The survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, who resisted the Nazis, has died

Michael Smus, 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. Captured, 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 honored him on social networks.

“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 X embassy said.

The Polish embassy said Smus “lectured youth about the history of Polish Jews and expressed his memories through art. His legacy remains.”

The Polish embassy and the Holocaust Educational Trust, a UK charity, named Smus the last surviving fighter from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. However, in 2018, Israeli officials and international media, incl The BBCreports that Simcha Rotem, who has just died at the age of 94, is the last surviving fighter from the uprising.

Last month, Germany’s ambassador to Israel awarded Smus the German Federal Cross of Merit in recognition of his contributions 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 testimony.

Smus 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, hunger, disease, and cold.

Because Smus spoke German, he was taken out to work in a factory repairing and repainting helmets, he narrated 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 began stealing as much paint thinner as they could to make gasoline bombs.

“We filled bottles that were placed on the roofs of all the houses near the entrance to the ghetto with the expectation that as soon as they came we would throw them down,” he said.

On April 19, the Nazis came to empty the Ghetto, an enclave in Warsaw created by the Nazis to segregate and persecute the Jews. The resistance hit back with weapons that had been exchanged for warm clothes by Italian soldiers sent from Africa to the Russian front.

The resistance, which Smus calls “the biggest insurrection in this war against Germany,” lasted 28 days.

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

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

He, along with some others, was captured on April 29.

They were put on a train to the Treblinka extermination camp. As he witnessed people die on the trip, “my heart turned to stone,” he said.

On the way, the train was stopped by employers who wanted to collect workers who had been taken from their factories. Another German came looking for skilled workers and Smus offered himself and those he knew.

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

He was moved and endured forced labor in other camps and finally a death march to Dachau before his Nazi captors escaped the oncoming American troops.

He told The Jerusalem Post that his father was killed trying to escape from a camp, while his mother and sister, who managed to stay in Lodz, survived.

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

After experiencing symptoms of trauma, he moved to Israel in 1979 alone to seek help, where he made art and educated others about the Holocaust.

He is survived by his wife.