Resistance (12 page)

Although the institution's offices moved from time to time, its most permanent location was in the building of Jewish Sciences. With its emphasis on self-help, the welfare network—unencumbered by the need to serve German masters—emerged as an alternative to the Judenrat. In some sense, this distinction was justified. The scope of the Joint's activities is detailed by a listing of its major departments: kitchens, food, housing, refugees, clothing, finances, health, social sectors, religion, youth, legal and statistical departments, and others. It employed hundreds of workers, including a core of people experienced in social work who enjoyed a certain autonomous status within this manifold organization. Unemployed artists, actors, writers, religious party activists, journalists, and the working intelligentsia, educated people with some experience in social work, were recruited into the ranks of the Self-Help personnel. In his diary, Chaim Kaplan frequently ridiculed the artists and writers and doubted their efficiency and inclination to help their own people, but he and others expressed great admiration for the initiative and devotion to the work of Self-Help. Unlike the Judenrat, which was performing an unfamiliar function under the watchful eyes of German rulers, Jewish Self-Help worked in continuity with traditional Jewish communal activities.

Emanuel Ringelblum, one of the organizers of this body and head of its social welfare department, explained the public significance of Self-Help:

 

The war presented the public with very important questions. It was necessary to put an end to the relationships based on political differences which existed before the war. There had to be a united front from the left to the right. The Nazi war against the Jews had become a war of annihilation. It was being waged against every class and level of the entire Jewish population. As far as the Nazis were concerned, there was no difference between the Zionists and the Bundists, they were equally despised ... the Jews were faced with the cardinal questions of life and death, and no factor could take upon itself the sole responsibility for such issues. Only by joining forces could we face such crucial and constant problems.

 

Through the efforts of Ringelblum and his friends, the Joint also had a covert identity as supporter of the civilian and political underground, and particularly of the pioneer youth movement, which later spearheaded armed resistance. Under the aegis of Self-Help, kitchens were set up, where the workers and most of their clientele were the starving and needy, as well as members of the youth movement or the political underground movement. Thus the kitchens, in addition to being places to eat, served as meeting places for an underground political body.

Ringelblum described a large assembly of the underground youth movement held in the building that housed the Self-Help offices. At the peak of the working day, ordinary social workers would be working side by side with those responsible for the underground archives set up by Ringelblum, who had taken on the obligation of gathering information and documenting Jewish life during the occupation.

In mid-1942, the Joint, operating without direct American support, lent financial aid to the Jewish Fighting Organization and its branches as it prepared for the uprising and rebellion. Ringelblum also had a hand in the establishment of a network of house committees, the first of which was created at the height of the September 1939 invasion. In every apartment house, a small group of individuals prepared for danger and emergencies, enemy attacks, and assisted refugees and tenants. Such committees operated in both Polish houses and Jewish houses, as well as in houses with mixed inhabitants. In most cases, these committees dispersed after the German occupation began.

Ringelblum conceived of the idea of turning the house committees into a locus of activity under the guidance of the Self-Help organization. The Self-Help organization divided the Warsaw ghetto into sectors, and committees were organized on both a sectoral and general scale. With the inhabitants forced by curfew to remain in their apartments during the long evenings, a vast opportunity developed for home activities. As a result, a local leadership emerged that was able to adjust quickly and resourcefully to changing conditions.

The backing and supervision of the Self-Help organization strengthened the house committees. Urgently improvised, the committees evolved into an institution that watched over the tenants of the houses and their situation, facilitated the relationship between families and tenants, and coped with such complex tasks as the organization of kindergartens, arrangement of cultural evenings and general meetings on the holidays.

Thanks to pressure imposed by the social department of Self-Help, those houses were in a better state and supported hostels and refuges, which were known as the refugee's "points." For a house with up to fifty inhabitants, the committee comprised five members; larger houses had seven. In April 1940 there were 778 house committees in Warsaw. Eventually, this number reached 1,518, covering more than 1,000 houses. They functioned for quite a long time, and their effect could be felt during the first and second years of the war. In the last year of the ghetto, conditions became more severe and reduced what help an individual could offer his neighbor. Frequent changes in the ghetto's borders and the expulsion of its inhabitants made the house committees unable to function.

Another organization guided by the social department of Self-Help was the
Landsmannschaft,
an association of refugees who had fled from the same cities and villages to Warsaw. Jews had been expelled from distant towns in western Poland in territories annexed by the Third Reich. Many affluent Jews arrived in Warsaw from towns such as Lodz with only hand luggage, in the hope that here they could manage better in the larger city. Other refugees had been expelled from towns and localities around the capital and forcibly evacuated to Warsaw.

In all, until the establishment of the ghetto, some ninety thousand refugees settled in Warsaw—more than one in five of the ghetto's population. The problem of their housing, food, work, and social services was the responsibility of the Judenrat and the Self-Help. In the memoirs of many refugees, one finds bitterness and many complaints about the indifference of the Warsaw Jews. In time of trouble, however, individuals tend to focus their compassion and sense of justice on their own families and fellow townsmen and less on the general population.

Refugees were housed in poor neglected cells where illness was rife. The Self-Help organized refugees into related groups, but only the more well-placed and aggressive found a niche in the Warsaw community. The majority of refugees were starving and reduced to a state of apathy and gradual acceptance of their fate.

A number of efficient and gifted personalities within the Self-Help organization confronted the problem of scarcity and suffering. During the war and the time of the ghetto, the directors saw themselves as the enlightened missionaries of salvation as long as they were dealing with local matters. Yitzhak Giterman, the most outstanding and influential of these individuals, was a native of Ukraine, and during the war he moved to Vilna and tried to sail via the Baltic Sea to Sweden to seek help for his people. He was caught in mid-sea, placed in a prisoner camp in April 1940, and returned to Warsaw, where he became the Joint's head of personnel. He devoted himself to public service, with sympathy and loyalty to the underground and, later on, to the Jewish Fighting Organization.

The Joint enjoyed official American patronage and was permitted by the U.S. government to work in Germany and the occupied countries until the United States entered the war in December 1941. In that year, the worst experienced by the Warsaw ghetto, the Joint reduced its aid to the ghetto by 40 percent. Why this American-Jewish institution lessened its assistance to the Jews of Poland during the time of their greatest need is a question we cannot answer. But as a result of that withdrawal of support, the Judenrat was forced to increase its role in social welfare. Even while it attempted to assist the most needy, the Judenrat could hardly ignore orders by the German authorities to supplement the rations of their own employees at the expense of refugees, children, and the starving.

In February and March 1941 Dr. Fritz Arlt, who was responsible for the welfare of the population as head of
Bevölkerungs-wesen und Fürsorge,
put out the first feelers to the Judenrat and self-help organizations in the ghetto. From conversations with Dr. Arlt, it appears that German authorities were planning to introduce a welfare section to assist Ukrainians and Jews as well as Poles. This approach to Jews and self-help organizations (which lacked official recognition and thus operated in a gray area between legality and illegality) was surprising, since the Jews had not been entitled to pensions or welfare services.

Both Jews and non-Jews were inclined to interpret Dr. Arlt's approach as a humane gesture by someone sensitive to their terrible distress. His motives, however, seem far from benevolent. Arlt represented the same extreme racism as the rest of his party, and he took an active part in the expulsion of Jews from the small towns and villages in the Cracow district, viewing the wretched situation of the Jews in the ghetto as convincing evidence of their racial inferiority. In fact, the willingness of German authorities to implement a welfare program that included Jews stemmed from a demand by representatives of such international institutions as the Red Cross and the Commission for Polish Relief who visited occupied Poland in 1940. These organizations promised to assist with general relief only if it included the Jews, who would also have to be represented on the local bodies responsible for its distribution. In their desire to obtain needed aid, as well as foreign currency at a low legal rate of exchange, German authorities submitted to the international demands.

In 1940 the welfare program was officially authorized under an umbrella organization called the NRO (the General Council for Welfare), headquartered in Cracow. Dr. Michael Weichert, who represented the Jewish Self-Help organization, represented the Jews on the council, along with some members of the Warsaw and Cracow Judenrats. Heading the united framework and the Polish sector were Polish aristocrats such as Janusz Radziwil and the Baron Adam Ronikier, who had had contacts with German authorities during the German occupation in World War I.

The welfare program did alleviate dire conditions in the ghetto as the Poles who headed the NRO recognized the desperate situation of the Jews and granted them a considerably larger portion of relief funds than their numbers warranted. At the same time, the Joint and the Self-Help organization remained the primary source of relief amid ever increasing distress.

As conditions continued to deteriorate, the organizations faced an insoluble dilemma in determining to whom to give aid and how much. Should they give the same ineffective pittance to all, or give more generously to the few and ensure that they, at least, had enough to survive? Emanuel Ringelblum described these doubts in his diary in May 1942:

 

Social welfare is not solving the problem. It only draws out people's existence for a longer period. The people must die in any case. It merely prolongs the suffering but there is no way out. In order to arrive at genuine results, millions of zlotys are needed monthly and these are not available. The most striking fact is that the inmates of the refugee hostels are all dying, because their food consists only of soup with a crust of rationed bread. Which poses the question of whether it would not be more useful to give the money at our disposal to a selected group from among the public activists or the intellectual elite. But the real situation is such that, firstly, even the number of intended chosen consists of too large a group and is therefore not feasible, and secondly,
there is no respite from the question of whether one may condemn the artisans, the workers and the ordinary masses, who were productive in their hometowns and villages and only in the ghetto as a result of the war, have been made into the dregs of humanity, ready for the grave. The tragic question still stands: what is to be done? To hand out tiny spoonfuls to everyone and then no one will survive, or to give handfuls [to the few] and then but a few will remain.

A
T THE BEGINNING
of the occupation, the Germans had no defined policy toward the Polish Jews. Heydrich's order of September 1939 regarding the establishment of the Judenrat did not establish a concrete plan toward the visible future, but it did articulate a two-stage policy. The first stage provided for a Jewish council (the Judenrat), the concentration of Jews from smaller localities in the major cities situated near railways, and the removal of Jews from certain branches of economic life
if
this did not have adverse effects on the wartime economy. The second stage, according to Heydrich, was a secret and final
plan (Endziel).
Some historians have linked the term
Endziel
with the final aim of the
Endlösung,
the "final solution," the complete annihilation of the Jews. However, in September 1939 there was no such far-reaching decision to kill all the Jews, and it is doubtful whether Heydrich or Himmler had already conceived of such a plan at that time. Such a plan developed over time and was fully implemented from the second half of 1941. From January 1942 onward, the total annihilation of all Jews everywhere was the announced policy of the Reich.

Heydrich's instructions in September 1939 were intended for the
Einsatzgruppen,
the mobile killing units, subordinate to the police and the SS, who accompanied the Polish administration. Ever sensitive to his status, Hans Frank, the governor-general, preferred to ignore Heydrich's instructions. The transfer of the Jews to the General Government from the western parts of Poland which had been annexed by Germany was, after a certain stage, opposed by Frank, who put a stop to some of Himmler's plans in this area.