Resistance (22 page)

Czerniakow wrote in his diary on the first day of the expulsion that the problem that worried him the most was the fate of the children in the orphanages. The orphans seemed to him the most difficult and painful problem. Too young to work, they were also without the protection of families. While the entire ghetto was occupied in the feverish pursuit of work or a permit that would, it was hoped, prevent deportation, the orphans were left to fend for themselves, and Czerniakow was unable to protect them.

The division of the ghetto into many units and the illusions of security provided by the signed permits and "good" employment were undoubtedly well-planned steps in the German tactics for executing the deportation. Communal life ended and everyone was alone. At most, the family unit remained intact. Instead of viewing the tragic situation as a general catastrophe affecting the entire community, each family, and often each person, was taken up with the feverish and exhausting effort of acquiring the protective piece of paper as a way of saving themselves and their close relatives. The Nazis cynically created a mass panic, verging on madness, among the hundreds of thousands of Warsaw ghetto residents. Starving and psychologically exhausted, the Jews were entrapped with no hope of escape; they clung to false hopes to the bitter end.

Only a few dozen SS men and German police stood guard during the first days of the ghetto's evacuation. A supplementary unit of black-uniformed police—composed of Ukrainians and other men from the Baltic states—was brought into the action. But the greater part of the work during the first days was done by the Jewish Police, who from the very beginning acted independently of internal ghetto controls.

On July 23, Czerniakow wrote in his diary, "The hour is three in the afternoon. At the moment, there are 4,000 ready to leave. By four, according to the order, there must be 9,000." At 4:00
P.M.,
he swallowed a dose of potassium cyanide while sitting at his desk. Alongside his body, a short letter to his wife, Dr. Felicia Czerniakow, was found containing the following words: "The SS wants me to kill children with my own hands. There is no other way out and I must die."

Even in death Czerniakow was a controversial figure. Some saw his suicide as an act of personal integrity, a defining example of his well-intended but failed efforts. Once the Judenrat leader understood that he could no longer protect the ghetto's inhabitants and that all his work had been in vain, Czerniakow took personal responsibility. Others, especially those active in the underground, were less charitable. Ringelblum wrote: "Suicide of Czerniakow—too late, a sign of weakness—should have called for resistance—a weak man."

The deportations began despite Czerniakow's gesture. The first to be taken were inhabitants of the poorhouses and refugees, people on the verge of dying who were found in the streets. They were joined by refugees from Germany who had arrived in Warsaw two months earlier. The refugees marched in orderly lines in clean clothing, saying that any place would be better than the ghetto. When this "easy" march was concluded, other houses were approached, whole streets and finally entire enterprises were emptied. One diarist described the first days of deportations:

 

The day has passed, the fifth day of the expulsion. On the first day, the hungry, the refugees, and the beggars went. The more solid inhabitants still did not feel the act of expulsion. The matter touched mainly those who had no home, lacked food, or did not have the proper cover. The Germans imposed a quota of thousands which had to appear at the
Umschlagplatz.
The Jewish police emptied the refugee stations, rid the streets of the dying and covered the centers of filth and squalor in order to produce the required numbers, as there were no more pitiful, indifferent or apathetic volunteers and the quotas of victims had to be filled.

The Nazis were evidently very angry. In the afternoon an agitated police squad hurriedly went out into the streets of the ghetto and gathered whoever they could find ... it seems to me that 110 one any longer thinks of his neighbor. Tension and anxiety focus on only one point: what will happen to me, how can I save my life and escape from this drowning ship?

 

After the first few days, German tactics changed. Police came to an apartment house, surrounded it, and demanded that all its tenants come down and appear before them with their permits. Nearby, one or two shouting Germans stood firing shots over the heads of the tenants and supervising the roundup. Though violence was kept at a distance, its threat was ever-present. Supplementary Ukrainian and Latvian police took part in the actual execution of the operation. After permits were examined, the Jews were divided into two groups: those who were released and those who were forced to leave.

Following the selection, the police spread through the apartments that had been left open. If homes were locked, the police simply opened them by force. They seized the people—mainly the elderly and relatives who were not included in the protective permits—as they hid in cellars, in attics, and chimney nooks. Police openly stole valuables from the empty apartments. Brutality, arrests, and beatings were ordinary, everyday occurrences.

This first stage of the "blockade and search of houses" took between a week and ten days. In the second stage, the Germans were not satisfied with supervising the seizures from the sidelines.
An enlarged force of German police and supplementary forces, together with the SS, took the "action" into their own hands. Permits were now only partially honored, but if the required quota was not met, families of those with permits were seized or permits were ignored and the deportation continued. Whole streets were surrounded, not just single houses. This second stage lasted for two weeks.

With every stage, the methods grew more extreme and violent, and the circle of deportees became wider. Permits no longer had any real value. People were seized not only from their homes and streets but from work places and workshops. People who were supposed to be at work were afraid to leave their signed permits with their wives, children, or parents at home, and took the permits to work with them. The SS and their helpers first took the women and children and the parents of the workers. Then they finally demanded of the employers managing the enterprises that they make do with a smaller number of workers essential to the production process and hand over the remaining workers to them. The following notes from August were found:

 

The permits no longer have any value. Some time has passed since the Germans themselves spread out in the ghetto; one cannot rely on any sort of papers. At times, they release the holders of permits and then there are times when they do not take the signatures into consideration at all and gather the victims indiscriminately. It all depends on the pace of the deportation. When the shipment train is full and the
Umschlagplatz
is full, the snatchers permit themselves a certain degree of generosity and pass over the young and holders of permits. This is not so when the raging fury of lagging behind in their quota takes over, when the railway carriages are empty and they are waiting to fill their quota of victims in the
Umschlagplatz,
in which case, the papers have no validity and there are only blows, kicks and shouting, which is an endless nightmare. Are these people not familiar with the normal language of human beings?

 

And these observations:

 

A new poster appeared in the ghetto: Everyone who volunteers to appear in the
Umschlagplatz
[this already happened during the first week of the expulsion] would receive three kilos of bread and a kilo of jam. And today it was quiet in the streets—no siege and no persecution. Thousands of volunteers came to the
Umschlagplatz.
In answer to the question as to what drives them to do so of their own accord, they answer that they do not have the strength to watch their little ones go hungry. The ploy succeeded. The temptation of sufficient bread is stronger than the possibility of losing one's life.

I saw a man with a boy on his shoulders. He stood out among the others going in that direction, for he did not carry large bundles but merely a small suitcase. The child on his shoulders was about five, shrunken, and evidently unable to walk on his own feet. His features were lovely and his large eyes stood out against his parchment-colored skin. Without meaning to, I overheard the conversation between the father and the toddler:

"Father, will we meet mother and be together again?"

"Of course, my child. She is already awaiting us there."

"And when will we be given bread, father?"

"Soon, it is already very, very near."

 

The appearance and features of people changed during the expulsion. It was not only the growing hunger and the impossibility of maintaining personal cleanliness that had brought this about. Anxiety and desperation had taken their toll.

On August
6,
the Nazis attacked the children's institutions in the ghetto, including the Jewish orphanage run by Dr. Janusz Korczak, the famed Jewish-Polish educator who was something of a cross between Mr. Rogers and Dr. Benjamin Spock in his native land. Korczak lined his children up in rows of four. The orphans were clutching flasks of water and their favorite books and toys. They were in their best clothes. Korczak stood at the head of his 192 children, holding a child with each hand. One child carried the flag of King Matt with a Star of David set against the white field on the other side. They marched through the ghetto to the
Umschlagplatz
where they joined thousands of people waiting without shade, water, or shelter in the hot August sun. The children did not cry out. They walked quietly in forty-eight rows of four. One eyewitness recalled, "This was no march to the train cars but rather a mute protest against the murderous regime ... a process the like of which no human eye has witnessed."

Between July 23 and September 6, some 230,000–240,000 people had been expelled or killed, while a few thousand escaped from the ghetto. On the night of September 6, the last massive selection began. The police announced by loud cries in the streets that on the following day all the Jews, regardless of age, sex, or place of work, had to leave their dwellings and meet in the area defined by Mila, Lubecki, Smocza, and Niska streets, the traditionally poor and densely populated heart of the Jewish quarter. No one knew the reason for this order. Rumors were rife that the expulsion had ended. Instead, the worst phase of the deportation was about to begin.

All the Jews had to go through the process of selection and to leave through a narrow passage with armed Germans standing on either side equipped with whips and bayonets. Every Jew had to have a number—to receive confirmation from his employer that he was one of the workers allotted to that specific factory. In all, thirty-five thousand numbers had been issued—only a tenth of the entire population of the ghetto at the beginning of the expulsion. The "cauldron" decree, as the order was later called—because the Jews were placed in an area the size of a cauldron—continued from September 6 to 10.

Many Jews had not received numbers. Despondent, they marched along the general line, passed through the selection process, accepted their fate, and were immediately taken aside to the site leading to the
Umschlagplatz.
Others hid. Those who were found were killed on the spot or had to join the line leading to the railway carriages.

Perhaps the most difficult experiences of all were suffered by many of the "lucky" ones who had numbers. Witnesses have told of babies crying when they went through the narrow passage of the "cauldron" carried by their mothers or fathers, and of SS soldiers sticking their bayonets into them or into the packs and bundles their parents were carrying on the suspicion that an infant was hidden.

Did the Jews of Warsaw know, with any certainty, what was awaiting them? Did they understand that going to the
Umschlagplatz
meant never returning, and that those who were pushed into the railway carriage were actually departing from this world? There were some people in the ghetto who had a more or less precise knowledge of what was going on. The truth spread in the form of rumors and a few short words spoken to a neighbor or friend. But in addition to the accurate information and the reliable facts, there were doubts, considerable difficulties believing that all this was possible.

By the second week of the deportation, there were some who returned to the ghetto in the railway carriages or trains carrying freight taken from the slaughtered in Treblinka. Some people managed to escape from the death camp and sneak back into the ghetto. Among the latter was David Nowodworski, an older member of the youth movement and the underground. Abraham Levin, a teacher and historian who worked in the underground archives in the ghetto, described his meeting with Nowodworski on August 28, more than a month after the deportations began:

 

Today we had a long talk with David Nowodworski, who returned from Treblinka. He told us in detail the whole story of his ordeal, from the moment he was taken until he managed to escape from the slaughter site and reach Warsaw. From his account, it is once again confirmed in no uncertain terms that all the transports, whether they were made up of people who were snatched or whether they went of their own accord, are all put to death and no one is saved. This is the naked truth and it is terrible to think that during the last few weeks, at least some 300,000 individuals from Warsaw and other cities such as Radom, Siedlce, and others, have been murdered.

The written evidence recorded from his words is so painful that it cannot be grasped in so many words. This is undoubtedly the greatest crime in the history of mankind.

 

The next day, Saturday, the twenty-ninth of August, Levin ended his diary entries with the following story: