Jewish Warsaw

By the time Hitler chose to expand Germany’s territories under the odious excuse of providing ‘living space’ for the German people Warsaw’s Jewish population numbered 350,000, and was expanding at such a rate that, in the words of historian Norman Davies,‘seemed to be heading for an absolute majority’. Neither pogroms nor the occasional boycott on Jewish businesses deterred Jews from settling in the Polish capital and only New York could boast a larger Jewish community. Yet within six years of occupation Warsaw’s thriving Jewish scene was all but wiped from the map, over 90% perishing either in the Ghetto that would imprison them or the gas
chambers of Treblinka. To trace Warsaw’s Jewish history one must track back to the 14th century. Although anti-semitism was by no means rare Poland was seen as a relative safe haven by many Jews, and it continued to draw in settlers forced into flight by more discriminatory regimes elsewhere. By the inter-war years the Jewish population had made significant contributions to the social, political and cultural fabric of Poland, a contribution that would eventually be extinguished by the monstrous racial policies of the Nazis, and that today exists only in memory. When Warsaw fell following a brief yet brutal siege the city’s ancient Jewish population were damned to destruction. Originally the Nazis had earmarked the eastern suburb of Grochów to serve as a ghetto, but bureaucratic and logistical difficulties meant that by 1940 the easy option was used, and Jews were forcibly penned into an area that already housed the majority of the city’s Jews. On March 27, 1940, the Judenrat, a Jewish council answerable to the Nazis whims was ordered to build a wall around the area, and a resettlement deadline of October 15 was handed to the city’s Jews. Failure to move into the assigned area
was to be punished by death. Spanning 18 kilometres and enclosing 73 of Warsaw’s 1,800 streets the area was carved into a ‘small’ and ‘big’ ghetto, the two linked by a wooden bridge standing over ul. Chłodna (E-2). Today a small memorial wall opposite café Chłodna 25 marks this spot. From the beginning conditions were harsh; recovered Nazi files show that while ethnic Germans were granted a food allowance totalling 2,613 calories per day, Jews and other groups deemed ‘sub-human’ were expected to survive on 184 calories. Unsurprisingly a black market supported by a smuggling network ran rife, some 80% of the food in the ghetto supplied through illegal means. Still it was not enough and as the noose tightened starvation became the principal enemy. In 1941 over 100,000 died in this way, their bodies often left to rot in the streets and gutters. Of the 800 ghettos scattered around the Third Reich the Warsaw one was the largest, and also the deadliest. At its zenith the approximately 380,000 people found themselves squashed into the ghetto, with an average of eight people to a room. Yet amid this sea of suffering a remarkable social scene flourished, as proved by the meticulous ghetto diaries kept by Emanuel Ringelblum. Although murdered by the Nazis in 1944 after his hiding place was discovered Ringelblum, an intellectual and social activist, kept volumes of notes documenting the day-to-day life of ghetto inhabitants. Ten metal boxes of his archives were discovered in the ruins of the city in 1946, and are today regarded as the definitive resource of this period in Jewish history. It is from his painstaking notes we learn of the soup kitchens and charities that existed, of the musical concerts and cabarets and the fifty or so underground newspapers that circulated amongst the masses. The illusion of a self-contained cruel but surviving parallel world was shattered in 1942 when the Germans re-ignited their interest in the total annihilation of the Jews. The Wansee Conference of January 1942 rubber stamped plans for the final solution to the Jewish question’ and on July 22 the first deportations to death camps had began. Over the next few weeks around 265,000 Jews were harried to a waiting area known as Umschlagplatz, from which they were loaded into cattle wagons destined for the Treblinka gas chambers. A year later a new action to thin the ghetto was launched, and by April 1943 a final push to completely liquidate the biggest ghetto was put into swing. For too long the Jews had been limited to passive resistance, now with rumours circulating about death camps a band of ill-equipped insurgents faced up to the full weight of the Nazi military machine. Led by Mordechaj Anielewicz the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) launched what would be recorded as the Ghetto Uprising on April 19, 1943. Numbering a few hundred the Jewish fighters continued their dogged resistance against elite German and Ukrainian forces, but faced with heavy artillery and even Stuka Dive Bombers it was to be a doomed struggle. Vicious street-tostreet, house-to-house battles ensued, insurgents often burnt out of their boltholes with flamethrowers and gas. On May 8 German forces surrounded the principal command post of the rebels on ul. Miła 18. Rather than face capture Anielewicz and his cabal opted for mass suicide, a fate also chosen by Szmul Zygielblum, a Jewish member of the Polish Government-in-exile based in London. Addressing allied leaders in his final note Zygielblum rounded on their perceived indifference towards the fate of Poland’s Jews before taking his own life. By May 16 the Uprising was over, with German commander Jurgen Stroop moved to announce in his report to his superiors ‘The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence’. With the fighting over the rest of the ghetto was levelled, and its inmates either sent to Treblinka or assigned to Gęsiówka (ul. Gęsia), a small concentration camp where their duties would involve clearing the rubble and ruins that formerly constituted the ghetto. It is estimated that some 15,000 Jews survived the war hiding out on the Aryan side, but with the war over and the vitriolic anti-Zionist policies of the post-war government the majority sought a new life in Israel. Today Warsaw’s Jewish population is estimated to stand at 2,000 and efforts are underway to gradually reintroduce the city’s hollowed out Jewish culture.