Resistance (14 page)

 

The Judenrat acted as a clearing-house for those seeking new homes, but most contacts were made independently amid great confusion, with every interested party exploiting the situation. Czerniakow noted in one characteristically terse sentence that he had been left without an apartment, and Ludwik Landau wrote on October 19, 1940, "Practically speaking, the transfer of busineses or residences has only affected the more affluent inhabitants ... hence running after an apartment for days on end is so physically debilitating and nerve-wracking, that it does not help anything."

Polish residents objected to the establishment of the ghetto, but once the matter was settled, a number of Poles appealed to the Germans to adjust the ghetto's boundaries, according to their interests. Some families acquired a place to live after considerable effort, only to find that a change in the ghetto borders left them again without a roof over their heads.

On October 30, the date by which all moving had to be finalized, a diarist wrote:

 

These are the last days for evacuating Jewish apartments in the Aryan quarters and finding a new one in the ghetto. The poor Jews are wandering about the outskirts of Warsaw. The wealthier did not wait until the last moment and managed in advance to find some hovel among their fellow sufferers, but the poor, who are thought to be gone, could not leave their homes for lack of means. They awaited some miracle, as the Jews are wont to do. In the face of such enormous troubles, all the energy they devote to earning a livelihood at which they excel, was paralyzed. Fatalism and submission to their fate has replaced these qualities.

 

Thus, October 31 found many without a place to live. The Germans announced that out of consideration for the Jews' desire to obey orders, the final date would be extended to November 15.

Jews were troubled by what character the ghetto would assume. Would it be an open ghetto or a closed one? Jews who had shops or small workshops still operating on the Polish side wondered whether to take their minimal goods and working tools to the ghetto in case it should be closed off, or to hope that the ghetto would remain open, making it possible to live inside the ghetto and still earn a livelihood elsewhere. During the final days, rumors spread about postponement of the ghetto plans or their abandonment altogether.

On November 16, 1940, the ghetto was sealed. Jews who arrived at the gates found them blocked by Polish and German police. Ringelblum observed that one could not compare this with the ghetto of medieval times. Then, the ghetto was closed only at night, if it was sealed at all, and while erected by hostile decree, it did help to maintain a Jewish way of life and added to the security of the Jews. Inside the ghetto, Jews were safe and secure. By contrast, the Warsaw ghetto was a cage isolating more than 400,000 people like lepers. Conditions were beyond the inhabitants' imagination. Masses of Warsaw Jews were pushed into these crowded quarters enclosed by a wall. Apart from a few who received permission for a limited span of a few hours or days, no Jew ever went outside the walls. The only way the Jews could leave the environs of the ghetto was on the closed and dim cattle cars going to the concentration and death camps or in a coffin en route to the cemetery. Only death released them from the ghetto. Only death led to deliverance from suffering and pain.

In the beginning, official estimates placed 380,740 people in the ghetto, including 1,718 Christians who were registered as Jews on the basis of Nazi legislation. In July 1940, the governor-general issued an order defining who was a Jew according to the Nuremberg racial laws of 193$, which stated that a person was a Jew if he was a believer in the Jewish faith, if he identified himself as a Jew, if he had three grandparents who were wholly Jewish, or if he or his parents had converted to Christianity and he was married to a Jew. Until then, whoever claimed to be Christian was not considered a Jew. Still, there were only a few instances of conversion among the Jews in order to avert their fate.

Yet, from the very beginning of the occupation in September 1939, the Germans issued racial decrees. For instance, when the order was issued that Jews wear a Star of David, Christians of Jewish origin were ordered to comply. Through the intercession of some of the leading converted individuals and their families, the heads of the senior welfare institution of the General Government asked German authorities to exempt Polish Christian› of Jewish origin, who had social and cultural rights. The Germans asked for a list of the candidates to be released from this decree. This list was submitted, and then the request was turned down. With the establishment of the ghetto in October 1940, German trucks sought out those who appeared on the list and they were forced to move to the ghetto. Still, some Jews and scores of assimilated Jewish families managed to remain in the Polish sector disguised as Poles.

Explanations vary as to what motivated local German authorities to set up a sealed ghetto in Warsaw. The Germans themselves later said that the ghetto was a response to the threat of disease, especially the typhus epidemic. Ludwik Hirschfeld, an outstanding epidemiologist, responded by noting ironically that there was no surer way of spreading an epidemic than by confining masses of people together, adding that it was doubtful that one could stop an epidemic from spreading beyond the ghetto.

There is every reason to believe that the authorities exploited health warnings to carry out a plan. At any rate, when Fischer first referred to setting up a ghetto during his meeting with Frank, there were no signs of an epidemic and matters of health were not discussed as a possible reason. Nor was there any epidemic when Batz announced the implementation of the ghetto.

The Warsaw ghetto was not the first of its kind; it was merely the largest. The Lodz ghetto, established in May 1940, preceded the Warsaw ghetto. Lodz was not included in the General Government, but was the second largest city, and contained the second largest Jewish community, in interwar Poland. It is possible that the Germans did not consider it desirable that the closed ghetto in Lodz should be the only one in the annexed territories and the Warthegau region. However, the man who ordered the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto provided his own explanation. Governor Ludwig Fischer stated in a comprehensive biannual report dated September 1941, under the heading "The Jewish Quarter in Warsaw":

 

In view of the large number of Jews to be found in Warsaw, at the very beginning of German rule, thought was being given to concentrating the Jews in the Jewish quarter. The intention was, first and foremost, to separate the Jews from the Aryan surroundings and from general political considerations of our world-view
[Weltanschauung
]. There were in addition other important reasons, health-wise and economic ... in general, 700 ethnic Germans [
Volksdeutsch],
113,000 Poles and 138,000 Jews were evacuated, making 251,000 in all. In this fashion, 11,567 Jewish apartments in the Jewish quarter and some 13,800 Jewish apartments in other parts of the city were made available. The transfer was made in the course of some six weeks in a tremendous organizational undertaking. The quarter was an area of 403 hectares, with a population of 450,000 to 500,000 Jews living in an unusually crowded state. A calculation has been made that 108,000 Jews live in one square kilometer of the quarter, as compared with 38,000 per square kilometer in the residential area of Warsaw, which is also above average.

 

During the first months, life in the ghetto seemed like a form of imprisonment. Jews felt that the ghetto was a return to medieval times and an offense to the honor and person of the Jew. Ironically enough, some Jews believed at the beginning that the walls of the ghetto could create a form of Jewish immunity against attacks and robbery from outside. This naive expectation was revealed quickly as illusory. The ghetto was an enclave of fragmented streets inhabited by people whose lives had been shattered. After further retrenchment in the ghetto's layout, two masses of streets and houses were formed, linked by a narrow bridge. Chlodna Street was a strange mixture: the houses and the sidewalks were included in the ghetto, but the road itself and traffic traveling on it were considered "Aryan." The Aryan road and Jewish sidewalks were separated by wooden fences. The entire length of the ghetto could be passed through in forty minutes. The ghetto was encircled by a wall two and a half meters high, topped by barbed wire. The wall had twenty-two gates, reduced in the course of time to thirteen, and at the final stage of the ghetto's existence, to only four. At the gates stood the guards of three police forces: German, Polish, and Jewish. Every person, every wagon, and every vehicle that approached was thoroughly searched. Crowded in the narrow streets of the ghetto lived a population equal to that of a city in other parts of the world: 26,ooo people lived in Pawia Street, 20,000 in Mila Street, and 20,000 in Gesia Street. The sidewalks were filled with masses of people whose threadbare clothing reeked with the smell of rotting foodstuffs and human sweat. The odor of waste and refuse filled the air. In the ghetto, it was said that a day felt like a month and that a month felt like years. Open spaces, freedom, the sight of a flower, greenery, of trees and the sound of birds, all were abstract ideas in another corner of the earth—far off and unattainable. In a contemporary memoir, one writer said:

 

Our ghetto was not an incarceration for a year or two, the ghetto is not an expiation for a crime. In the course of time, a sort of permanent reality has been woven whose very essence was the ghetto. In the ghetto, a mother is trying to explain to her child the concept of distance. Distance, she says, "is more than our Leszno Street. It is an open field, and a field is a large area on which the grass grows, or ears of corn, and when one is standing in its midst, one does not see its beginning or its end. Distance is so large and open and empty that the sky and the earth meet there." A child cannot imagine its wonderful description. "Distance," continues the mother, "is a long journey, a continuous journey for many hours and sometimes for days and nights, in a train or a car, or perhaps aboard an airplane which flies through the air like a bird and moves more swiftly than the eye can follow. The railway train breathes and puffs and swallows lots of coal, the same coal that we lack to heat our room. And a ship is a boat, like the ones pictured in your book, but is real and the sea is a huge and real bath where the waves rise and fall in an endless game. And these forests are trees, trees like those in Karmelicka Street and Nowolipie, so many trees that one cannot count them. No, the trees are not like the single trees here. They are strong and upright, with crowns of green leaves, and the forest is full of such trees as far as the eye can see and full of leaves and bushes and the song of the birds. No, even if we multiply the number of trees in Karmelicka by many thousands, we would still not have a forest. For a forest is something else and the trees here are like birds in a cage, while in the forest they breathe freely. Freedom, yes, what is freedom."

 

In 1941 an underground Polish paper printed an impression of the ghetto as seen from the outside:

 

The ghetto was set up in the most crowded quarter. It was laid out in such a fashion that it has neither a park, nor does it touch on the Vistula at any point, and the only area covered with trees is the cemetery. The density cannot be described. The average occupancy of a room is six souls and sometimes the number reaches twenty. According to estimates of the population department, there are now living in Warsaw on every hectare, some 70 individuals, and in the ghetto—1,100 ... Since January 1941, Jews from the cities and villages in the Warsaw district have been evacuated to the densely populated and famished ghetto. The population of the ghetto reached 500,000. Due to the increasing crowdedness, such undescribably unhealthy conditions were created that cannot be put in writing, hunger and distress abound. The streets are full of masses of people moving about aimlessly, many are pale and feeble. Alongside the walls, many beggars are sitting or lying around and it is not an uncommon sight to witness people collapsing from starvation. Every day, the asylum gathers up dozens of abandoned babies. Some die in the streets. Contagious disease is rife, particularly tuberculosis.

 

The ghetto was frequently called "a coffin," but it also had a particular tempo of its own. It had its own culture and political underground. The well-known leader of the religious Zionists, Rabbi Yitzhak Nissenbaum, tried to provide a religious understanding of life and duty within the ghetto. He introduced the concept of
kiddush hahayim,
"the sanctity of life," in place of the more common
kiddush hashem,
the sanctification of God's name, the traditional term for martyrdom used by the Jewish community. Nissenbaum's justification: During the Middle Ages, the enemies of the Jews wanted to destroy their spiritual world, intending in the main to convert them to Christianity. The Nazis were trying to annihilate the Jewish people. Therefore, if in the past it was the Jews' primary duty to sacrifice their lives rather than renounce their beliefs, in the ghetto it was now their sacred obligation to struggle for their physical survival. Survival itself became a sanctified response to the Nazis. Jews within the ghetto were less philosophical, less religious. Nevertheless, they intuitively understood Nissenbaum's point. Survival was the common mission. Residents spoke of
überleben
, which could be translated as "to overcome and stay alive" and to arrive eventually at a release from sorrows.

Some Orthodox Jews continued to abide by the kosher dietary laws, and were not prepared to forgo praying in a minyan (a quorum of ten men) when praying together with a group of more than ten was prohibited. For all that, the wartime Jew of the ghetto was most unlike his forebears, as the conditions of the ghetto did little to strengthen his religious beliefs. Families struggled to maintain traditions even as scarcity and distress contributed to human frailty. In the history of the ghetto, however, there was but one instance of the murder of a man for his food or money. As long as there was a spark of normality hidden in the darkness of the ghetto, trust in the spiritual world endured.