Despite the odds: 81st anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising - How We Got Here - TVP World

Today, on the 19th of April, the world commemorates the 81st anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The revolt which, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, was ""one of the most significant occurrences in the history of the Jewish people"", was an ultimate display of Jewish resistance towards the Nazi occupation and the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust.

Germans forced over 400,000 Jews within the walled-in area of the Warsaw ghetto they had established in 1940. In the ghetto, tens of thousands of people died of starvation and disease.

The daily caloric value of food rations in the Warsaw ghetto in late 1940, and early 1941 was around 200 calories per person. In comparison, at that time, the value for Poles was about 700 calories and 2,600 for Germans.

On 22 July 1942, the so-called Great Liquidation Action began. Within a two-month period, the Germans deported nearly 300,000 ghetto residents to their deaths in the Treblinka extermination camp.

Today, Warsaw and Poland commemorate this act of bravery and a call against Nazi German crimes.