Last Fighter of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Dies at Age 99 in Israel

Michael Smuss, who was the last surviving fighter from World War II’s Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, died in Israel at the age of 99, the Embassy of Poland in Tel Aviv confirmed on Thursday.

Smuss was born in 1926 in what was formerly known as the city of Danzig and is now Gdańsk in Poland. He later moved with his family to Lodz and then, following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he and his father were sent to Warsaw, where they were forced to live in the Warsaw Ghetto. He joined the Jewish resistance and helped them smuggle weapons into the ghetto.

“We filled up bottles which were then 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’ll be throwing them down,” Smuss recounted three years ago in a video for the Sumter County Museum in South Carolina.

In 1943, the Germans began liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto to deport its inhabitants to the Treblinka concentration camp. Smuss was one of hundreds of Jews that fought Nazi soldiers for almost one month and defended the Warsaw Ghetto during the uprising that began on April 19 of that year. He was 16 years old at the time and helped throw Molotov cocktails at Nazis from the rooftops of the ghetto, he said in a video shared by the Israel Defense Forces.

“Whenever the Germans came in on the first day, they didn’t expect anything to happen,” he added. “We let them walk in to the end of the street, and then little by little the Jewish soldiers on the balconies started firing, which was very successful. On the second day, as we see that they are coming … we threw the Molotov cocktails.”

Thousands of Jews were killed and roughly 50,000 were captured during the uprising, according to the IDF. Seven thousand of those Jews were immediately murdered and most of the others were sent to death camps. Smuss and his father were captured and put on a train to Treblinka, but Smuss was instead taken to be a forced worker at different camps before he being liberated by US troops in 1945. He also survived a death march in the spring of 1945. His father died during the Holocaust.

After reuniting with his mother and sister at the end of World War II, Smuss moved the United States and then Israel. He began painting to cope with his trauma, and gave lectures about the Holocaust and antisemitism. Last month, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit by Germany.