On the night of August 15-16, 1943, the Bialystok Ghetto was enveloped in three tight rings of Wehrmacht and SS forcesΓÇöarmed with heavy and light weapons and artilleryΓÇöand by Ukrainian auxiliary forces. The chairman of the Judenrat was informed that the ghetto inhabitants would be relocated to Lublin. Some 30,000 Jews, exhausted, spent, and burdened with whatever possessions they could carry, streamed toward the evacuation point. At that precise moment, the Jewish underground in the ghetto launched an uprising. Flyers were disseminated to the population to disobey the German evacuation order. For five days, fierce battles raged in the ghetto between forces that were vastly unequal in size, training, and equipment. A large detachment of German soldiers and police, backed by armored vehicles and tanks, was brought into the ghetto, and the main bunker of the underground was surrounded on August 19. The Germans shot all the underground fighters, except one, that day. There is no firm information on how the commanders of the uprising, Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff and Daniel Moszkowicz, met their death, but it appears that they committed suicide.
Deportations from the ghetto began on August 18 and went on for three days, in the course of which most inhabitants of the ghetto were sent to extermination in Majdanek and Treblinka. The 2,000 Jews who were left behind were deported three weeks later.
