Michael Smuss: Warsaw Ghetto survivor who resisted the Nazis dies

Michael Smuss, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland who resisted the Nazis, has died aged 99 in Israel.

He joined the ghetto uprising as a teenager in 1943, helping to make petrol bombs. Taken prisoner, he survived concentration camps and a death march before the end of World War II.

After the war, he became an artist and Holocaust educator. The embassies of Germany and Poland in Israel paid tribute to him on social media.

“He repeatedly risked his life during the Holocaust, fighting for survival and helping other prisoners in the Warsaw Ghetto – even after he was captured by the Nazis and deported to concentration camps,” the German embassy stated on X.

The Polish embassy said Smuss “lectured youth on the history of Polish Jews and expressed his memories through art. His legacy endures.”

The Polish embassy and the Holocaust Educational Trust, a UK charity, called Smuss the last surviving fighter of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. However, in 2018, Israeli officials and international media, including the BBC, reported that Simcha Rotem, who had just died aged 94, was the last surviving fighter of the uprising.

Last month, Germany’s ambassador to Israel awarded Smuss with the German Federal Cross of Merit, in recognition of his contribution to Holocaust education and promoting dialogue between the two countries, the embassy said.

“Thousands of people, especially young people in Germany, have learned from his testimonies.”

Smuss was born in 1926 in the Free City of Danzig, a city-state that is now Gdansk, Poland. He later moved to Lodz before being deported to the Warsaw Ghetto with his father.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were crammed into the ghetto, where they faced poverty, starvation, disease and cold.

Since Smuss spoke German, he was taken outside to work in a factory repairing and repainting helmets, he recounted in a video recorded for the Sumter Museum in the US in 2022.

He joined the Jewish Resistance in the ghetto, and he and others started stealing as much paint thinner as possible to make petrol bombs.

“We filled up bottles which were put up on the roofs of all the houses close to the entrance of the ghetto with the expectation that once they’re going to come, we’d be throwing them down”, he said.

When the Nazis came to empty the camp on 19 April 1943, the uprising began. The resistance fought back with weapons they had exchanged for warm clothes from Italian soldiers who had been sent from Africa to the Russian front.

The resistance, which Smuss called “the greatest uprising in this war against Germany”, lasted 28 days.

“It was very rough… no shower, no food. They were burning up, liquidating one house after another, full of smoke burning in your eyes,” he said.

He described thousands of bodies lying in front of houses and “the smell of gas and decomposed bodies”.

He, among some others, was taken prisoner on 29 April.

They were put on a train to the Treblinka extermination camp. As he witnessed people dying on the journey, “my heart became a stone”, he said.

Along the way, the train was stopped by employers looking to retrieve workers that had been taken from their factories. Another German came looking for experienced workers, and Smuss offered himself and those he knew.

“When we left on the train to Treblinka, I was sure that my life was over,” he told The Jerusalem Post earlier this year. “But when the train came to a halt, I felt with all of my being that on this day I was not going to die.”

He was moved and endured forced labour at other camps, and finally a death march to Dachau, before his Nazi captors fled incoming American troops.

He told The Jerusalem Post that his father was killed trying to escape one camp, while his mother and sister, who had been able to stay in Lodz, survived.

Smuss initially returned to Poland, but then moved to the US, where he worked, studied and started a family.

After experiencing trauma symptoms, he moved to Israel in 1979 alone to seek help, where he took up art and educating others about the Holocaust.

He is survived by his wife.