Poland was Tuesday commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, an ill-fated Jewish revolt against the occupying Nazi Germans which marked a symbolic stand against the Holocaust.

Ceremonies were to begin at 11:00 am (0900 GMT) with the lighting of candles at the site of the notorious "Umschlagplatz", from where the Nazis sent more than 300,000 Jews by train to the Treblinka death camp, 100 kilometres (60 miles) to the northeast.

More candles were to be lit at the site of a bunker where the 24-year-old leader of the 1943 uprising, Mordechaj Anielewicz, and 80 comrades committed suicide as Nazi forces closed in to crush the month-long insurrection.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his Israeli opposite number Shimon Peres were then to pay homage at the imposing monument to the ghetto fighters, unveiled on the fifth anniversary in 1948.

The ceremony was to close with the Kaddish, or Jewish prayer for the dead, and an ecumenical religious service.

Kaczynski and Peres were later to meet survivors from the Jewish resistance, as well as 98-year-old Irena Sendler, a Pole who risked her life to spirit 2,500 Jewish children out of the ghetto.

The annual commemoration has been brought forward this year because the April 19 anniversary of the revolt falls on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.

On the eve of World War II, Poland was Europe's Jewish heartland, home to 3.5 million Jews.

Warsaw alone had a Jewish community of 400,000, making it the largest Jewish city in Europe and the second in the world after New York.

After invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis set up ghettos nationwide to corral and eventually kill the Jewish population.

Half of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust were Polish.

At its height, around 450,000 were crammed into the walled Warsaw ghetto.

About 100,000 died inside from starvation and disease. Most of the rest were sent to Treblinka in mass deportations in 1942.

A handful of Jewish paramilitary groups, mostly made up of people in their teens and twenties, were created in the ghetto.

With an estimated strength of 1,000, they scraped together a small arsenal of home-made arms and weapons smuggled in by the non-Jewish Polish resistance.

They first clashed with Nazi troops on January 18-22, 1943, managing to hinder the deportations.

On April 19, 1943 they decided to take up arms again rather than face near-certain death in the Nazis' "Final Solution".

"We knew perfectly well that there was no way we could win," their last commander Marek Edelman, 85, told AFP in a recent interview.

"It was a symbol of the fight for freedom. A symbol of standing up to Nazism, and of not giving in," he said.

The spark on April 19 was a Nazi move to wipe out the remaining 60,000 ghetto dwellers.

For almost a month, the fighters battled 3,000 Nazi troops who began razing the ghetto with explosives and fire after failing to crush the revolt as easily as expected.

Following Anielewicz's suicide on May 8, several dozen fighters, including Edelman, escaped through the sewers. The Nazis marked their "victory over the Jews" by blowing up Warsaw's main synagogue on May 16.

Around 7,000 Jews died in the revolt, most of them burned alive, and more than 50,000 were deported. Estimated Nazi losses were 300, dead and injured combined.

Many ghetto survivors fought in the Warsaw uprising which began on August 1, 1944 as the Polish underground tried to seize the city from the Nazis before the Soviet army arrived.

That failed, 63-day revolt and the Germans' brutal response cost the lives of 200,000 civilians and fighters, and led to the near-total destruction of Warsaw by Nazi troops, who then retreated before the Soviets arrived in January 1945.

HERE

Mon Apr 14, 11:43 PM ET

Mieczyslaw Jedruszczakis, pictured on April 9, in front of the only remaining parts of a wall that was used to pen in hundreds of thousands of Jews into an area in central Warsaw. Poland is commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in which Jewish people took an ill-fated but symbolic stand against the Holocaust

(AFP/File/Janek Skarzynski)