Warsaw Ghetto

The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany in General Government during the Holocaust in World War II. In the three years of its existence, starvation, disease and deportations to concentration camps and extermination camps dropped the population of the ghetto from an estimated 450,000 to 37,000. The Warsaw Ghetto was the scene of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, one of the first mass uprisings against Nazi occupation in Europe.

Formation of the Ghetto

Plans to isolate the Jewish population of Warsaw and its nearby suburbs in a ghetto first circulated immediately after the German occupation of Poland in 1939. At the time, the German administration of the General Government had not been fully organized, and there were conflicting interests among the three major players: the civilian administration, the military, and the SS. Under these circumstances, the Jewish Council, or Judenrat, headed by Adam Czerniakow, was able to delay the establishment of the Ghetto by one year, mainly by appealing to the military to consider how Jews were a valuable labor resource.

The Warsaw Ghetto was finally established by the German Governor-General Hans Frank on October 16, 1940. At this time, the population of the Ghetto was estimated to be about 380,000 people, about 30% of the population of Warsaw. However, the size of the Ghetto was about 2.4% of the size of Warsaw. Nazis then closed off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world on November 16th that year, building a wall. During the next year and a half, Jews from smaller cities and villages were brought into the Ghetto, while diseases (especially typhoid) and starvation kept the inhabitants at about the same number. Average food rations in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw were limited to 253 kcal, compared to 669 kcal for gentile Poles and 2,613 kcal for German people.

Destruction of the Ghetto

In early 1942, the Nazis made the decision at the Wannsee conference to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The first phase of the Final Solution was Operation Reinhard, with the goal of destroying the Jews of Poland. Construction started on the Treblinka extermination camp in May of 1942, and it was completed in July, when the wholesale liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto was to begin.

On July 22, 1942, the Judenrat was informed that all Jews except those working in German factories, Jewish hospital staff, members of the Judenrat and their families, and members of the Jewish police force and their families would be "deported to the East". The Jewish police were to deliver 6,000 Jews to the Umschlagplatz train station each day, and failure to do so would result in immediate execution of some one hundred hostages, including Czerniakow's wife. After failing to persuade the Germans to change their plans, or at least spare the orphans of the Ghetto, Czerniakow killed himself on July 23, 1942, leaving behind a note, "I can no longer bear all this. My act will prove to everyone what is the right thing to do." On July 23, members of the Jewish underground met, but decided not to resist, believing that the Jews were really being sent to work camps, rather than their death.

As ordered on July 22, 1942, mass deportations of the inhabitants started; in the next 52 days (until September 21, 1942) about 300,000 people were taken to the Treblinka extermination camp. During the remaining days of July, the Jewish Ghetto Police were responsible for carrying out the deportations, a total of 64,606 Jews were transported to the death camps that month. From August onward, the Germans and their allies took a more direct role in the deportations, with over 135,000 Jews deported in August alone.

The final phase of the first mass deportation happened between September 6 and September 11, 1942, when 35,886 Jews were deported, 2,648 were shot on the spot and 60 committed suicide. After this selection approximately 55,000 to 60,000 Jews remained alive in the Ghetto, either working in German factories within the Ghetto or living in hiding.

During the next six months, what was left of several political organizations was brought together under the name ŻOB (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, Jewish Fighting Organization), headed by Mordechai Anielewicz, with 220-500 persons; another 250-450 were organized in the ŻZW (Żydowski Związek Walki, Jewish Fighting Union). The members of these groups had no illusions about the German plans and wanted to die fighting. Their armament consisted largely of handguns, homemade explosives and Molotov cocktails; the ŻZW was better armed as a result of better contacts to the Polish underground outside the ghetto.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the destruction of the Ghetto

On January 18, 1943, the first instance of armed resistance occurred when the Germans started the second expulsion of the Jews. The Jewish fighters had some success: the expulsion stopped after four days and the ŻOB and ŻZW resistance organizations took control of the Ghetto, building dozens of fighting posts and operating against Jewish collaborators. During the next three months, all inhabitants of the Ghetto prepared for what they realized would be a final struggle. The final battle started on the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943. Jewish partisans shot and threw grenades at German and allied patrols from alleyways, sewers, house windows, and even burning buildings. The Nazis responded by shelling the houses block by block and rounding up or killing any Jew they could capture. Significant resistance ended on April 23, and the uprising ended on May 16. During the fighting approximately 7,000 of the Jewish partisans were killed and 6,000 were burnt alive or gassed in bunkers. The remaining 50,000 people were sent to German death camps, mostly to Treblinka extermination camp.

Social and cultural life in the ghetto

Gueto de v.jpg Despite the enormous hardships of day-to-day life, the Judenrat and youth movements succeeded in organizing various institutions and organizations in the Ghetto to meet the various needs of the inhabitants. The major concerns were overcrowding, hunger, inactivity, and work detail. In response, the Judenrat took the bulk of the responsibility for allocating housing-with an average of seven people per room, while charitable organizations such as CENTOS organized free soup kitchens: at one point as much as two-thirds of the Ghetto's population was provided for by these soup kitchens. For a brief time, the Judenrat was also permitted to organize four elementary schools (grades 1-3) for ghetto children, but there was also an extensive underground school system run by the various youth movements, which covered all grades (often disguised as soup kitchens) and even offered university-level courses on Sundays.

The Judenrat was also responsible for the hospitals and orphanages that operated in the Ghetto. One orphanage, headed by the pediatrician and author Janusz Korczak, was run as a model democracy, called the Republic of Children. This and the other orphanages were evacuated in 1942 and their occupants and staff were sent to Treblinka.

Cultural life included a lively press in three languages (Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew), religious activity (including a church for Jews who had converted to Catholicism), and lectures, concerts, theater, and art exhibits. In many cases, the artists and performers were prominent figures in Polish cultural life during the war.

One of the most remarkable cultural efforts in the Ghetto was headed by the historian Emmanuel Ringelblum and his group Oyneg Shabbos, which collected documents by people of all ages and positions to create a social history of life in the Ghetto. In all, it is estimated that some 50,000 documents were collected, including essays on various aspects of ghetto life, diaries, memoirs, art work, underground journals, drawings, school work, posters, play bills, recipes, notes from lectures, etc. These documents were hidden in three separate batches, two of which have since been recovered and provide an invaluable insight into life in the Ghetto. Plans are now underway to find the third cache, which is believed to be buried under what is now the Chinese Embassy in Warsaw.

Commemoration

On April 22, 2002, members of the Polish Council for Christians and Jews commemorated the 59th anniversary of the 1943 anti-Nazi uprising in with visits to memorial sites connected with the city’s former Jewish quarter.

Famous Ghetto prisoners

Władysław Szpilman whose memoirs have become the film The Pianist by Roman Polański
Marcel Reich-Ranicki the most famous living literary critic in Germany
Simon Pullman conductor of the Warsaw Ghetto symphony orchestra

References

Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Houghton Mifflin, 1998, trade paperback, ISBN 0395901308, hardcover, 1994, 277 pages, ISBN 0395601991
Martin Gray, For Those I Loved, Little Brown Company, 1984, 351 pages, hardcover, ISBN 0316325767
Władysław Szpilman, The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945, 2002, ISBN 0312311354

External links

Warsaw Ghetto Liquidation
Documents and information about the Warsaw Ghetto from the Jewish Virtual Library
Warsaw Life: A detailed account of the Warsaw Ghetto
The KZ Warsaw

History of Poland (1939–1945) | World War II ghettos | History of Warsaw | Nazi Germany | Jewish Polish history

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