City sirens and church bells sounded this afternoon in the Polish capital, signaling the start of celebrations dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

The uprising that broke out on April 19, 1943 is the largest event of Jewish resistance against the Nazis during World War II, an event during which many armed Jews attacked the Nazis.

Presidents of Israel Isaac Herzog and Germany Frank Walter Steinmeier, accompanied by his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda, appeared together in front of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, opposite the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, located in the place where fighting was fought during the uprising.

The three presidents are expected to travel together to the synagogue in Warsaw in the afternoon.

Throughout the city, as in previous years, at least three thousand volunteers began distributing cardboard daffodils and capes in memory of Marek Edelman, the last leader of the Jewish uprising who died in 2009, who marked each anniversary by laying a bouquet of yellow flowers at the base of the monument. Heroes of the ghetto.

Because of their color and shape, daffodils resemble the yellow star that the Nazis forced Jews to wear.

The daffodils accompanied pamphlets summarizing the history of the uprising in Polish, Ukrainian and English.

A year after the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis designated a zone in Warsaw to round up almost half a million Jews over three square kilometers, exterminate them by hunger and disease, and send more than 300,000 to the gas chambers of the death camp at Treblinka, 80 km. east of the Polish capital.

About seven thousand people were killed during the clashes of the rebels, another six thousand died later on the background of fires methodically arranged by the Nazis. The survivors were sent to camps.

This year, against the backdrop of the anniversary, various events are planned, meetings with survivors, concerts, film screenings, theater performances.

Newly discovered photographs of the ghetto taken by a Polish firefighter will be part of an exhibition at the Polin Museum, while until now most of the known photographs were taken by the Nazis and showed the Jewish quarter through the eyes of the Germans.

Source: APE-MPE, AFP.