The main ceremony took place at Białystok’s Memorial to the Defenders of the Białystok Ghetto on Friday, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
The monument sits at a square dedicated to the leader of the Białystok Ghetto Uprising, Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff.
In attendance were officials including the German ambassador to Poland, Viktor Elbling, and descendants of Białystok’s Jews, now living abroad.
Germany's ambassador to Poland, Viktor Elbling, speaks at an event commemorating the 81st anniversary of 1943 Białystok Ghetto Uprising. Photo: PAP/Michał Zieliński
During a day of tributes, mourners lit candles at the Great Synagogue Memorial, which commemorates the victims of a 1941 fire, when Poland's Nazi German occupiers gathered Białystok’s Jews in the city’s biggest Jewish temple and set them ablaze, local media reported.
The atrocity marked the beginning of the extermination of Białystok’s Jewish community, according to historians.
Last year, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a video message to mark the 80th anniversary of the wartime revolt, describing the Białystok Ghetto Uprising as an act of bravery that reaffirmed the dignity of Jews during the Holocaust, according to reports at the time.
Blinken said in his message that the 1943 revolt was an act “not of futility, but of bravery,” for although “survival was not on the cards,” the 300 insurgents rose up to “determine how, not whether they would die.”
The Białystok Ghetto Uprising, which pitted 300 Jewish insurgents against 10 times as many German troops equipped with tanks and aircraft, is regarded as the second-biggest single act of Jewish resistance against the Nazi Germans, after the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the PAP news agency reported
Both revolts were brutally crushed, and survivors were sent to death camps.
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Source: PAP