Tributes to Simcha Rotem poured in throughout the weekend, after one of the last surviving fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising died at the age of 94 in Jerusalem.
Rotem was among the last known Jewish fighters from the 1943 uprising against the Nazis, which was the single greatest act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
“This is a loss of a special character since Kazik was a real fighter, in the true sense of the word,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. “The challenge for all of us now is to continue giving meaning to remembrance without exemplary figures like Kazik.”
Known as Kazik, Rotem was born in Warsaw in1924 and was active in Zionist youth movements as a teenager.
World War II broke out when he was just 15.
In July 1942, Rotem joined the Warsaw Ghetto’s Jewish Combat Organization, or ZOB, which had begun to grow after the killing of 265,00 Jews at the Treblinka death camp. Then, the Nazis moved to exterminate the remaining Jews still in the ghetto in April 1943.
Some 300,000 Warsaw Jews had already been sent to their death — but the insurgents refused to accept that fate.
There were 50,000 Jews left, said Rotem at a 2013 ceremony in Poland they started the resistance to “choose the kind of death” they wanted.
“But to this very day I keep thinking whether we had the right to make the decision to start the uprising and by the same token to shorten the lives of many people by a week, a day or two,” Rotem said.
After World War II ended, Rotem made aliyah to pre-state Israel in 1946 and served as a manager in a supermarket chain until retiring in 1986. He fought in the country’s independence war, too.
Rotem was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, one of the nation’s highest honors, for his actions during the war by Poland’s president 2013.
“Kazik fought the Nazis, saved Jews, immigrated to Israel after the Holocaust, and told the story of his heroism to thousands of Israelis,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement. “His story and the story of the uprising will forever be with our people.”
Rotem is survived by his two children and five grandchildren.
There is now only a single known remaining Warsaw Ghetto Uprising survivor left in Israel — 90-year-old Aliza Vitis-Shomron.
“It’s a difficult day because this really means that this is it. I’m the only one left and there is no one else to keep the story alive,” she told the Associated Press. “He was the last fighter. I’ll keep speaking till my last day, but no one lives forever. After me, who will keep telling?”
