| abstract | - Ulica Miła 18 (or 18 Pleasant Street in English) was the headquarters bunker (actually a shelter) of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB), a Jewish resistance group in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland during World War II. The bunker at Miła 18 was constructed by a group of underworld smugglers in 1943. The ŻOB fighters arrived there after their own bunker, at 29 Miła Street, had been discovered. The smugglers who had built it were helping the ŻOB as guides. On 8 May 1943, three weeks after the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when the bunker was attacked by the Nazis, there were around 300 people inside. The smugglers surrendered, but the ŻOB command, including Mordechaj Anielewicz, the leader of the uprising, stood firm. German and Ukrainian troops threw tear gas into the shelter to force the occupants out. Anielewicz, his girlfriend Mira Fuchrer and many of his staff committed mass suicide rather than surrender, though a few fighters managed to get out of a rear exit, and later fled from the ghetto through the canals to the Aryan side at Prosta Street on May 10. The bodies of Jewish fighters were not exhumed after 1945 and the place gained a status of war memorial. In 1946 monument known as "Anielewicz Mound", made of the rubble of Miła houses, was erected. A commemorative stone with the inscription in Polish and Yiddish was placed on top of the mound. In 2006 a new obelisk designed by Hanna Szmalenberg and Marek Moderau was added to the memorial. The inscription in Polish, English and Yiddish reads: The names of 51 Jewish fighters whose identities have been established by historians are engraved on the front of the obelisk. Although it is often claimed that Miła 18 was the last shelter in the Ghetto to fall, this was not the case (according to Jürgen Stroop, his men took 30 "bunkers" on 12 May alone). It should be also noted that the current street numbering in Mila Street does not correspond to the wartime numbering: the memorial is nowadays at the intersection of Miła and Dubois streets while the current Miła 18 is an apartment block around 700 metres to the west.
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