Stefan Grayek, 92, Fought in Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Stefan Grayek, who died Friday in Tel Aviv at 92, was a fighter in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising and went on to help resettle Jews in Israel and became a leader of the movement to memorialize the Holocaust.

While German troops held Warsaw's Jews captive and systematically starved and transported them to the Treblinka death camp, Grayek helped organize resistance and escapes through the ghetto's sewer system. During the uprising that raged between April 19 and May 18, 1943, he taught others how to shoot and to use grenades, and built laboratories to make Molotov cocktails. The uprising was crushed, but Grayek managed to survive by hiding out with sympathetic Christian families.

Grayek was the grandchild of chasidic followers of the Rebbe of Gur, founder of Poland's largest chasidic dynasty. His parents rejected religion and raised Grayek in a secular but pro-Zionist home. He studied agriculture with the thought of settling in the British Mandate of Palestine. As war loomed, some of his Zionist neighbors left for America, but not Grayek. "I felt some kind of responsibility towards the people who stayed," he told the Jerusalem Post in 1992.

Although the revolt was probably doomed from the start — the Jews were poorly armed and unsupported — it was nevertheless an empowering event for survivors and an example to others that Jews could fight back.

"We felt it was better to die with a gun in our hands than to take a train to Treblinka," he told the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times. "We knew it was not possible to beat the Germans, but we wanted a high price for our lives."

The Warsaw Ghetto's example of resistance helped inspire similar revolts in Bialystok and Vilna. "We felt for the first time we can take revenge for the Jewish people, our friends and families," Grayek told the Baltimore Sun in 1993.

After the war, Grayek worked to find Jewish children whom the Catholic Church had sheltered during the war, often in convents and monasteries. He helped many of Poland's remaining Jews to emigrate — some legally, some not — to the new state of Israel. He helped plan a large granite monument raised in honor of the Warsaw Ghetto dead, which in 1948 was dedicated on the site of the ghetto, by then mostly a pile of rubble.

In 1949, he left for Israel himself, and helped found Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot, the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz.

Grayek continued to work to memorialize Holocaust victims, and in 1967 announced that Polish authorities had agreed to construct a permanent Jewish pavilion at the former death camp. He later helped lead protests regarding a Carmelite convent that had been established in a warehouse at Auschwitz-Birkenau that had once been used to store cans of Zyklon B nerve gas. The nuns left in 1993.

Grayek was president of the World Federation of Jewish Fighters, Partisans, and Camp Inmates, as well as a member of the directorate of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem.

Asked during the Jerusalem Post interview why he had not experienced the trauma felt by many Holocaust survivors, Grayek answered: "Perhaps because like other people in the resistance I fought back."

He is survived by a son, a daughter, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.