolowy, director of Warsaw’s Jewish community center, was an early supporter of what she called a grassroots alternative to the pomp and circumstance of the government’s ceremony, only a few hundred feet away.
“Jews were sentenced to death in the center of their own city and the majority of people outside the ghetto were doing nothing about this,” said Dolowy, who believes government focus on heroism should not erase inquiry into less heroic actions by Poles.
“If Jews were not treated before the war as strangers, it would have been much easier for everyone, Jews and non-Jews, to rise together and resist,” she theorized.
The counter-commemoration reflects the contrasting attitudes in Poland towards honoring Jewish and Holocaust memory. In 2017, the government passed a law that assured public schools taught history from a heroic, patriotic perspective, and in 2018 made it illegal to insult the Polish nation’s Holocaust record, condemning scholars who dared delve into historical Polish aggression against Jews.
Attendees shown at an alternative Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemoration, which has grown in recent years. (Dinah Spritzer)
Jerzy Warman, 76, a Polish-born Jew participating in the non-governmental commemoration whose parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto, said the Polish government wants to turn the uprising commemoration into an event where “they can do a roll call of Poles who they say helped the Jews.”
Warman noted that his father joined Edelman at the Warsaw Uprising, a major Polish resistance campaign that took place year after the Ghetto Uprising. “The Jews tried to join the Polish Home Army as a group but were rejected by them,” Warman recalled his father explaining.
Moshe Kis, 22, a Jewish political science student from Warsaw whose grandmother spent two years in the ghetto, echoed Warman’s view.
“So many people here still don’t understand their own history,” said Kis, who will immigrate to Israel next year. He added, fiddling with a daffodil over coffee, “when the sirens went off today in honor of the uprising, I heard people around me saying on the street, ‘what is this for, are we being invaded?’”
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Israel and the Impossible Standard of Moral Perfection
Jewish visitors gesture as Israeli security forces secure the area at the compound that houses Al-Aqsa Mosque, known to Muslims as Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount, in Jerusalem’s Old City, Photo: May 5, 2022. REUTERS/Ammar Awad
There is a standard applied to Israel that no other nation is expected to meet. It is not a standard of law, nor of morality as commonly understood. It is something far more rigid and far less honest. It demands perfection in the face of existential threats, and even then, it delivers condemnation.
As the conflict with Iran intensifies, Israel finds itself navigating a reality few countries have ever faced.
Iran has made its intentions unmistakably clear for decades. The destruction of Israel is not rhetoric for domestic consumption. It is official Iranian policy. It is repeated openly, consistently, and without apology.
When Iran strikes, it does not distinguish between civilian and military targets. In fact, it purposefully targets civilians. And it doesn’t only target Jews. Rockets do not ask who is religious or secular, Jewish or Muslim, Israeli or Arab. They fall where they are aimed, and often where they are not, with one purpose in mind: to kill, to terrorize, and to destabilize.
Israel, in contrast, is forced to think not only about survival, but about responsibility. This includes responsibility toward all of its citizens: Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze. The diversity of Israeli society is often overlooked, but in moments of crisis, it becomes impossible to ignore. Protection must extend to everyone, without exception.
That is why restrictions on public gatherings were imposed. Not as a political statement, but as a practical necessity. In wartime, large crowds are not just gatherings. They are potential mass casualty events waiting for a single missile.
Yet when Israel extended these restrictions during Ramadan, including closing access to major religious sites, the response was immediate outrage. The accusation was predictable: Religious discrimination. Oppression. A supposed targeting of Muslim worshippers.
The reality was different. The restrictions applied across the board. Muslims were not permitted at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Christians were not permitted at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Jews were not permitted at the Western Wall or the Mount of Olives. This was not selective enforcement. It was a universal policy driven by security concerns.
But nuance rarely survives in the modern information environment.
Within hours, a simplified narrative took hold. Israel was once again cast as the aggressor, the oppressor, the state that denies religious freedom. The broader context disappeared. The ongoing threat, the indiscriminate nature of incoming attacks, the responsibility to prevent mass casualties, all of it was pushed aside.
Then, almost as if to underline the point, a rocket landed near Jerusalem’s Old City that very same day. It was a stark reminder of what was at stake. Had thousands gathered as they normally would, the consequences could have been devastating.
And yet, even that reality does not shift the narrative.
This is the dilemma Israel faces repeatedly. If it acts to prevent harm, it is accused of repression. If it refrains and harm occurs, it is blamed for negligence. There is no decision that escapes criticism, because the criticism is not rooted in the decision itself. It is rooted in a predetermined judgment against a state run by Jews.
Another example illustrates this pattern with uncomfortable clarity. A toddler was found approaching the Israeli border alone. In any other context, this would be seen for what it is. A child placed in danger, likely as part of a calculated attempt to provoke a reaction.
Israeli soldiers responded not with force, but with care. They ensured the child’s safety, provided food and water, and transferred him to the Red Cross. Evidence showed the child was unharmed at the time of transfer.
Yet the story that followed claimed abuse. Allegations of injuries surfaced, contradicting the available evidence. The facts did not matter. The narrative had already taken shape.
This is not simply misinformation. It is a pattern of interpretation that assumes guilt regardless of evidence.
As Easter approaches, restrictions on religious gatherings once again draw criticism. Clergy voice frustration. Observers condemn the limitations. But the fundamental question remains unanswered: What is the acceptable level of risk? How many lives can be gambled in the name of normalcy?
Israel does not have the luxury of abstract debates. Its decisions carry immediate consequences measured in human lives. That reality forces choices that are imperfect, often unpopular, and always scrutinized.
The tragedy is not only in the conflict itself, but in the inability of much of the world to acknowledge its complexity. Until that changes, Israel will continue to face an impossible standard, one where even its efforts to prevent tragedy are reframed as acts of injustice.
Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.
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Europe’s Left-Wing Is at a Crossroads — And Its Voters Are Walking Away
Anti-Israel demonstrators release smoke in the colors of the Palestinian flag as they protest to condemn the Israeli forces’ interception of some of the vessels of the Global Sumud Flotilla aiming to reach Gaza and break Israel’s naval blockade, in Barcelona, Spain, Oct. 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nacho Doce
For decades, Europe’s left‑wing parties were the natural home of working‑class families, social reformers, and supporters of egalitarian economics.
Today, however, these parties face a deep identity crisis; many voters no longer know what they represent. Their decline is neither sudden nor mysterious. It stems from their failure to outline a coherent economic alternative, their reluctance to address public concerns over cultural change, and a foreign‑policy shift that alienates moderates and minority communities alike.
Economically, the left has slipped into disarray. Some parties now embrace neoliberal ideas they once opposed, while others offer vague promises disconnected from real policy. With inflation rising, industries shifting, and inequality widening, many working‑class voters feel abandoned. Rather than addressing these issues, left‑wing leaders often focus on internal ideological debates that resonate mainly in urban strongholds.
A similar pattern appears on immigration and cultural identity — central issues in European politics. The left often responds to public concerns not with solutions but with dismissal, treating working‑class worries as reactionary instead of substantive. In countries where leftist parties have merged with centrists, their message has blurred even more, creating space for right‑wing populists eager to fuse economic frustration with cultural fears.
Foreign policy has intensified these divides. After the latest Middle East conflict, parts of the European left adopted an uncompromising pro‑Palestinian stance, often aimed at courting Muslim voters. Legitimate criticism of Israeli policy is one thing, but rhetoric that blames Israelis collectively or echoes historic antisemitic themes is another.
France’s La France Insoumise (LFI), for example, has repeatedly refused to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, fueling what observers describe as a toxic climate. Similar tensions appear in Sweden, where Jewish students report rising hostility, and in Spain, where pro‑Palestinian rallies receive political backing without clear rejection of antisemitic elements.
Even smaller nations face similar issues. In Croatia, descendants of Jewish families whose property was seized under fascist and later communist regimes still encounter heavy bureaucratic barriers when seeking restitution. As Deutsche Welle reporting shows, heirs in Zagreb — governed by the green‑left coalition Možemo! — spend years navigating courts and administrative obstacles, with many properties still unrecovered despite clear historical proof of ownership. These unresolved legal complexities fuel mistrust and reveal how institutional inertia persists.
The left’s challenge is not simply to recover lost voters, but to regain a sense of political purpose. It must craft a credible economic message, engage cultural concerns without contempt, and articulate a foreign policy grounded in principle rather than posturing.
Europe needs parties capable of balancing social justice with social cohesion — and clarity with empathy. Whether the left can meet that challenge will shape the continent’s politics for years to come.
Dr. Vladimir Krulj is a political economist with Franco‑Serbian roots, educated at HEC Paris, King’s College London, and France’s elite École nationale d’administration (ENA). A Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, he is known for his unapologetically pro‑market views and his critiques of Europe’s failing economic orthodoxies. He also teaches at ESCP Business School and the University of Tours in France.
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When Democracies Lose the Narrative, They Lose More Than Words
A view of a residential building damaged by a strike, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 23, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Israel is fighting a war, and being judged in real time by people who are not carrying its risks, don’t face its decisions, and aren’t responsible for its outcomes. The judgment against Israel is not forming slowly. It is forming immediately, and it is shaping what Israel is allowed to do next.
This is where the real shift happens. Public opinion is not a side effect of war. It is becoming one of its constraints.
In the months and years following October 7, 2023, Israel’s internal reality became visible to anyone willing to look. Families of hostages have spoken publicly. Military strategy has been debated in real time.The political leadership has been questioned openly. These are not cracks in the system. They are the system functioning under pressure.
Outside of Israel, those same signals are being interpreted through a different lens. They are not seen as accountability. They are seen as division, not as strength.
At the same time, Israel’s enemies project a consistent message. Their narrative is simple, repeated, and controlled. It travels easily. It feels clear. It leaves little room for visible disagreement.
When public opinion turns, it begins to influence political pressure. Allies become more cautious. Support becomes conditional. The space to act narrows.
This is how a democracy can begin to lose ground outside the battlefield while still fighting effectively within it.
In today’s information environment, visibility does not guarantee understanding. Information is selected, framed, and repeated in ways that shape perception, often reflecting how perception gets manipulated.
At the same time, controlled messaging from the other side removes internal friction from public view. What reaches the outside world is a simplified version of events: Israel as the aggressor, and anyone that tries to attack or threaten it as the heroic underdog.
People are drawn to clarity. A message that is repeated without variation feels reliable. Over time, repetition shapes belief and narrows the range of what people are willing to consider. This pattern reflects how groupthink leads to collective blindness. Once a simplified narrative settles, it becomes resistant to correction, even when it leaves out essential context.
Israel faces an additional layer of scrutiny. As a democracy, it operates within a framework of law and declared ethical standards. Its actions are measured against those standards in real time. Civilian harm is debated openly. Operational decisions are questioned publicly. This is necessary for accountability. It also places the full weight of war in public view, including the reality of acceptable damage in conflict
These discussions are often detached from the conditions in which those decisions are made. They are evaluated without the same exposure to risk, uncertainty, and consequence. The result is a gap between how decisions are made and how they are judged.
That gap is where public opinion shifts.
From a distance, consistency feels stronger than complexity. A controlled narrative feels more stable than an open one. Over time, this creates a reversal in perception. The side that exposes its internal responsibility begins to look uncertain. The side that conceals its internal dynamics begins to look resolved.
When clarity is valued more than accuracy, and repetition carries more weight than context, the advantage moves toward those who control the message, not those who expose the truth.
Israel is not only fighting to defend itself. It is operating within a system that rewards simplicity and penalizes transparency. Ignoring that reality allows others to define the terms of judgment before the outcome is even known.
Public opinion follows what is repeated and understood. Recognizing how that understanding is formed is no longer optional. It is part of the fight itself.
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Tsahi Shemesh is an Israeli-American IDF veteran and the founder of Krav Maga Experts in NYC. A father and educator, he writes about Jewish identity, resilience, moral courage, and the ethics of strength in a time of rising antisemitism.