The Third Reich at War (52 page)

By November 1942, only 36,000 Jews were left in the Warsaw ghetto, all engaged on labour schemes of one kind or another.
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Few now doubted what would happen to those who were taken off in an ‘action’. They knew they were going to their death even if they were hazy about the way it was done. The mass deportations gave rise to anguished self-examination amongst politically active Jews. ‘Why did we allow ourselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter,’ was the agonized question that Emanuel Ringelblum asked himself.
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Ringelblum thought that the Jews had been terrorized by the extreme violence of the Germans into passivity. People knew that if they tried to revolt, many others who had not been involved would also be the target of German reprisals. Religious Jews, who probably formed the majority of the ghettos’ inhabitants, were perhaps inclined to regard suffering and death as merely transient, and to accept what was happening as the outcome of the Divine Will, however difficult that may have been. The role of the Jewish police in carrying out selections and deportations also made resistance more difficult. Often people trusted the ghetto leadership, which almost always tried to reassure them about the future rather than create problems by spreading alarm. Arms were hard to come by, the Polish resistance was often (though not always) reluctant to supply them, and weapons frequently had to be purchased on the black market at very high prices. There was always hope, and the need for it frequently meant that ghetto inhabitants preferred to disbelieve the stories of extermination camps that were told to them. Often, particularly in the early stages of the murder programme, the German authorities convinced those selected for deportation that they were merely being moved to another ghetto or another camp. The vast majority of Jews were too weakened by prolonged hunger, privation and disease, and too preoccupied with the daily struggle to stay alive, to offer any resistance. Nevertheless, young and politically active Jews in a number of ghettos formed clandestine resistance movements to prepare for armed revolt or to organize an escape to the forests to join the partisans, the favoured tactic of the Communists (but which also undercut the possibility of resistance within the ghetto itself). A group of this kind was particularly active in Vilna, but it was generally unable to act because of internal political divisions between Communists, socialists and Zionists, the disapproval of the Jewish Councils that ran the ghettos, and the violent intervention of the German authorities at the slightest hint of resistance.
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In Warsaw, however, the resistance did come to fruition. In the course of 1942, Jewish underground organizations began to form, and Polish Communists supplied them with arms. On 18 January 1943 insurgents attacked the German guards accompanying a deportation column, and the deportees escaped. Himmler now regarded the ghetto as a security risk and ordered its final ‘liquidation’ on 16 February 1943. But the raid had made the resistance movement widely known and admired amongst the remaining Jewish population in Warsaw, which now began collecting and hoarding food supplies and preparing for an uprising despite the hostility of the ghetto’s Jewish Council to any armed action. Alarmed at the prospect of an armed confrontation and concerned at the left-wing politics of some of the underground leaders in the ghetto, the Polish nationalist resistance rejected their call for help and offered instead to smuggle the Jewish fighters out to safety; the offer was refused. Fundamental to the resistance was the certainty that the entire population of the ghetto was about to be killed; there was no hope left, and the resisters, overwhelmingly young men, became convinced that it would be better to go down fighting and die with dignity than submit meekly to extermination. As the SS marched in to begin the final round-up on 19 April 1943, they were fired on at several points, and had to work their way forward in a series of bitter street-fights.
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J̈rgen Stroop, the SS officer in charge of putting down the revolt, described how his men fought day and night against the desperate resistance. On 23 April 1943, Himmler ordered him to proceed with ‘the greatest harshness, ruthlessness and toughness’. ‘I now therefore decided,’ Stroop wrote,

to undertake the total annihilation of the Jewish residential quarter by burning down all the housing blocks, including those belonging to the armaments factories . . . The Jews then almost always came out of their hiding-places and bunkers. Not infrequently the Jews stayed in the burning houses until, because of the heat and because they were afraid of being burned to death, they decided to jump out of the upper storeys, first flinging mattresses and other upholstered objects out of the burning houses onto the street. With broken bones they still tried to crawl across the street to housing blocks that were not yet alight or only partly in flames.
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Some fighters fled into the sewers underneath the ghetto, so Stroop had scores of manhole covers opened and put smoke-sticks down them, driving the fighters underground towards an area of the city where they could be cornered and shot. A few managed to flee across the boundary on to the Polish side of the city. The great majority were killed. By 16 May 1943, Stroop announced the end of the action by blowing up the main synagogue. The fight had been an unequal one. A mere fifteen German and auxiliary troops had been killed. This was almost certainly an underestimate, but with equal certainty the actual number, whatever it was, was out of all proportion to the number of Jews killed. 7,000 Jews, reported Stroop, had been ‘annihilated’ in the street-fighting, and up to 6,000 had been ‘annihilated’ as buildings were burned down or blown up. The rest of the ghetto’s inhabitants had been taken to Treblinka.
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‘The last remnants of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto have been eradicated,’ reported Wilm Hosenfeld on 16 June 1943. ‘An SS Storm Leader told me how they had mown down the Jews who rushed out of the burning houses. The whole ghetto is a fiery ruin. This is the way we intend to win the war. These beasts.’
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On 11 June 1943 Himmler ordered the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto to be razed to the ground. Cellars and sewers were to be filled in or walled up. After the work was completed, soil was to be poured over the site and a park constructed. Although the park was never even begun, the ruined buildings were destroyed over the next few months. Himmler and the SS pursued the survivors of the uprising relentlessly. Stroop offered a reward of a third of the ready cash found in the possession of any Jew in the Polish part of the city to the arresting policeman, and threatened execution to any Pole found sheltering a Jew. Warsaw’s Polish population, Stroop reported, had ‘in general welcomed the measures carried out against the Jews’. A substantial number of Jews survived for a time in hiding, protected by Poles. Among them was Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who had stolen a good deal of money from the safe of his employers, the Jewish Council, and handed most it over to the resistance. With the remainder, he and his wife bribed their way out of the ghetto in February 1943, and found a hiding place with a Polish typesetter and his wife on the outskirts of the city. Every time he ventured out, Reich-Ranicki felt himself in acute danger from young Poles who sought to earn money, or sometimes even just the jewellery or the winter clothing worn by their victims, by identifying Jews on the street and handing them over to the police.
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Emanuel Ringelblum, the historian whose assiduous collection of diaries, letters and documents has provided us with much of what we know about the Warsaw ghetto, also went into hiding. Ringelblum was arrested during the uprising and taken to Travniki Camp, from where a Polish railway worker and a Jewish contact sprang him in July 1943. Dressed as a railwayman, and equipped with false papers by the Polish underground, he made his way with his wife and twelve-year-old son back to Warsaw, where they were hidden along with thirty other Jews in a bunker under the greenhouses of a Polish market garden. From here he re-established contact with the Jewish resistance, and resumed his work of gathering information and writing reports on the evolving situation for posterity. On 7 March 1944, however, the bunker was betrayed, and the Gestapo arrested the inhabitants. Ringelblum was tortured for three days, then taken to the site of the ghetto, where he was forced to watch his wife and son being killed before being executed himself. The Germans had learned of the archive he had assembled, but they were unable in the end to lay their hands on it; Ringelblum had buried it under the ghetto during the uprising, but refused to reveal its whereabouts. Part of it was eventually located and dug up in September 1946; the rest was discovered in December 1950, with Ringelblum’s
Notes
sealed inside a milk-churn.
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Well before Ringelblum’s death, the original leaders of most of the Jewish ghetto communities had long since been removed from office and replaced by men more easily intimidated into doing the Germans’ bidding.
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Virtually the only choice open to such men was to try to preserve a minority of the ghetto inhabitants from the exterminatory zeal of the Nazis by arguing for their economic indispensability. Even this, however, would not count in the end, since Hitler and Himmler increasingly considered the security risk posed by the Jews to outweigh any value they might have for the war economy.
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The insoluble dilemmas faced by ghetto leaders by this time were graphically illustrated by Chaim Rumkowski, the controversial, self-willed Elder of the L’d’ ghetto. Rumkowski had initially preserved the ghetto by persuading the Germans to regard it as a centre of production. But this did not prevent the Germans from systematically depriving it of food supplies. The young student Dawid Sierakowiak’s diary recorded ‘hunger everywhere’ in the L’d’ ghetto already in April 1941. Life for him, as for others, was reduced to a never-ending quest for something to eat - mostly carrots and other root vegetables. Sierakowiak relieved the boredom by learning Esperanto with a group of Communist friends, before he was able to enrol in the ghetto school and start lessons again. With other inmates, Sierakowiak kept in touch with world events through listening in secret to BBC radio broadcasts and reading German newspapers smuggled in from outside. The news he heard only dampened his spirits further: one German victory followed another seemingly without end.

On 16 May 1941 he reported that a medical check-up had left him seriously concerned about his health: the doctor ‘was terrified at how thin I am . . . Lung disease is the latest hit in ghetto fashion; it sweeps people away as much as dysentery and typhus. As for the food, it’s worse and worse everywhere; it’s been a week since there were any potatoes.’ Somehow he managed to survive the year, occupying his mind by translating Ovid into Polish, and earning some money by giving private tutorials. Frequently ill, he stuck doggedly to his studies, completing them successfully in September 1941 and finding a job in a saddlery.
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Meanwhile, as more and more ghetto inmates were taken away by the Jewish ghetto police, never to return, Jews from other parts of Europe started to be shipped in. Rumkowski tried to persuade the German authorities that there was no room for them, but without effect. To the 143,000 Jews living in the L’d’ ghetto in the autumn of 1941 were now added, in October, 2,000 more from small towns near by, then 20,000 from the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, along with 5,000 Gypsies. Sierakowiak thought the new arrivals looked spectacularly well dressed. Yet the newcomers were soon reduced to selling their bespoke-tailored suits for small quantities of flour and bread. Meanwhile, on 6 December 1941, the gas vans at the newly constructed camp in Chelmno had begun operation. Rumkowski was ordered to register 20,000 ghetto residents supposedly for labour service outside the ghetto walls. He managed to persuade the Germans to halve this number and with a special committee selected prostitutes, criminals, people on welfare, the unemployed and Gypsies. In an attempt to reassure people, Rumkowski declared in a public address on 3 January 1942 that honest people had nothing to fear. On 12 January 1942 the first deportations took place. By 29 January 1942, more than 10,000 Jews had been taken from the ghetto straight to Chelmno and put to death in gas vans. By 2 April 1942 another 34,000 had been taken away and murdered; by May, the total had reached 55,000, including now over 10,000 Jews deported to L’d’ from the west.
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All the while, new transports of Jews were arriving, particularly from the Wartheland. The ghetto population thus remained at well over 100,000.
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By the middle of 1942, reported Sierakowiak, people were dying in large numbers of ‘ghetto disease’: ‘A person becomes thin (an “hourglass”) and pale in the face, then comes the swelling, a few days in bed or in the hospital, and that’s it. The person was living, the person is dead; we live and die like cattle.’ In September 1942 2,000 patients were seized from the ghetto hospitals with the co-operation of Rumkowski’s ghetto administration and taken off to be gassed; then all children under the age of ten, everybody over the age of sixty-five and all the unemployed, making another 16,000 in all. Sierakowiak’s mother was among them. Many were shot, suggesting growing resistance to deportations. Rumkowski justified his co-operation in the action in a speech to ghetto inhabitants on 4 September 1942: ‘I must amputate limbs in order to save the body!’ he said, weeping as he spoke. It was not clear whether he really believed this or not. Fearful and depressed, the majority of the remaining inhabitants were too concerned with the daily struggle for survival to react with anything but dull resignation. By November 1942 Sierakowiak’s father was ill, ‘completely covered with lice and scabs’; in March he died. In April 1943 things began to look up for Dawid Sierakowiak: he found a job in a bakery, a much-sought-after position since it enabled him to eat his fill of bread on the job. But it was too late. He was already sick with fever, malnutrition and tuberculosis, lice-ridden and suffering from scabies, so weak that he was sometimes unable to get out of bed in the morning. ‘There is really no way out of this for us,’ he wrote on 15 April 1943. It was his last diary entry. On 8 August 1943 he died, just two weeks after his nineteenth birthday.
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