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Warsaw

Jewish Life in Warsaw Before the Holocaust
Jewish Life in Warsaw During the Holocaust
Jewish Life in Warsaw After the Holocaust

                     Pages of Testimony

Jewish Life in Warsaw Before the Holocaust

• Historical Background
• Photographs

Historical Background

Warsaw, the largest city in Poland, became the capital of Poland in 1596. There are records of Jewish residents in Warsaw from as early as the 15^th century. According to a 1792 census, some 6,750 Jews lived in suburban Warsaw, comprising one tenth of the city’s residents. At this time, the Jews were actually barred from living in the heart of the city. In the 19^th century, despite many restrictions imposed on the Jewish community, the Jewish population in Warsaw grew considerably. Warsaw’s Jewish community became the largest Jewish community in Europe, and the second largest in the world, after New York. Before World War II some 378,000 Jews lived in Warsaw, comprising about 29% of the city’s population. At this time, Jews lived in all parts of Warsaw, with many in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods.

After World War I the Jews of Warsaw suffered considerably from the policies of the Polish government. The world-wide economic crisis in 1929 also left its mark on the Jews of Poland, with approximately one-third living in poverty in the 1930s.

Despite these problems, Warsaw in the interwar period was considered the “capital” of Polish Jewry and one of the most important Jewish centers in the world. The city was home to a variety of Jewish political movements, welfare organizations, trade unions, and many cultural and religious institutions. Jewish newspapers and other publications in Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew were all printed in Warsaw. Warsaw was also home to various Jewish educational initiatives, sports organizations and youth movements as well as creativity on a wide scale vis-à-vis Jewish literature, theater and visual arts. In this testimony, Holocaust survivor Joseph Carmeli, who was born in Warsaw in 1930, recalls:

In this testimony, a Holocaust survivor who was born in Warsaw in 1915, describes his way of life in the city before the Second World War:

On the eve of the Second World War, approximately 378,000 Jews lived in Warsaw, comprising about 29% of the city’s population.

Prewar Photographs

• Mila Street, Warsaw, Poland
• A Jewish school, Warsaw, Poland
• Entrance to a building on Mila Street, Warsaw, Poland
• Street in the Jewish quarter, Warsaw, Poland
• Woman handing out cakes to children in the Jewish quarter, Warsaw, Poland
• Hella and Fella Ogurek walking down the street, Warsaw, Poland
• Pedestrians in the Jewish quarter, Warsaw, Poland
• A Jewish family, Warsaw, Poland
• Two children in the Jewish quarter, Warsaw, Poland
• A Jewish school, Warsaw, Poland
• Students and their teacher at a Jewish school, Warsaw, Poland
• The children of the Vilner family, Warsaw, Poland
• The Bund Council in August 1937, Warsaw, Poland

Jewish Life in Warsaw During the Holocaust

• Historical Background
• Photographs

Historical Background

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Within a few days the Polish government fled Warsaw, and on September 28, Warsaw came under Nazi rule. The military siege of Warsaw caused great suffering for all the inhabitants of the city. Within days the city became a mass of ruins and ashes. Thousands of Jews lost their lives in the German bombing raids and about a third of Jewish–owned buildings were demolished. Many thousands of Jews reacted by joining the vast stream of war refugees fleeing eastward. In late October, Warsaw became a district center of the new Generalgouvernement civil administration, with Ludwig Fischer serving as district governor. This new civil authority replaced the initial military regime that the German Army had established upon occupying Poland.

With the fall of Poland, the Jews of Warsaw became subjected to brutal attacks and forced labor. One of the first steps taken by the Nazis was to set up a Judenrat (Jewish Council) in Warsaw, under the chairmanship of Adam Czerniakow. The Nazis did not permit any Jewish institutions to function besides the Judenrat and welfare organizations. In November 1939 the Generalgouvernement issued the infamous regulations concerning the visual identification of the Jewish population, including the order for Jews to wear white armbands with a blue Star of David. Many Jews also lost any means of supporting themselves and their families as a result of tough economic regulations, such as severe restrictions on the movement of large sums of money and the freezing of bank accounts. The curfews limited the traveling of merchants and their business contacts outside the city. These and other restrictions made family life very difficult even before the ghetto was closed in November 1940. As a result, we begin to see the establishment of various public aid organizations which tried in different ways to alleviate the widespread suffering of the Jewish population. However, nothing could assuage the harsh psychological effects of public humiliations and harassments of Jews in the streets by German soldiers or the total dislocation of a family whose sole source of its meager rations was jeopardized because the breadwinner was taken off the city streets by the Germans to forced labor.

In October 1940 the Nazis informed the Jews that a ghetto was to be established in Warsaw. The ghetto was sealed off on November 16; at its peak, it housed more than 450,000 Jews. Living conditions in the ghetto were insufferable. Six or seven people lived in one room, the food rations supplied by the Germans were vastly inadequate, and more than 80,000 people died of disease, cold and malnutrition. The German Transfer Office regulated all economic exchanges in the ghetto. In fact, only about 65,000 Jews worked during this period and even they couldn’t support their families. However, most economic activity conducted by the Jews in the ghetto was illegal, including food smuggling. In order to survive, most Jews either subsisted on their savings or slowly sold all their property. In his wartime diary, Holocaust survivor Hersh Wasser discusses the hardships in the Warsaw Ghetto:

Despite the grave difficulties, life for some inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto was rich with educational and cultural activities conducted by underground organizations. These organizations were offshoots of various Jewish political parties and youth movements that had existed before the Nazi occupation. In the Warsaw Ghetto there were secret libraries, children’s classes and a symphony orchestra. In addition, prominent writers and poets continued to compose their artistic works. The Oneg Shabbat Archive was an underground enterprise led by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum. Between 1939 and 1944 Ringelblum and his team worked, inside and outside the ghetto, to document the history of the Warsaw Ghetto and other communities in Nazi-occupied Poland.

During the first half of 1942 rumors began to circulate about deportations from other ghettos, spreading panic among the ghetto inhabitants. In addition, the Germans began carrying out night raids in which Jews were plucked from their homes at random and murdered. In late July 1942 the Germans launched a two-month-long wave of deportations from the Ghetto. Unwilling to follow Nazi orders and make the decision of whom to deport, Judenrat chairman Adam Czerniakow committed suicide. The fact that children had not been excluded from these orders was a breaking point for him that contributed to his decision to commit suicide. In Czerniakow’s penultimate diary July 22, 1942 entry, the day before he committed suicide, he notes:

By September 12,1942, approximately 300,000 Jews had been deported from Warsaw - 265,000 to the Treblinka extermination camp. Some 50,000 Jews remained in the Ghetto. In the following testimony, Holocaust survivor Adam Boren, born in Warsaw in 1925, describes the 1942 deportations:

At the beginning of the deportations leading members of the youth movements active in the Warsaw Ghetto formed a self-defense group known as the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ZOB). Another group formed was the Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, ZZW).

In January 1943, the Nazis launched a second wave of deportations out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Believing this aktion to be the final liquidation of the ghetto, the Jewish ghetto fighters devised plans to resist the Germans. The deportations lasted just five days, during which some 6,000 Jews were deported and more than 1,700 were killed inside the ghetto. Many of the Jews in the ghetto believed that they could survive by hiding until the end of the war, and in their eyes this was a form of resistance. In fact, the Germans had only planned to deport a few thousand Jews at that time. Some Jews in the ghetto became convinced that armed resistance could help them survive. The Jewish ghetto fighters, by contrast, believed that their goal was not survival, but rather resistance for the sake of resistance.

The final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto began on April 19, 1943, on the eve of the Jewish Passover holiday. The ghetto fighters were ready in their positions. The majority of the remaining population was hiding in bunkers built over the previous months. The fighters launched the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising--the first uprising of an urban population in German-occupied Europe. After days of guerilla warfare, the Germans resorted to searching for Jews, bunker by bunker, and burning down the ghetto. The Jewish ghetto fighters fought heroically. By May 8 the Nazis discovered the leaders of the Uprising in the Mila 18 bunker. In his last letter prior to death during the Uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz writes to his comrade in arms Yitzchak Zukerman:

Emmanuel Ringelblum describes the young women of the youth movements who carried important information between the different ghettos before the Uprising and who fought bravely beside the men inside the ghetto in the following manner:

On April 29, 1943, the Polish underground press reported:

A Jewish carpenter, Srul Shaya Kalezyk, about 10 months after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, wrote a letter in Polish and Yiddish, on the work permit he had used in the ghetto. He was among a few hundred Jews who had been brought to the ghetto ruins after the Uprising by the Germans, for specific work tasks. His permit was found in the ruins of the ghetto in 1965. Kalezyk wrote:

After the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, individual Jews hid in the ghetto for several months, and thousands crossed over to the Polish side of Warsaw in search of refuge. Moreover, many of these Jews were killed in the Warsaw Polish Uprising in August 1944.

Warsaw was razed to the ground after the failed 1944 revolt. 150,000 Poles were killed and hundreds of thousands were sent to Nazi labor camps.
Warsaw was liberated by the Red Army on January 17, 1945.

Photographs: Warsaw During the Holocaust

• Building the ghetto walls, Warsaw, Poland
• Food distribution, Warsaw, Poland
• People preparing flour rations for distribution in the ghetto, Warsaw, Poland
• People lined up at a public kitchen in the ghetto, Warsaw, Poland
• A Boy helping a man in the ghetto, Warsaw, Poland
• A child selling armbands and other articles in the ghetto, Warsaw, Poland
• A boy painting toys in a private workshop in the Warsaw Ghetto, Poland
• A German soldier checking the documents of two Jews, Warsaw, Poland
• Jews being transported in trucks to forced labor outside the ghetto, Warsaw, Poland
• Jews on a ghetto street, Warsaw, Poland
• Adam Czerniakow, Warsaw, Poland
• German soldiers forcing a Jew to cut off another Jew's beard as locals watch, Warsaw, Poland
• Boxes and jugs in which the 'Ringelblum Archives' were concealed, Warsaw, Poland
• Emanuel Ringelblum, Warsaw, Poland
• Girls eating in a soup kitchen, Warsaw, Poland
• Zivia Lubetkin, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Warsaw, Poland
• Commanders of the ZOB, Warsaw, Poland
• Jewish children walking single-file in the street before their deportation to Treblinka, Warsaw, Poland

Jewish Life in Warsaw After the Holocaust

At the end of the Second World War, about 2,000 Holocaust survivors congregated in Warsaw where they received some initial aid from the Jewish Committee operating there. However, in the first months after the war, the major Jewish renewal in Poland centered in Lublin. It was only with the reconstruction of Warsaw itself that Jewish institutions reopened in the city. The Institute of Jewish History resumed its activity, contributing greatly to the documentation of the destruction of European Jewry. The Central Jewish Committee also resumed activity, as did a number of Jewish social and cultural organizations. Over time, between 20,000 to 30,000 Jews, most of whom had not lived in Warsaw before the war, settled in the city. In the following testimony, Holocaust survivor Alice Meroudas describes her life in Warsaw, where she spent a few months in 1946:

Postwar Photographs

• Digging the Oneg Shabbat Archive, Warsaw, Poland
• A meeting of members of the underground, Warsaw, Poland, April 19, 1948
• The ruins of Warsaw, Poland
• A monument for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Warsaw, Poland
• The Jewish cemetery, Warsaw, Poland
• The Fridman family, Warsaw, Poland

Pages of Testimony

Pages of Testimony serve as symbolic gravestones, providing a unique memorial for victims of the Holocaust. The following are five Pages of Testimony that were submitted to Yad Vashem, in memory of individuals from Warsaw who were murdered during the Holocaust:

Page of Testimony for Vita Bornstein
Page of Testimony for Stefa Karetny
Page of Testimony for Nahman Bark
Page of Testimony for Hanna Wagner
Page of Testimony for Abraham Zisblatt

You might want to print these Pages and take them with you on your journey to Poland. When you visit Warsaw, you can read the names and stories that are recorded on these Pages of Testimony.
For more Pages of Testimony, search the Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names.

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