Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Hero Michael Smuss a’h Passes Away in Israel at 99

Michael Smuss a”h, the last remaining fighter from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, passed away in Israel at the age of 99, the World Jewish Congress announced Thursday night.

“Michael Smuss, who was part of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during WWII against the Germans, has passed away in Israel at the age of 99. May his memory be a blessing,” the WJC said in a statement honoring his legacy.

Born in 1926 in Danzig, today Gdansk, Poland, Smuss was just a teenager when the Nazis forced him, along with hundreds of thousands of other Jews, into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. There, he joined the Jewish resistance, determined to fight back against the Nazi regime.

According to the WJC, Smuss was assigned to work restoring Nazi helmets, a job that gave him access to chemical substances that could be used to create Molotov cocktails. “He stole and passed on the materials to the resistance,” the organization said, adding that Smuss himself took part in the 1943 uprising.

Eventually captured, Smuss was sent to the Treblinka death camp but was later diverted for forced labor. As the war neared its end in 1945, he endured and survived a death march. After the war, he immigrated to the United States before settling in Israel, where he took up painting to help process his wartime experiences.

The WJC paid tribute to Smuss’s courage and the importance of preserving his memory. “We continue to tell the stories of survivors, especially as so many are no longer with us, so that this history is never forgotten,” the organization said.