Resistance (19 page)

Lewartowski was one of the oldest Communists in the Bialystok ghetto when he was sent to lead the new branch being organized in the Warsaw ghetto, a city he knew well from his secret activities in the party. In his youth, Lewartowski had belonged to the Left Po'alei Zion and was acquainted with many of its activists. Lewartowski was a warm and popular man with deeply embedded Jewish roots. He did not succeed in establishing a wide base of Communist cells in the ghetto, but he did manage to create an intense and close relationship with the members of the Zionist youth movements.

Pinkus Kartin was quite different. He hailed from Luck in western Ukraine and had been a member of the Communist party since adolescence. Like many others, he paid for his beliefs and his attachment to the party with years of imprisonment in interwar Poland. He volunteered for the Dombrowski Brigade and fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. At the end of that war, he escaped to France, where he was active in the Party. He was eventually returned to the Soviet Union as part of an agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union to exchange civilians. There he joined the circles of Polish immigrants and went through a course for training cadres of Party activists, and in 1941 he was parachuted into Poland with the first group of activists to launch and lead the rehabilitated Communist party.

Kartin's obvious Jewish features prevented his fulfilling this role among the Polish public. For a considerable time, he was obliged to hide in the apartment of a Polish shoemaker until it was decided to send him to the Warsaw ghetto to organize a Communist branch inside the ghetto. His military past and lively personality charmed the members of the youth movements, who were sorely in need of military training and experience. This mature and experienced figure fired their imaginations and aroused their expectations.

The fighting unit of the anti-fascist bloc was divided into groups of five, composed mostly of members of the youth movements. A few candidates from outside the organized bodies were also enlisted after their background had been carefully checked and they had shown willingness to become part of a military organization. The groups met weekly in private dwellings to be trained in guerrilla tactics and later learned how to use the only available pistol, which the anti-fascist bloc had smuggled into the ghetto.

The organization was at best amateurish. The "army trainers" were youth movement veterans whose military knowledge was acquired from books or learned from Kartin. During a secret parade of the groups in Leszno Street, the organization's men were ordered to march up and down the street in pairs or trios at a certain hour. This exercise by a force of about five hundred was evidently intended to display its strength to the bloc commanders, but group members discovered friends and acquaintances and kept signaling to each other in an undisciplined and unprofessional manner.

The youth movements mistakenly assumed that the tremendous power of the Red Army stood behind the Communists. But it soon became clear that the PPR had no direct contact with the Soviet Union and the Red Army, nor could it expect any support from these sources. Moreover, the newly formed Communist party was received with little approval and explicit antagonism by many in the Polish community, who were in no hurry to pardon the betrayal they had suffered in the campaign of September 1939. Hence only small groups of loyal Communists and radical leftists responded to the proposal for a leftist alliance to support the struggling Soviet Union. As a result, the Communists were less than able to assist the Jews in the ghetto.

The aims of the military struggle were also in doubt. The Communists intended to prepare the young people to enter the forests to support the partisan forces. Members of the youth movements, however, viewed as paramount the need for defensive action and preparation for the struggle within the ghetto. Nothing came of the promises of materiel and training made to the youth leaders. As a result, the Communists had no young partisans in the forests, nor did they have bases ready to absorb the Jewish fighters. In May 1942 the groups of five were informed that the time had arrived to set up the first company of fighters and to leave the ghetto for the forests. A date was set for leaving, but the event, intended to be the first real military action, was canceled at the last moment, helping to bring an end to the anti-fascist bloc itself.

On May 30 three outstanding Communist activists of the ghetto, including Pinkus Kartin, were arrested. The arrests aroused fear that the Germans had tracked down the bloc, which could lead to the complete collapse of the ghetto underground. But it was subsequently learned that the arrests were linked to a wave of Communist arrests on the Polish side of Warsaw. The arrests came when ghetto activists were to meet their Polish comrades outside the ghetto. It is likely that those arrested were severely tortured before they were killed, but they betrayed no one and no further arrests were made. Yet the incident was not without its ramifications. The shock of the arrests left its mark on the ghetto underground. The bloc ceased to exist, and the Communist underground suffered a serious setback from which it never recovered.

In postwar Poland, Communist historians claimed that the Jewish Fighting Organization established during the expulsion was an extension of the Anti-fascist Bloc. But there is no basis for this assumption and its intent to give Communists the credit of having been the first to found a fighting organization. Nor did Communists actually figure in the founding of the Jewish Fighting Organization. The significance of the bloc lay in the fact that it was the first to organize a fighting body in the ghetto which united a variety of political underground groups.

Another event that alarmed the ghetto was the wave of terror in April 1942 and the ensuing murder of prominent Jews. On Friday evening, the eighteenth, which the Jews called "the bloody night," trucks filled with German soldiers and SS men entered the ghetto. The soldiers went into houses and apartments, taking some sixty men, whom they shot and left lying in the streets. Fifty-two were dead, others wounded. Some Jews had been warned in advance of imminent danger (including Yitzhak Zuckerman) and went into hiding.

During the following days, many frightened inhabitants tried to find out who the Germans sought and why. The answers, however, were not so simple. Among those on the wanted list were agents, including Abraham Gancwajch and his close partner Sternfeld, who managed to escape, due to advance warning. Among those killed was Menahem Linder, a Jewish sociologist and demographer involved in the underground archives, who was close to Emanuel Ringelblum, the political underground of the Zionist left, and a number of activists in the Bund.

It was difficult to point to any common political characteristics shared by the various people who were murdered or wanted. The official explanation was that the killings were an act of retaliation. This was confirmed by Brandt of the Gestapo, who said "that the reason for the night's act of retaliation was the appearance of secret publications in the ghetto and that more stringent means would be taken if they continued to appear."

Adam Czerniakow and other members of the Judenrat passed on this message and tried to stop publication of these journals, but the underground did not accept the explanation. Not only did the publications continue, but many took a sharper line. The underground was convinced that the killings were intended to rid the ghetto of people whom the Nazis considered individuals of initiative and influence, who could take the lead against them personally or through a resistance organization. Similar "clearing" operations were carried out in other ghettos before the beginning of the deportations to the death camps.

At the same time, the underground bore some responsibility for publishing the journals used as a pretext for the Nazi's actions. Ringelblum took the underground to task for neglecting the rules of secrecy. As a result secrecy became more stringent, and the publications went into "deep underground."

Another result was the dispersal of the groups of young people who had been recruited and organized at the height of the war for underground work. Only a hard core of experienced members remained in the underground. It became clear that a stage of comparative stability had ended in the ghetto and that the future called for greater preparedness.

After "the bloody night," there were other incidents in which individuals were murdered. Orders and "sanctions" increased against those Jews who lived outside the ghetto without permission. Previously, those who were not shot on the spot had been imprisoned in the ghetto and released on completion of their sentence. In June 1942, 110 Jews were killed, including women and young children from among the inmates of the ghetto prison. This aroused anger against Heinz Auerswald, commissar of the ghetto, who previously had been considered a moderate.

Officially, the murders were characterized as retribution for the growing opposition that police encountered outside the ghetto. Whatever the rationale, it was a step in the process of evacuating the Warsaw ghetto.

Anxiety was rife during the weeks preceding the expulsion. Frightening rumors were afloat, creating a dense cloud of unease that hovered over the ghetto. The underground archives published a bulletin providing information on the expulsion and the mass killings in the death camps, but it reached only the inner circles of the underground. The situation resembled the awful days preceding the pogroms endured by the Jews in the 1880s in the towns and villages of southwestern Russia. But under the Nazi regime the Jews in the ghetto had no means to repel an attack. Millions, actually the whole Jewish population, were condemned to death in a sealed cell. The Jews of the ghetto were not told what crime they had committed or what was required of them.

The youth movements expressed their challenge to the public. In
Jutrznia
(Dawn), the underground journal of Hashomer Hatzaír, the following appeared on March 28,1942:

 

We know that Hitler's system of murder, slaughter and robbery leads steadily to a dead end and the destruction of the Jews. The fate of the Jews in the Soviet Russian areas occupied by the Germans, and in the Warthegau marks a new period in the total annihilation of the Jewish population. For the Jewish masses, this will be a period of greater bloodshed ... than any in their history. There is no doubt that when Hitler feels the end of his rule approaching, he will seek to drown the Jews in a sea of blood. There must therefore be a start to the recruiting of all creative forces among the Jews. Despite the destruction, many such forces still remain, for generation after generation, passivity and lack of faith in our own strength pressed upon us; but our history also boasts of pages glowing with heroism and struggle.
It is our duty to join this period of heroism...

 

These determined statements reveal the blindness and frustration of the Judenrat. Czerniakow makes a number of references in his diary to rumors concerning the dangers attached to expulsion. We know that members of the underground who occupied public positions tried to convince him of the gravity of the situation. David Wdowinski, a senior activist of the Revisionist movement in the ghetto, brought refugees from Lublin to Czerniakow in order make him realize what fate lay in store for the entire ghetto.

In the last days preceding the expulsion there was confusion and chaos in the ghetto. Terror stood at the locked gates, and the masses of Jews were helpless.

And the Judenrat?

On July 20, 1942, two days before the deportation action began, Czerniakow finally decided to shake off his crippling inactivity. He wrote in his diary:

 

At 7:30 in the morning I asked Mende [of the Gestapo) how much truth there was in the rumors. He replied that he had heard nothing. When asked whether it could happen, he replied that he knew
of
no such scheme. Uncertain, I left his office. I proceeded to his chief, Kommissar Böhm. He told me that this was not his department but Hoeheman [Höhmann] might say something about the rumors. I mentioned that according to rumor, the deportation is to start tonight at 7:30. He replied that he would be bound to know something if it were about to happen. Not seeing any other way out, I went to the Deputy Chief of Sector III, Scheerer. He expressed his surprise on hearing the rumors and informed me that he too knew nothing about it. Finally I asked whether I could tell the population that their fears were groundless. He replied that I could and that all the talk was utter nonsense.

 

The manner in which the head of the Judenrat was sent from room to room, the way everyone lied to him even as the expulsion plan was drawn up and readied, and the way the
Einsatzgruppe
units of the Reinhard Campaign were prepared to spring on their prey are but other evident indications of the Nazis' cynical methods.

On that wearying day of rounds, Czerniakow was still not satisfied, and he approached Auerswald, the commissar of the ghetto, who had recently been called to Berlin and had undoubtedly been instructed as to how he was to act in preparation for the deportation. Auerswald had worked with Czerniakow for some time, and despite the fact that they were on different sides of the barricade, the two had had frank and open discussions from time to time. Yet on the eve of the deportation and slaughter of tens of thousands of Warsaw Jews, this German did not offer a single personal word to a man he had known well and whose integrity he could not question.

Not only had the verdict condemning the Jews of Warsaw already been decided when Czerniakow hurried from official to official, but on the previous day, July 19, 1942, Himmler had dispatched an order to the supreme commander of the SS and the police, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, which stated:

 

I order that the resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the General Government be carried out and completed by December 31, 1942. From December 31, 1942, no persons of Jewish origin may remain within the General Government, unless they are in the collection camps in Warsaw, Cracow, Czestochowa, Radom and Lublin ... These measures are required with a view to the necessary ethnic division of races and peoples for the new order in Europe, and also in the interests of the security and cleanliness of the German Reich and its sphere of interest.