HOLOCAUST survivors and their descendants were joined by world leaders to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising today.

The anniversary honours the hundreds of young Jews who took up arms in Warsaw in 1943 against the overwhelming might of Nazi forces.

There are no surviving fighters still alive. Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander, died in 2009. 

Mr Edelman remained in Poland and helped keep alive the memory of the revolt in his homeland. 

Simcha Rotem, a fighter who smuggled others out of the burning ghetto through sewage tunnels, died in 2018 in Israel, where he settled.

The small number of elderly surviving witnesses today were mostly children at the time of the revolt.

The commemorations took place in front of the Memorial to the Ghetto Heroes, where the fighting erupted.

Alongside presidents Isaac Herzog of Israel and Andrzej Duda of Poland, the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said his country had learned the lessons of history. 

“As German federal president, I stand before you today and bow to the courageous fighters in the Warsaw ghetto,” Mr Steinmeier said. “I bow to the dead in deep sorrow.”

Poland, where Europe’s largest pre-war Jewish population lived, preserves sites like the ghetto and the Auschwitz death camp. 

Avi Valevski, a professor of psychiatry from Israel whose father, Ryszard Walewski, a doctor who led a group of some 150 warriors in the revolt, described the visit as “more than an emotional moment.”

The Germans invaded Poland in 1939 and the next year set up the ghetto, the largest of many in occupied Poland.

It initially held some 380,000 Jews, who were crammed into tight living spaces, and at its peak housed about half a million people. Disease and starvation were rampant, and bodies often appeared on the streets.

The Jewish resistance movement in the Warsaw ghetto grew after 265,000 men, women and children were rounded up in the summer of 1942 and killed at the Treblinka death camp. 

A small group of rebels began to spread calls for resistance, carrying out isolated acts of sabotage and attacks. 

The uprising began when the Nazis entered the Ghetto on April 19 1943, the eve of Passover.

Three days later the Nazis set the ghetto ablaze, but the Jewish fighters kept up their struggle for nearly a month before they were brutally vanquished.