On 18 January 1943, when another wave of deportations began, Jewish underground organisations decided to resist. There were perhaps only some 50,000 people left in the Ghetto by that point, and no more than a 1000 members of the underground combat organisations. The initial resistance, meagre as it was, was a shock that forced the Nazis to halt deportations until 19 April when they moved again in full force. Between January and April the resistance organisations, among them many members of the socialist Bund, established a degree of authority in the Ghetto, building bunkers, smuggling weapons and executing collaborationists. They were preparing for an inevitable confrontation in which they stood no chance.
The people regained their agency and when they died, they died as fighters not victims. Nobody expressed the power of resistance to restore humanity to the downtrodden better than Wladyslaw Szlengel in his poem Counterattack. Szlengel, born in 1914, wrote it in reaction to the first clashes in the Ghetto in January and it was probably one of the last poems written before his death in the Ghetto Uprising.
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For more on the song's story and a video art piece by Haim Sokol check here:
https://partisan-jam.fhu.art/songs/counterattack--song
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This tune is a part of the Partizan Jam project meant to learn with Antifascism was initiated by Free Home University together with Arkadiy Kots Band.