The Warsaw Ghetto

The Warsaw ghetto uprising, the first significant rebellion in Nazi controlled Europe, involved the struggle of a few starving, poorly armed Jews against the mighty Nazi forces.  It was a heroic event, significant to the Jews in that it changed their perception of themselves from passive victims to heroic fighters, helping to shape the policy of the fierce nation of Israel and Jews all over the world.  The event became a universal symbol of resistance and changed the way Jews were seen by non-Jewish people as well. However, prior to this notable act of resistance, an equally heroic and defiant struggle to “live” was in force in the Warsaw ghetto.  The Jews faced the increasingly cruel and harsh conditions imposed by the Nazis with ingenuity and courageously struggled to maintain their livelihood, culture and religion against insurmountable odds.   Despite increasing brutality, disease and starvation the Jewish people fought the daily battle to survive and hoped for a  future.  It was only when the future was no longer an option, and it became clear that death was inevitable, that the few remaining Jews in the Warsaw ghetto exercised their choice over how they would die, and they chose to die as heroes.      

           Persecution of the Jews was not a new phenomenon in Poland.  After fleeing from Western Europe in the fourteenth century, the Jewish refugees were welcomed by King Kasimierz the Great of Poland. He believed that the commercial skills that the Jews possessed would help him to make his Kingdom competitive with other sophisticated European nations.  But this welcoming environment did not last. The Polish clergy and the German traders, who felt threatened by the commercial success of the Jews, succeeded in creating a wave of anti-Semitism and the Jews were been banned from living in the city from 1527-1768.  In 1795, Poland was divided between the conquering nations of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Warsaw now belonged to Russia and the Jews began to migrate back to Warsaw. From the 19th century to the end of World War I, Warsaw was in the "Pale of Settlement," an area in which the Russian Jews were forced to live. Between World War I and World War II Warsaw was once again a Polish city with a thriving Jewish community with a Jewish population of approximately 375,000 mostly concentrated in the old town section of Warsaw in the Southeast. By October 1940, the effort of the Adolf Hitler’s Nazis to rid Germany and all of Europe of Jews was beginning to take shape and Nazis began to deport German Jews to conquered lands such as Poland and the Warsaw ghetto grew to approximately 450,000.[1]                                                       On January twentieth, 1941 Waldemar Schoen, head of the Department of Resettlement in the Warsaw district, delivered a speech which chronicled the development of the Warsaw ghetto. [2]  According to this source, the idea for the creation of a Jewish quarter in Warsaw was proposed in February, 1940. The city administrators objected strongly because 80 % of the artisans in the area were Jewish, and they were afraid that the formation of a ghetto would seriously disrupt the area’s economy.  Another argument was that it would be impossible to feed such a high number of Jews. The revised proposal involved a ghetto established on the outskirts of the city.  An edict issued on October 2, 1940, and signed by Dr. Fischer, the head of the Warsaw district, stated “all Poles residing in the Jewish quarter must move their domicile into the other part of the city and Jews living outside the Jewish quarter must move into the Jewish area by October 31st” taking “only refugee luggage and bed linen.” [3]  The resettlement was to be completed by November 15th as the District Medical Officer had warned of increased probability of epidemics during the winter.  In an effort to hurry things along, plans for resettlement on the outskirts of Warsaw were dropped and the ghetto was confined to the old Jewish quarter of the city.  Schoen’s report indicates that initially there were 27,000 mostly two-room apartments each of which was home to over fifteen Jews.  Gradually the twenty-two gates that allowed passage from the ghetto to the Aryan side were closed until only a few remained.  These were heavily guarded and passage was only permitted to Jews who worked as forced laborers.  According to Schoen, there were three reasons behind the establishment of the ghetto.  The first was to protect the army and general population from the disease carrying Jews.  The second was to keep the Jews from continuing to dominate Poland and Germany politically and economically.  A final reason was to put a stop to the black market which, according to Schoen, endangered the German war effort.  The establishment of the ghetto is referred to by Schoen as a “moral requirement.”[4] 

            Originally some in the Nazi hierarchy saw that the ghettos could serve an economic purpose.  Hans Frank, the governor of Poland, saw detained Jews as a source of forced labor.   He continually fought to supply the ghetto with resources that would allow the Jews to be healthy enough to work. But to the majority of the Nazi hierarchy the ghettos were merely “round up centers that would make it more convenient either to let them die in overcrowded unsanitary conditions or to annihilate them by other means."[5]  Fredrick Ubelhor, chief of Lodz district, wrote after returning  to Germany from the Lodz ghetto, the first ghetto ever established under Nazi control, "The creation of the ghetto, is of course, only a transition measure. I shall determine at what time and by what means the ghetto will be cleansed of Jews. In the end, we must burn out this Bubonic plague."[6]

            The conditions in the Jewish section of the Warsaw ghetto were very primitive. There was little water, no paved streets or electricity and inadequate sewage. The ghettos became death traps where the Jewish people died of disease and starvation. This was a calculated move, the Nazis "deliberately created unsanitary conditions which could not but spread disease.”[7] The Jews became the “dirty, diseased people driven to criminal acts in order to survive that the Nazis portrayed them to be.”[8]

            Hitler recognized that he would have to gain the support of the German people to carry out his murderous agenda and a big part of his war effort became creating and distributing anti-Semitic propaganda which was used to justify abuse of the Jews. According to Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels  "Jews are piled on top of each other, ugly figures to look at, let alone touch. The Jews are the lice of civilized humanity. One has to exterminate them somehow, otherwise they will continue to play their torturous and annoying role."[9]  Using the threat of epidemic as an excuse, the ghetto was declared a quarantine area and walled in. The Jews were sealed off from the world.  Passage outside the ghetto was forbidden, except for forced labor, no packages or goods (including mail) were permitted in or out, and food rations were systematically cut. 

            The Nazis were required to develop institutions to supervise and control this large Jewish community. According to Howard M. Sacher, “Whenever possible, the Germans utilized the dregs of Jewish society, the outcasts and criminals, for their own purposes.  In Warsaw they employed sizable numbers of Jewish policemen, the scum of Jewish life, many of them apostates, to keep order, and to inform on their fellow Jews.  The police were given uniforms, armed with whips and clubs, and permitted to swagger menacingly about the ghetto streets.”[10]  Now the Jews were subject not only to the brutality of their Nazi overseers and the Polish police force, but to the bullies within their own society.                                  The Nazis also established Jewish councils,  Judenrats, in the ghettos with the purpose of helping the Nazis control the Jewish population, acquire Jewish assets, and   deliver Jews for labor and, in the end, extermination.. The Judenrats were criticized for being puppets of the Nazis. They consisted of the powerful and well-to-do and the Nazis exploited this class difference by granting the council and other wealthy citizens special treatment, which created social tension with the starving masses.  On April 23, 1941, Chaim Kaplan, an inhabitant of the ghetto,  refers to the Judenrat in his diary as “an abomination in the eyes of the Warsaw community...They are known as scoundrels and corrupt persons.” [11]Although Kaplan states that the president of the Warsaw ghetto,  Adam Czerniakow,  “is rumored to be a decent man” he and others criticize Czerniakow for not being able to control the corruption around him. 

            Czerniakow comes across in his own diary as a fair and moral man who was able to earn the respect of some Nazi officials and tried constantly to improve the situation of his people.  He wrote of his success in having schools, closed by the Nazis, reopened  September 5,  1941: “At Long last permission was given today for the opening of the elementary schools.”[12]  He constantly tried to make things more equal between social classes.  He speaks of the injustice of the Jewish council’s budget being derived principally from indirect taxation the weight of which fell mainly on the poor and his diary entry of May 26, 1940 describes his reaction to the tremendously unfair “bread tax” -- “The disgusting ordinance voted on with a heavy heart.  I am taking it to the authorities tomorrow.”[13] Czerniakow continually proposed measures that would make things more fair and was frequently voted down by the council but occasionally he was successful.  On May 16, 1941, he pushed through a proposal that “30,000 well to do people be deprived of their ration cards in order that the food might be redistributed among the poor.”[14]

             Czerniakow’s tremendous conflict at being placed in such a lose-lose situation is made clear when he asks himself,  “Have I the strength to maintain a decent level of behavior?”[15]  He had such a high standard of ethics that he could not understand the failure of his fellow Jews to maintain rationality and civility in the face of such horrendous conditions and this is part of the reason that he never considered violence as an option.  When the order for the Final Solution was delivered, Czerniakow struggled to maintain exemptions for as many as he could.  On July 22, 1941, he writes, “For the time being my wife was free, but if deportation was impeded in any way she would be the first one to be shot as a hostage.”[16]  The next day’s entry was his last: “It is three o’clock, so far 4,000 are ready to go.  The orders are there must be 9,000 by four o’clock.”[17]  Overwhelmed with the task of deciding who would live and who would die, Czerniakow decided to commit suicide.  Even this act was controversial; some thought it to be an act of courage, others thought it to be an act of cowardice. 

            The first act of resistance by the Jews did not involve violence, it was the simple

act of act of survival. 

“One of the most surprising side-effects of this war is the clinging to life, the almost total absence of suicides.  People die in great numbers of starvation, the typhus epidemic or dysentery, they are tortured and murdered by the Germans in great numbers, but they do not escape from life by their own desire.  On the contrary, they are tied to a life by all their senses, they want to live at any price and to survive the war.”[18] 

This clinging to life took many forms.  When the Germans ordered the majority of schools to close, primary and secondary schools were secretly set up to educate 50,000 children.  Many university-level and post-graduate courses were offered, particularly in areas helpful to the community such as medicine and chemistry.  Czerniakow reports, “At 12, I spoke at the ceremony marking the opening of a course for pharmacists.”[19] Agricultural courses were also set up to help the Jewish people, the majority of whom had been artisans, to develop their own food source.  Cultural life thrived in theater, art, creative writing and many other forms.  On August 30, 1941, Czerniakow writes, “I took part in the opening of a graphic arts show at Sienna Street.  I authorized a gift of 50 zlotys to be distributed to the best boys and girls.”[20]           

            On January 20, 1940 all religious establishments were ordered closed and public prayer was forbidden, but this did not stop the Jews from practicing their religion.  Minyans, small groups of observant Jews, continued to gather.  In April 1943, on the eve of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the Jewish people observed  Passover with the traditional seder knowing full well that the Nazis planned to clear the ghetto the following day. 

            Although the Nazis forbade the Jews from publishing newspapers, the Jews published many underground newspapers devoted to religious and political ideas.  In order to accomplish this the people involved put their lives and the lives of others in great danger.  On the night of April 17, 1942, “the night of blood,” fifty-one Jews were shot in retaliation for the appearance of underground newspapers in the ghetto.[21]  Documentation of the times was tremendously important to the Jews. A group calling itself the “Oneg Shabbat” (because they met in secrecy every Saturday) had committed itself to documenting the problems and events of Jewish life in the ghetto.  This group consisted of writers, teachers, Rabbis and historians, and was lead by Dr. Emmanuel Ringelblum.  “They had no illusions.  Their only hope was that the memory of the Warsaw ghetto would endure.”[22]  Just before the ghetto’s destruction this archive was placed in three milk cans and buried around Warsaw.  The Ringelblum milk cans were not discovered until 1946.                                                                                                       The Jews showed tremendous ingenuity and creativity. Numerous factories in the ghetto were established from virtually nothing.  Old cement factories were turned into bread factories that operated in secrecy and supplied food for charitable agencies to distribute.  “Wherever there was a demand ghetto workers filled the niche.”[23]  Two thousand families went into the brush industry producing 25,000 brushes a day and smuggling them out of the ghetto for distribution.  Plumbers who could not work made hospital beds out of pipes and sold them through middlemen to the Nazi army itself. New technologies were developed and materials were creatively substituted.  For example contraceptives were commonly made from babies’ pacifiers.[24]   To function, these industries smuggled in raw materials from the Aryan side of Warsaw, manufactured goods within the ghetto’s walls, and then smuggled the finished products back out. 

            Smuggling was one of the most essential and dangerous parts of life in the ghetto and it began at the very moment the ghetto was created.  It accounted for 80 % of the food that came into the ghetto.[25]  This was crucial given the inadequate rations supplied by the Nazis. There was well organized wholesale smuggling between Jews and Poles, smuggling by the Jewish workers who left the ghetto to work on the Aryan side, and smuggling by hundreds of women and children who left the ghetto and risked their lives to bring food back to their families.  This last group faced the greatest danger.  Individuals who were caught faced execution and torture, often public as a warning to others.  Despite this, “the smuggling never stopped for a moment.  When the streets were still slippery with blood that had been spilled, other smugglers set out as soon as the candles had signaled the way was clear.”[26]       

            The Nazis noted that the Jews were outliving their predicted life expectancy and got to work on a quicker solution to the “Jewish problem”  Deportations of Jews to the death camps began and rumors of them reached the ghetto. The attitude of survival began to fade among the Jews.  On July 8th of 1942 Czerniakow writes “Many people hold a grudge against me for organizing play activity for the children...I am reminded of a film: a ship is sinking and the captain, to raise the spirits of the passengers, orders the orchestra to play...I had made up my mind to emulate the captain.”[27] Many in the ghetto began to call for forceful resistance.    

             The idea of armed resistance was not a new idea. It had existed from the beginning especially among some of the young men and women of the ghetto, but many obstacles had kept it from being set in motion.  Persecution was not new to the Jews and in the past, knowing they would sacrifice the lives of many individuals, the Jews focused on the survival of their culture as a whole.  Throughout history their strategy was to always appear worthy, appeal rationally for justice, and to avoid making conflict any worse.  Violence was rarely part of this strategy which dates back to Moses’s appeal to the Pharaoh.  But this position reflects more than just a strategy.  It is a deeply held belief of many Jews that under the worst circumstance they must follow God’s commandments and they will be delivered in the end. It is  taught in the Torah that inhumanity must be met with great humanity.[28] Czerniakow and many of the older Jews with power in the ghetto believed that this was the best way to deal with the Nazis and “being confronted by the murderous Nazis the Jews fell back in vain on their traditional strategies of coping with the oppressor; they did not realize they were not dealing with a traditional oppressor but with an exterminator pure and simple.”[29]                                                                        It must be noted as well that the Nazis went to great lengths to make the Jews believe that survival was a possibility, “fake postcards from deportees and surviving relatives in the ghettos painted a picture of a good life in the resettled areas.”[30]  The Jews had been cut off from the outside world so they, particularly those who did not want to believe the worst, were taken in by this charade. The idea of armed resistance only took hold when rumors of the death camps begin to filter back to the ghetto.

            Another major obstacle facing armed resistance was the Nazi principal of “collective responsibility.”  In response to every act of resistance,  the Nazis would retaliate against large numbers of Jews.  Frequently retaliation involved public execution. In response to small transgressions, the Nazi’s would round up many Jews and torture and or execute them in a public setting.  This clearly persuaded the Judenrat to discourage resistance as seen in Czerniakow’s diary entry on July 8, 1941 when he wrote “In spite of all harassment, acts of cruelty, threats...not  irresponsible act has been recorded that could have seriously effected the Jewish population.”[31]                                                                                                             Even those Jews who were inclined to active resistance faced obstacles.  The youth had been so demoralized by the summer of 1942 that the first task facing the resistance leaders was to overcome their depression: “These times are marked by the total loss of will to fight amongst the Jews, it is the adolescent youth that must become the strong hold and tower of the Jewish spirit of freedom.”[32]  To reawaken this spirit instructors, who served not only educators but also recruiting officers who drew students into the resistance, were placed in many living quarters.  The resistance also had to overcome disagreements among factions who had different agendas and the resistance movement was sometimes paralyzed when the  groups could not come to an agreement.  The failure of those groups who favored violent action and those that did not to compromise led to inaction in the summer of 1942 when the first 300,000 Jews were deported to death camps.  In the end the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), lead by twenty-four year old Mordecai Anielewicz, united the others. By the fall of 1942 the ZOB had superseded the Judenrat as the main authority among the remaining Jews in the ghetto.  Marc Lichtenbaum, the new president of the Judenrat, admitted to German officials “I have no power in the ghetto; another government rules here” referring to the ZOB.[33]       

            Once in power the ZOB prepared for battle asking “to die with honor-that is with arms in their hands.”[34]  The greatest obstacle they faced was the lack of support from the Polish underground that they counted on for their weapons.  The Polish Underground noted in a report on the problems facing the Jewish resistance “in December 1942, after insistent request the Jewish Fighting Organization received 10 revolvers and a limited amount of ammunition...these weapons were in very poor condition and only a part were fit for use...it therefore demanded incomparably more help...received another 10 revolvers.”[35] ThePolish underground was also asked to help remaining Jews reach safety and failed to respond. According to their own documentation, the Polish Underground was capable of accomplishing this.[36]  The Polish underground largely  abandoned Jewish resistance, which has been attributed to the fact that the majority of Poles were not opposed to having a Judenfrei (free of Jews) homeland.[37]  In addition, the governments of many nations stood by passively. According Ringelbaum, “It is said that the martyrdom of the first Christians who were tortured by the Romans and thrown to the beasts in their circuses, was what brought the emptied hearts of the intelligentsia and the masses nearer to Christianity while the torture and martyrdom of generations of Jews in the Diaspora and its influence on the spirituality and hearts of the Christian nations was less than nil.”[38] A major example of the worlds indifference is the fact that the Soviets were so close and perfectly aware of what was going on yet they did not lend a helping hand to the fighting Jews.

            Despite these huge obstacles, the ZOB mobilized the remaining Jewish population, which numbered approximately 75,000, and made ready to fight.  They operated in small groups called “fours” and “fives,”  much like today’s terrorists cells.  This way they would not attract much attention or risk many lives if a few members were caught.[39]  In January 1943 the ZOB circulated a pamphlet calling for action, “We are rising up for war...awake and fight.”[40]  Their first acts were not against the Nazi’s but against Jewish collaborators. On January 18, 1943, as the second deportation began, the Nazis met their first real opposition from the Jews. Himmler visited the ghetto in January and concluded that Jewish lives were no longer worth supporting.  He issued the order for the destruction of the ghetto.

.           On April 19, 1943, SS Major General Jurgen Stroop set up outside of the ghetto and prepared to carry out the orders.  The ZOB, already warned of the action, was ready and waged a heated battle armed with a few pistols and Molotov cocktails.  The Germans were forced to retreat.  Stroop reported back to his superiors “We observed that Jews and bandits, despite the danger of being burned alive, preferred to return to the flame rather than be caught by us.”[41]  The ZOB were true to their slogan “all are ready to die as human beings.” [42] In his last letter Mordecai Anielewicz wrote on April 23: “It is impossible to put into words what we have been through.  One thing is clear, what happened exceeded our boldest dreams.  The Germans ran twice from the ghetto...I feel that great things are happening and what we dared do is of great, enormous importance.”[43]  Despite the importance of the battle, it was brutal for the people who took part, according to resistance fighter Marek Edelman, who wrote in his diary from his hiding place in a bunker during the last days of the uprising: “One can think of nothing but a breath of air,  The heat in the bunker is unbearable...From time to time there is shouting.  Tensions, nervousness without end... We have not eaten now for twenty-four hours...” [44] Surpassingly, the Jews held off the mighty Nazi army for three weeks. The battle raged until ZOB headquarters was surrounded on May 8, 1943.  Eighty percent of the resistance fighters, including their leader, died.  Some were killed by the Nazis and others chose to commit suicide.  By May 16, 1943, the Nazis were victorious, what had been a home to 450,000 Jews only two years ago was now empty, in ruins and sixty miles away its remaining inhabitants had been gassed and cremated within hours of their arrival at Treblinka.    

            The story of the rebellion in Warsaw and the heroic people who led it became legendary and the memory lives on in the minds of Jews and non-Jews.  It changed forever the world’s view of the Jews and more importantly, the view Jews held of themselves: “Does the self-defense, the effort to sell their lives dearly, to stand up for peoples’ honor, isolated and tortured, does all this not merit the sympathy of the world?  We have not yet been tried in this manner, we have not yet trod the path of heroism, except during the last days of Warsaw, in the last hours of the surviving remnant in the Polish ghettos.  And now our hearts are beginning to beat on hearing of the splendid heroism and the terrible depression is beginning to vanish.”[45] But prior to the uprising, the Jews were not passive helpless victims as they are sometimes described. They were persistent and extremely creative under horrendous conditions. As heroic as their final battle was, the daily battle fought by the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto to hold on to their culture, religion, family, and lives despite tremendous odds was equally courageous.