WARSAW GHETTO ANNIVERSARY - German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (L), Polish President Andrzej Duda (C), and Israel's President Isaac Herzog leave after laying wreaths at The Monument to the Ghetto Heroes during commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto Uprising, in Warsaw, Poland on April 19, 2023. (AFP)
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WARSAW, Poland – Germany's president on Wednesday sought pardon for crimes committed by Germans during World War II in comments on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising anniversary in Poland's capital.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the first German president to speak at the commemorations, joined Polish and Israeli heads of state to mark 80 years since a doomed uprising by Jewish insurgents against Nazi German occupiers.
"I stand before you today and ask for your forgiveness for the crimes committed by Germans here," said Steinmeier, speaking at the annual ceremony held in Warsaw's former Jewish district.
During his speech, the German president also blasted his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin for waging war against Ukraine.
"With his illegal attack on a peaceful, democratic neighboring country... the Russian president has broken international law," Steinmeier said.
"This war brings immeasurable suffering, violence, destruction and death to the people of Ukraine," he added.
The official ceremony took place at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, which is located at the site of several of the uprising's armed clashes.
Later in the day, the three presidents went to the Nozyk synagogue in Warsaw -- the only one to have survived the war in the Polish capital -- where they lit "candles of memory," the Polish presidency said in a tweet.
'Absolute evil'
The Warsaw Jews launched their armed revolt against the Nazis on April 19, 1943, preferring to die fighting than to be sent to a death camp.
It was the largest single act of Jewish resistance against the Germans during World War II.
"We must remember," Israeli President Isaac Herzog said, adding that Holocaust memory is not relative.
"Absolute evil existed, in the form of the Nazis and their accomplices. And absolute good existed, in the form of the victims and the rebels, from every nation," Herzog said.
Around 7,000 Jews are estimated to have died in the battles and another 6,000 in the fires started by the Nazis in the ghetto.
"The revolt was suicide. We couldn't win, but we had to do them harm," ghetto survivor Halina Birenbaum, 93, told AFP ahead of the anniversary.
Earlier on Wednesday, church bells and sirens sounded across the Polish capital as volunteers across the city handed out paper daffodils for residents to pin to their jackets.
The tradition is in honor of Marek Edelman, an uprising commander who, until his death in 2009, would mark the anniversary by depositing a bouquet of the flowers at the memorial.
Because of their color and form, daffodils resemble the yellow stars Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis.
This year, the paper daffodils are also being distributed in other Polish cities.