Warsaw Jews During World War II
The Jewish Population before the Outbreak of War
The earliest reports of the presence of Jews in Warsaw date from the fifteenth century. In the 1792 census, 6,750 Jews were found to be living there, about one-tenth of the city's total population. In the nineteenth century, Warsaw's Jewish population grew rapidly; it became the largest Jewish community in Europe, and, in the twentieth century, the second-largest in the world, next only to New York. On the eve of World War I, the Jews in Warsaw numbered 337,000. Just before World War II broke out, Warsaw's Jewish population was 375,000 (29.1 percent of the total). It was in Warsaw that many Jewish world political and cultural centers were located. Most of the Polish Jewish newspapers and periodicals were published in Warsaw in different languages; the various Jewish school systems received their central direction from Warsaw, and Jewish political parties, sports organizations, and youth movements had their headquarters there.
The Fight for the City
On September 28, Warsaw surrendered; the next day, German forces made their entry into the city. There is no evidence that the Germans deliberately aimed their fire at the Jewish streets and the section that was densely populated with Jews. However, the Jews felt that they had been a special target. The hail of shells that landed on the High Holy Days (the New Year and the Day of Atonement) reinforced that impression. Chaim Aaron Kaplan, a Jewish teacher in Warsaw who kept a detailed diary up to his last day in the ghetto, made the following entry on September 14: "Yesterday, between five and seven in the afternoon, as the Jewish New Year, 5700, was being ushered in, the northern section, populated mostly by Jews, suffered an air raid." Adam Czerniakow, on September 22, stated: "Today is the Day of Atonement, truly the Day of Judgment. All night long the guns were shelling the city."
Initial Anti-Jewish Measures
In November, the first anti-Jewish decrees were issued, such as the introduction of a white armband with a blue Star of David (Magen David) on it to be worn by all Jews; the requirement of signs identifying Jewish shops and enterprises; the order to hand in radios; a ban on train travel; and so on. The hardest blows came with the decrees and regulations on economic affairs. On October 17, the district governor, Ludwig Fisher, issued a decree prohibiting non-Jews from buying or leasing Jewish enterprises without obtaining a special permit for this purpose (a Jewish enterprise was defined as any enterprise in which Jews had a share of more than 25 percent). The Jews were not permitted to reopen their schools, and for a while they were also barred from attending prayer services. The restoration of prewar institutions and organizations was strictly prohibited; even a small group of Jews was not allowed to meet without a permit. In place of the very many institutions of different kinds that had existed in the past, only two frameworks were allowed to function: the Judenrat and the welfare institutions.
Forced Labor
In the course of time, it appeared that the random seizure of Jews for forced labor by the Germans would be replaced by an orderly procedure. The Judenrat proposed to the Germans that it would provide them with a fixed quota of men for work, in place of the haphazard kidnappings that had brought Jewish life to a total standstill. According to this arrangement, every Jew was assigned a fixed number of days per month for forced labor. As a result, the Judenrat, which did not have the financial resources to cover the wages of the forced laborers, was in financial straits at all times.
Welfare
The financial base for welfare and mutual help consisted of funds that had been accumulated by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (known as the Joint); these amounted to substantial sums and were available for welfare purposes under the new conditions. The Joint was registered as an American institution, and at this time the Germans still had to take that fact into consideration. The Joint took all the existing welfare institutions under its wing. Its representation in Poland, based in Warsaw, included a group of devoted and talented people who demonstrated their ability, courage, and dedication even during the war and the existence of the ghetto. Outstanding among them was Yitzhak Gitterman, who for years had been the moving spirit in the Joint's projects and activities, and the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who was to have a hand in many and varied activities during the war and in the underground.
The House Committees
Important instruments of Jewish self-help, directed by Ringelblum, were the Komitetly Domowe, or House Committees. The House Committees gained in importance when the early curfew hours were introduced, by which time all the tenants had to be in their homes; as a result, the ties among the tenants were strengthened. The Committees were staffed by volunteer activists, who developed into an important local leadership group.
The Establishment of the Ghetto
On November 16, 1940, the ghetto in Warsaw was sealed off, and thousands of Jews who had left their remaining belongings on the other side of the wall no longer had access to them. The Germans had planned for 113,000 Poles to be evacuated from their homes and resettled elsewhere, and for 138,000 Jews to take their place. As soon as the ghetto was set up, a flow of refugees converged upon it. Some 30 percent of the population of Warsaw was being packed into 2.4 percent of the city's area. According to German statistics, the density of population in the ghetto was 6-7 people to a room. The apartment buildings in the ghetto area were in a poor state and lacked sanitary facilities, and there were no lawns or trees in sight. Of Warsaw's 1,800 streets, no more than 73 were assigned to the ghetto. The ghetto wall was 11.5 feet (3.5 m) high and topped by barbed wire. Two thousand Warsaw Jews who had been converted to Christianity were also put into the ghetto, and one church was left open, under a priest of Jewish parentage, who, with the rest of his flock, was regarded as Jewish under the racist laws. The Nazis did not use the term "ghetto," instead referring to it as the "Jewish quarter" (Judische Wohnbezirk). The ghetto cut the Jews off from the rest of the world and put an end to any remaining business ties with Poles.
Statistics Reflecting Life in the Ghetto
The number of persons employed by the Judenrat increased rapidly, and a 1,000-man Jewish police force (Judischer Ordnungsdienst) was formed. Eventually, the police force was increased to 2,000. At its maximum size, the Judenrat staff consisted of 6,000 persons, compared to the 530 employed by the Jewish Community Council before the war. The daily food ration allocated to the Warsaw Jews consisted of 181 calories - about 25 percent of the Polish rations, and 8 percent of the nutritional value of the food that the Germans received for their official ration coupons. In November 1940, the month the ghetto was sealed off, there were 445 deaths in the ghetto. The number of deaths thereafter rose rapidly: in January 1941, to 898; in April, to 2,061; in June, to 4,290; and in August, to 5,560. The last number was the highest monthly figure, which fluctuated thereafter between 4,000-5,000 for as long as the ghetto existed. A substantial drop was registered in May 1942, at the time of the great deportation, when 3,636 deaths were recorded.
Pauperization and Starvation
The pauperization of the inmates proceeded at an ever-growing rate, with more and more people becoming completely penniless, even to the point of starving to death. One of the diarists, Stefan Ernst, made the following entry, at a time when the liquidation of the ghetto was drawing near: "The ghetto contains 20,000, maybe 30,000, persons who have enough to eat, and these are the social elite; at the other end of the ladder are about a quarter of a million people who are all beggars, completely bereft of everything and who wage a daily struggle to postpone their death by starvation. In between these two extremes are about 200,000 people, the 'average' who somehow manage, are still able to take care of themselves, look clean and dressed, and their bellies are not swollen from hunger." Sixty-five thousand persons in the ghetto had jobs - 55,000 of them drawing wages, and the others self-employed. The same source put the number of people with no means of support of any kind at over 200,000.
Economic Life
The ghetto's ties with the outside world were handled by the Transferstelle (Transfer Office), a German authority that was in charge of the traffic of goods into and out of the ghetto. In June 1941, 333,000 zlotys (about $3,330) worth of items manufactured in the ghetto passed through official channels. In the following months, the monthly average was 500,000 zlotys ($5,000), whereas the clandestine production, as calculated by an economist in the ghetto, amounted to approximately 10 million zlotys (about $100,000) in that same period. For two categories alone - carpentry work and brush manufacture - goods in the amount of 7-8 million zlotys ($70,000-$80,000) were manufactured illegally. The food smuggled into the ghetto, according to the quantity estimates made by Czerniakow, represented 80 percent of all the products brought in. As a rule, the Jews preferred to work in places that manufactured goods for "illegal export," where they were treated better and where the pay was much higher than in the German-owned factories. Several methods were employed to carry out the smuggling operations, which never ceased as long as the ghetto remained in existence: through buildings that were connected with buildings on the "Aryan" side; across the wall, through camouflaged openings in the wall; and through subterranean canals. Smuggling on a large scale also went on through the ghetto gates, with the various policemen and guards - Germans, Poles, and Jews - involved in the conspiracy and receiving monetary bribes for letting the smuggled goods pass.
Smuggling
Smuggling on a smaller scale was also engaged in by children and women who, at the risk of their lives, crossed over to the Polish side in order to bring back some food for their families. The overall smuggling operation was a complex organization, maintaining ties with partners and accomplices on the Polish side. Each individual smuggling operation, involving dozens of packages, took no more than a few minutes, and every effort was made to leave no traces. However, hardly a day passed without people being caught and losing their lives. The casualties, however, did not deter the smuggling organization and did not bring the smuggling to even a temporary halt.
Religion, Education, and Culture in the Ghetto
Among the prohibitions that the Germans did not enforce fully was the ban on gatherings, which applied even to the privacy of homes. For a while, the ban of gathering included public prayer services. This did not prevent Jews from holding daily services in private homes, with the prayer quorum of at least ten males, while on the Jewish festivals, thousands of persons attended prayer services. In the spring of 1941, the ban was abolished and the synagogues were permitted to reopen. The major educational effort in the ghetto was an underground operation. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of clandestine classes, on different levels, were held in private homes in the ghetto. While regular schools were banned in the ghetto, the Judenrat was permitted to maintain the vocational training schools sponsored by the ORT organization.
Underground Political Parties and Youth Movements
After the occupation of Warsaw, members of youth movements and parties joined together and began to prepare plans of action. As time went on, the underground embarked upon several courses of action, one of which was to provide assistance to persons who were in the most dire straits. The Germans' lack of interest in the underground activities, and the silence on the subject observed by their Jewish agents in the ghetto, enabled the underground, prior to the spring of 1942, to engage in a broad range of activities without the Germans taking drastic steps to suppress them or to punish the participants. The underground press led to two results: It provided the news-hungry ghetto population with reliable information on international political developments and on the war fronts; and it raised political and ideological issues that encouraged polemics and discussions. All parties from the prewar Jewish political scene were also active in small groups in the ghetto underground.
Oneg Shabbat
A unique and important enterprise created in the ghetto was the Ringelblum Archive, code-named Oneg Shabbat by the underground.
Youth Movements
The Jewish youth movements and their leaders played an important role in the underground, especially in the later stages: following the great deportation, during the months of preparation for the uprising, and during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising itself. Prior to the stage in which the mass killings of Jews were launched, no basic differences existed among the political parties and the youth movements in the underground. The youth movements were more active and more daring, and engaged in a wider variety of operations, but they did not offer themselves as an alternative to the underground's political leadership or even to the Judenrat. They accepted the authority of the political parties, acknowledging them as the senior element in the underground. After the discovery of the Nazi extermination program in the East, the youth movements came to the conclusion that the Nazis had embarked upon a program of total destruction, and therefore resistance and fighting were the Jews' only remaining choices, even if they offered no prospect for survival.
The Deportations - the First Phase
The Aktion of mass deportation began on July 22, 1942, and continued until September 12. On July 23, Adam Czerniakow committed suicide. He had been ordered to provide a daily quota of 7,000 Jews for deportation, and to include children in this number. In the first ten days, 65,000 Jews were taken from the ghetto. This meant that the Germans had filled the quota they had announced. Even in this first phase, which lasted to the end of July, there were several instances of the SS, the German police, and their Ukrainian and Latvian helpers breaking into the ghetto alleys, rounding up people at random in the streets, and dragging them out of their homes without paying any heed to the personal documents in their possession or to the exempt status they had by virtue of the permits they held when the daily quota had not been met.
Deportations - the Second Phase
In the second phase, from July 31 to August 14, the German forces and their helpers took direct charge of the Aktion and the roundups, with the Jewish police in a secondary role. The German police and the auxiliary police, comprising Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians - a force of some 200 armed men - saw the Aktion through, day after day.
Deportations - the Third Phase
The third phase of the deportation began on August 15 and ended on September 6. At this point, the deportation took on the character of a total evacuation. The Germans and their helpers conducted a manhunt, combing the streets and the apartment houses, seizing every person they found at home, looking into every corner, and hardly taking note of the papers and exemptions produced by the Jews.
Deportations - the Final Phase
The final phase began on September 6. The "shops" and the Judenrat were allotted a number of permits; 35,000 such permits were issued, meaning that the Germans intended to leave in the ghetto 10 percent of its pre-deportation population. In addition to the 35,000 who had permits, another 25,000 - and perhaps a few more - managed to remain in the ghetto. This was a new ghetto - actually a form of labor camp. The Jews who were left, mostly women and young men, the last remnants of their families, went through a great psychological change. As long as the deportations were going on, the Jews had been in a constant state of tension, concentrating all their strength on one goal: to survive. When the deportations came to a halt, they had time to take stock of their situation. More and more of them said that they would not surrender to the Germans without a fight.
The Underground and the Ghetto
On July 28, representatives of the youth movements Ha-Shomer ha-Tza'ir, Dror, and Akiva held a meeting at which they decided to form the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organization; ZOB). Although the organization was founded, it had no means at its disposal and had as yet to adopt a clear policy on the way it would conduct the struggle. The first steps taken were to try to acquire weapons and to draw up a plan of action. The ZOB passed a death sentence on Joseph Szerynski, the Jewish police commander, who had been released from jail in order to help the Germans in the deportation.
The Underground after the Deportations
When the wave of deportations came to an end, the ZOB began operating under different conditions. Mordecai Anielewicz returned to the ghetto and assumed a leading role in the organization's activities. Contacts with the Armia Krajowa were established, which led to its recognition of the ZOB as a fraternal organization in league with it, and to its supplying a modest quantity of pistols to the Jewish fighters. Most of the ZOB's arms, however, were acquired by purchasing them from middlemen, who had bought or stolen them from Germans or their helpers. A profound change in public opinion had taken place in the ghetto, and as a result, underground groups of different political orientations were now willing to join the Jewish Fighting Organization. By October, the ZOB had been consolidated and enlarged, with the addition of youth movements and splinter groups of underground political parties of all persuasions, from Zionists to Communists. A ZOB command was formed, made up of representatives of the founding organizations and the fighting groups. In that period, another organization came to be formed in the ghetto, under Revisionist Zionist auspices, as with the Betar youth movement. This underground group adopted the name Zydowski Zwizek Wojskowy (Jewish Military Union; ZZW).
Deportation and Resistance in January
The second wave of deportations was launched on January 18, 1943. This time, however, the Jews who were ordered to assemble in the courtyards of their apartment houses to have their papers examined refused to comply and went into hiding. The first column that the Germans managed to round up, in the first few hours, consisting of some 1,000 persons, offered a different kind of resistance. A group of fighters, led by Mordecai Anielewicz and armed with pistols, deliberately infiltrated the column that was on its way to the Umschlag, and when the agreed-upon signal was given, the fighters stepped out of the column and engaged the German escorts in hand-to-hand fighting. The column dispersed, and news of the fight, which had taken place in the street of the central ghetto, soon became common knowledge. The fact that the Aktion was halted after only a few days, and that the Germans had managed to seize no more than 10 percent of the ghetto population, was regarded, by Jews and Poles alike, as a German defeat.
The Effect of the Deportations and First Armed Clash
The deportations and other events that took place in January were to have a decisive influence on the last months of the ghetto's existence, up to April and May of 1943. The Judenrat and the Jewish police lost whatever control they still had over the ghetto. In the central part of the ghetto, it was the fighting organizations that were obeyed by the population. The ghetto as a whole was engaged in feverish preparations for the expected deportation, which all believed would be the last and final one. The general population concentrated on preparing bunkers. Groups of Jews, made up mostly of tenants of the same building, went to work on the construction of subterranean bunkers. The fighters and their commanders were under no illusion and did not believe that their fighting would lead to rescue. They were preparing for a revolt that would be a final act of protest, a last sign of life that they would send to the Jews and all of humanity in the free world.
Final Liquidation and Revolt
The final liquidation of the ghetto began on Monday, April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover. This time the deportation did not come as a surprise. The Jews had been warned of what lay ahead and they were ready.
In the first three days, street battles were fought in the ghetto. The systematic burning of the ghetto, building by building, did, however, force the fighters to abandon their positions, to take refuge in bunkers, and to go over to a different method of fighting the Germans, by making sorties in small groups of fighters and taking the Germans by surprise. In the first two nights, no German soldier was to be seen in the ghetto. The ghetto was now one great, burning torch. It was enveloped in dense smoke and permeated by stifling odors, its very air seeming to burn. The bunkers became infernos. Situated underground, with building or ruins of buildings on top, the bunkers and the air in them reached boiling point; the food was spoiled by the devastating heat; the water was warm, and it stank. The Jews inside took off their clothes, could hardly breathe or talk, and were on the verge of going mad. Even so, they would not surrender to the Germans. Under cover of darkness, they tried to move from the living hell their bunkers had become to other bunkers where conditions were slightly better - although these, too, were bound to suffer the same fate and become uninhabitable within a few days.
On May 16, SS General Juergen Stroop, commander of the SS forces, ordered to liquidate the ghetto, announced that the Grossaktion had been completed. To celebrate the victory, he ordered Warsaw's Great Synagogue, which was situated outside the ghetto, to be burned down and destroyed.
Stroop's Report
In his final report on the military campaign that he led against the ghetto revolt, Stroop provided the following data: "Of the total of 56,065 Jews who were seized, 7,000 were destroyed during the course of the Grossaktion inside the former Jewish quarter; in the deportation to T2 [the Treblinka extermination camp] 6,929 were exterminated, which adds up to 13,929 Jews destroyed. In addition to the 56,065, another 5,000 to 6,000 lost their lives in explosions and fires."
