WARSAW, April 19 (Xinhua) -- The presidents of Poland, Germany and Israel on Wednesday joined Holocaust survivors and their descendants in Warsaw in commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Sirens wailed and church bells rang at midday to mark the beginning of the ceremony that honored the hundreds of young Jews who took up arms in the Polish capital in 1943 against Nazi Germany.
"The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto primarily symbolizes bravery, determination, courage, and the will to fight for freedom," Polish President Andrzej Duda said in a public speech.
"I stand before you today and ask for forgiveness for the crimes that the Germans committed here," German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said at the site of the former ghetto.
"May their memories, and may the memories of all victims of the Holocaust, be preserved in our hearts forevermore," Israeli President Isaac Herzog tweeted after attending the event in the morning.
Later in the day, the three presidents lit candles of remembrance in a synagogue in the Polish capital.
On the eve of World War II, Poland was home to almost 3.5 million Jews, with Warsaw boasting the world's second-biggest Jewish diaspora after New York, according to the Polish president.
The Germans invaded Poland in 1939 and set up the ghetto in 1940 by corralling around 400,000 Jews into a small section of Warsaw. Most were then sent to concentration camps to be killed or died from the conditions within the ghetto, but on April 19, 1943 hundreds decided to fight for their freedom.
The insurgency, unsuccessful though, went down in history as the greatest act of opposition to the Holocaust.
