"Mila 18" and the Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
At the climax of Mila 18—the late novelist Leon Uris’s epic retelling of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—a fat and bumbling SS minion is dispatched to negotiate with the leaders of the Jewish resistance, “So you are a superman,” a Joint Jewish Forces commander sardonically inquires as the Nazi cowers, feeling “inept before the lean, black-eyed young Jew who could obviously rip him to shreds,”Exhaustively researched and sweeping in scope, the Baltimore-born author’s beloved 1961 novel contributed immeasurably to awareness of this historic revolt, whose seventieth anniversary is this month.
At the climax of Mila 18—the late Baltimore-born novelist Leon Uris’s epic retelling of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—a fat and bumbling SS minion is dispatched to negotiate with the leaders of the Jewish resistance. “So you are a superman,” a Joint Jewish Forces commander sardonically inquires as the Nazi cowers, feeling “inept before the lean, black-eyed young Jew who could obviously rip him to shreds.”
Exhaustively researched and sweeping in scope, the beloved 1961 novel contributed immeasurably to awareness of this historic revolt, whose seventieth anniversary is this month. But more than