April 19, 1943: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

The best-known photo from the Uprising, after its failure.

The boy has never been positively identified,

and there is no way to know if he survived the camps.

April 19, 1943, 80 years ago: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising begins, the most famous resistance movement against an occupation of a nation by Nazi Germany.

The Nazis had invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, starting World War II. Overwhelmed, the country fell in 10 days, and the deportation of the country's Jews to concentration camps began -- first to use them as slave labor, and later to execute them in what became known to the Germans as "the Final Solution," and to the civilized world as "the Holocaust."

There were 2 main groups launching the Uprising, which would normally have been opposed to each other, but united in the face of a common enemy: The left-wing Jewish Combat Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ŻOB), and the right-wing Jewish Military Union (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, or ŻZW).

The ŻOB flag. The ŻZW flag was much the same,

but without the Star of David.

It was the largest single revolt by Jews during the War. Ultimately, the Uprising failed, due to being heavily outnumbered and outgunned: They killed 150 Germans, as opposed to losing 13,000 of their own people. Marek Edelman, the only surviving ŻOB commander, said the point of the revolt was "not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths."

By the time the Allies finally put an end to the Nazi state, 5.8 million Polish citizens had died during the War. About 90 percent of Jews living in Poland, around 3 million, died.