Jews, Poles Join to Honor Warsaw Ghetto Uprising : Holocaust: The 50th anniversary of the doomed revolt takes place amid concerns over new horrors.

Jews and Poles came together here Monday to mark the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in an emotional event haunted as much by the awareness of a new horror stalking Europe as by their own troubled past.

Thousands of Jews, many of them young students and some of them elderly survivors of the uprising, traveled to Warsaw from Israel, North America, Australia and elsewhere in Europe to join the largest ceremonies ever held to commemorate the uprising.

For the first time, Western and Israeli leaders also accompanied senior Polish officials in a series of anniversary events, which during the Communist era were frequently reduced to narrow propaganda shows.

Monday’s events culminated with a dramatic late-evening sound and light show at the ghetto memorial attended by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Polish President Lech Walesa.

Several thousand people, mainly young, gathered in the park bordering the memorial to watch. Many held candles.

Earlier in the day, other leaders and groups of Holocaust survivors laid wreaths at the memorial, helped open a new exhibition on the event and unveiled a plaque in honor of one of the uprising’s heroes.

The uprising, launched April 19, 1943, by several hundred crudely armed ghetto residents against vastly superior Nazi occupation forces, was the only known large-scale resistance mounted by the victims of the Holocaust against their oppressors.

Although doomed from the start, the 27-day battle destroyed the Nazi myth of Jews as a people too cowardly to fight and generated a legend that has been heralded as an inspirational example of resistance against evil.

For Poles, a nation whose own history is filled with martyrdom, the uprising constitutes a special bond in a troubled relationship. At one level, Monday’s events, together with a series of symposiums, exhibitions and Jewish cultural evenings held throughout Poland in recent weeks, provided a long-delayed chance for Poles and Jews to confront their tangled past with an openness that was simply impossible during the Communist era.

The new candor seemed to show that the Jewish link with Poland remains emotive and difficult.

In the years before World War II, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe, totaling 3.5 million; but after Hitler invaded the country in September, 1939, and imposed a Nazi occupation, Poland became a deathtrap for Jews. About three million Jews succumbed in infamous camps with names like Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek.

Many Jews believe that Poles either did too little to protect them or even actively assisted in their betrayal during the Nazi era. Post-World War II persecutions that forced many Holocaust survivors to flee, merely reinforced these suspicions.

Today, only about 10,000 Jews remain in Poland.

In speeches Monday evening, both Walesa and Rabin seemed to be searching tentatively for deeper reconciliation.

“Our mind cannot grasp the enormity of what happened, while our hearts are still boiling with anger, but there is no desire for revenge,” Rabin said. “It’s very difficult to forgive, but we must believe in a better future.”

Walesa stressed the Jewish contributions to Poland.

“Those who died here were Polish citizens,” he said. “They lived together with us for nearly 1,000 years. They enriched our land and our culture.”

In interviews Monday, many Jews who returned for the commemoration said they found it an emotional experience.

Estelle Epstein, a Toronto property manager making her first trip to Poland with her 71-year-old mother, who was born here and escaped the Holocaust, said she found herself afraid of uniformed Poles.

“When I look at them, my hair stands on end,” she said. “I don’t know why. . . . I feel they hate me. I’m not saying it’s right, it’s just an emotional reaction.

“My daughter is more tolerant than I am; I am more tolerant than my mother; it will only diminish through the generations,” she added.

In several official speeches, dignitaries stressed the historical importance of the uprising, noting that because the freedom fighters’ ideals eventually triumphed, they, not the Nazis, were the victors.

But many of those attending Monday’s events expressed concern that the lack of Western action to stop the ethnic massacres in Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere in Eastern Europe means that little has been learned from the heroism of the ghetto fighters.

“Looking at the fate of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and the Muslims in Bosnia, we make the painful discovery that this part of history has not ended,” said newspaper editor and leading Communist-era dissident Adam Michnik.

Challenging Gore during a public meeting-like exchange at the Jewish Heritage Institute, prominent local Jewish journalist Konstanty Gebbert said: “For the first time . . . I feel that the freedom fighters maybe actually lost. You are the vice president of the world’s biggest superpower. If you can’t stop (the atrocities) . . . what hope is there?”

Gore, his face suddenly flushed, hesitated before eventually noting that the United States is working to persuade other nations to join in stopping the violence.

In an interview on Polish television Sunday evening, the ghetto’s lone surviving military commander, Marek Edelman, now a heart specialist in the central Polish city of Lodz, said that commemorating the uprising had only one meaning: “It is to remind the world that mass killing is a crime--a crime against humanity and against the human being. In the center of Europe, this mass killing continues and the world is doing nothing to stop it.”

At the time of the uprising, the ghetto had been sealed off from the rest of the city by the Nazi occupation forces for more than 28 months. About 400,000 Jews had been enclosed and trapped in November, 1940, when the walls and barbed wire had been erected.

After the Nazis had transported more than 300,000 of the residents by train to death camps in southern Poland, several hundred among those remaining vowed to resist. They organized carefully, scrounging and smuggling grenades and makeshift weapons. When Nazi troops entered the ghetto on the morning of April 19, 1943 to begin new deportations, the uprising began.

It took between 2,000 and 3,000 troops nearly four weeks to crush the resistance. In the process, every building in the ghetto was either blown up or set afire. Those few fighters who managed to escape fled through the city’s network of sewers.

On May 16, SS (elite force) Gen. Juergen Stroop sent a cable to Berlin. It stated, “The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw no longer exists.”

Times staff writers Paul Richter, in Warsaw, and Tamara Jones, in Bonn, contributed to this report.