Add thelocalreport.in As A Trusted Source
Michael Smus, who fought Nazi soldiers with Molotov cocktails warsaw He became a painter to deal with his trauma from the World War II ghetto uprising and after the war, he has died. He was 99 years old.
in his wife israel His death was confirmed on Thursday. He said Smus died on October 21. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, said the funeral would take place on Friday.
Smus was born in 1926 in what was then the Free City of Danzig, now Gdańsk, Poland. Later he moved to Łódź and Warsaw. In 1940, he became one of thousands of Jewish people forcibly imprisoned within the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Warsaw Ghetto initially housed about 380,000 people. jews Which were crammed into tight living spaces, and at its peak housed around half a million people. Disease and starvation were rife, and dead bodies were often visible in the streets.
According to Frank Stephens, a family member living in Germany, Smus joined the Jewish resistance in the ghetto and was active in an underground group led by Mordechai Anilewicz.
While working to restore the helmets of Nazi soldiers used in the war, Smus gained access to a thinner that could also be used to make Molotov cocktails. He stole as much as he could and gave it to the resistance.
“We filled bottles, which were placed on the rooftops of all the houses near the entrance to the ghetto, with the hope that, once they arrived, we would throw them down,” Smus explained in a video for the Sumter County Museum in South Carolina three years ago.
When Nazis entered the ghetto on April 19, 1943, with the intention of destroying it, hundreds of Jews took up arms in a desperate attempt to retaliate.
Paul Diedrich, a Germany-based family member who spent a few months with the man in Israel earlier this year, told The Associated Press that on that day, Smus himself threw Molotov cocktails at Nazi soldiers from ghetto rooftops.
He was one of the few resistance fighters to survive the nearly month-long battle.
According to Paul Diedrich’s account, Smus was arrested by Nazi soldiers and was on his way to Treblinka when he was turned back by the Nazis, who needed workers. He spent time in other camps before escaping death row in the spring of 1945.
After the war ended, Smus moved to America, where he started a family.
Later, he moved to Israel, where his process of dealing with Holocaust trauma began in earnest. He began painting and met his second wife, Ruthie.
Diedrich said, “From then on, Michael began to process his experiences artistically and went to German schools to show the descendants of his oppressors the unimaginable.”
He added, “Despite his experiences, he retained an unfailing sense of humor.” “At 99 he still smiled and laughed with me.”