On this day in 1943, Mordechai Anielewicz, Polish leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization responsible for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was killed amidst the fighting near Mila 18. Today, a memorial stands near the site where Anielewicz fell in the battle for Jewish survival against the Nazis.Anielewicz was born in Warsaw in 1919 and from a young age, established himself as a leader of the left-leaning Zionist youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair. When the War began, Anielewicz left Warsaw for Vilna, which at the time was occupied by the Soviets in eastern Poland. He was detained by Soviet officials for trying to establish an escape route to British-occupied Palestine. Upon his release, Anielewicz crafted a plan to have a group of Jews return to German-occupied Poland so that the youth movement's efforts could continue in secrecy. He aided in the publication of an underground newspaper, and coordinated meetings with other local resistance while simultaneously leaving Warsaw, illegally, to visit resistance fighters inside other ghettos. In June 1941, after Anielewicz received word of Jews being mass murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe, he established an organization for self-defense within the Warsaw Ghetto, Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organization, or ŻOB). About a year later, almost all of Warsaw’s Jews were deported by German authorities (nearly all to the death camp at Treblinka), leaving just 60,000 within the Ghetto’s walls. Anielewicz quickly realized that the ŻOB was outmatched; as a result, the other underground Jewish resistance movements joined forces with the ŻOB. In November 1942, Anielewicz assumed the role of commander. On January 18, 1943, the Germans carried out a second deportation. Anielewicz led the ŻOB in a street struggle, battling the German authorities. On January 22, the Germans halted the second deportation which Jews read as a victory.On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, Nazi authorities attempted the final deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, directly followed by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The ŻOB was eventually outmatched by German officials who began to burn every building in the ghetto. Anielewicz and his fellow resistance fighters were backed into the HQ bunker at Mila 18 Street where, on this day, Anielewicz was killed. While the resistance forces ultimately failed in their efforts at halting this final deportation with two-thirds of the ghetto’s remaining Jews deported to the forced-labor camps at Poniatowa and Trawniki and concentration camps at Lublin and Majdanek, Anielewicz deemed his efforts successful. He wrote, “My life's dream has come true; I have lived to see Jewish resistance in the ghetto in all its greatness and glory.”