Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination
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In Warsaw the lack of food also became catastrophic in March 1941. Like his counterpart in the Warthegau, Frank had to make a decision; and he made the same choice as Greiser. A decree of April 19 reorganized the German administration of the ghetto: District Governor Ludwig Fischer appointed the young attorney Heinz Auerswald (a former official in the Department of Internal Affairs of the General Government) as “Commissar for the Jewish district of Warsaw,” directly under his own orders. Moreover, a “Transferstelle for overseeing the ghetto’s economic relations to the exterior” was set up as an independent institution under the management of the banker Max Bischoff.68 Needless to say the new authorities had very little control over the demands and initiatives of the ever-present Security Police and SD.69
It was in this administrative context that Bischoff launched his new economic policy, with some measure of success. According to Raul Hilberg and Stanislaw Staron, the value of exports from the ghetto increased from 400,000 zlotys in June 1941 to 15 million in July 1942, when the deportations started. Most of this production came from Jewish firms and not from German firms in the ghetto employing Jews. The same computation indicates that the number of productively employed Jews in the ghetto rose from 34,000 in September 1941 to more than 95,000 in July 1942.
Yet, despite this “economic upswing,” as in Lodz the minimum food level for the entire ghetto population was never assured.70 The Information Bulletin of the Polish underground published a leading article, on May 23, 1941, that seems to give a faithful description of the situation as seen from the “outside.” “Further crowding has resulted in conditions of ill-health, hunger and monstrous poverty that defy description. Groups of pale and emaciated people wander aimlessly through the overcrowded streets. Beggars sit and lie along the walls and the sight of people collapsing from starvation is common. The refuge for abandoned children takes in a dozen infants every day; every day a few more people die on the street. Contagious diseases are spreading, particularly tuberculosis. Meanwhile the Germans continue to plunder the wealthy Jews. Their treatment of the Jews is always exceptionally inhuman. They torment them and subject them constantly to their wild and bestial amusements.”71
Under such circumstances the natural reaction of most individual members of a group on the scale of a large ghetto would be to concentrate solely on personal survival and that of family members or close friends. This indeed was the common behavior of the average ghetto inhabitant in Warsaw (and anywhere else in Jewish communities under the occupation), according to a keen observer, the Bund leader and ghetto fighter Marek Edelman, among many others.72 Yet these basic reactions were countered by considerable efforts at assistance from the outside, self-help in various guises, the indirectly useful effects of self-interest, and mainly collective attempts to withstand the challenge for the sake of the weakest members of the group, children and youngsters, or for those closest in ideological (political or religious) terms.
Outside help, massively provided by the Joint Distribution Committee (or JDC) allowed for the internal organization of welfare on a significant scale.73 Thus the “Jewish Social Self-Help”—Jüdische Soziale Selbsthilfe, or JSS—started coordinating the efforts of previously independent Jewish welfare agencies throughout Poland. The task of the JSS was overwhelming, although it tried to set priorities, beginning with the neediest: children and the elderly; in its first year of activity it helped some 160,000 people in Warsaw alone by distributing food and other basic necessities.
Tension soon arose between the council and the Warsaw JSS; the latter had to fight every inch of the way to avoid coming under the authority of the Judenrat. Whereas the JSS dealt with ghetto populations in general, the “House Committees,” as their name indicates, organized self-help at the tenement level.74 While the “Joint” was the main funding source of the JSS, the House Committees’ activities were supported by both the JSS and the dues of those tenants who could afford it.75 Moreover some welfare organizations established before the war, such as CENTOS, assisting orphanages, and ORT, concentrating on vocational training, maintained their own activities. In Warsaw none of this, however, would have sufficed without large-scale smuggling as an essential part of “self-help.”
“Heard marvelous stories of the smuggling that goes on via the Jewish graveyard. In one night they transported twenty-six cows by that route,” Ringelblum noted on January 11, 1941.76 A few weeks later Kaplan added his observations: “Smuggling was carried out through all the holes and cracks in the walls, through connecting tunnels in the cellars of buildings on the border, and through all the hidden places unfamiliar to the conqueror’s foreign eyes. The conductors on the Aryan trolleys in particular made fortunes…. Aryan trolleys make no stops inside the ghetto, but that’s not a handicap. The smuggled sack is thrown out at an appointed spot and caught by trustworthy hands. This is the way they smuggle in pork fat, in particular, which the religious leaders have permitted us to use in this time of destruction.”77 The smugglers, or rather the ringleaders, were the first to benefit from these operations. German and Polish guards pocketed substantial bribes—and so, on a lesser scale, did members of the Jewish ghetto police.
On the face of it the German administration fought the smuggling and the ghetto commissar took some measures to make the illegal traffic more difficult.78 Yet “for the most part, smuggling was tolerated, and the measures taken against it were meant only to restrict its magnitude.”79 As for the Jewish Council, it understood perfectly that given the food supply situation, smuggling could not and should not be stopped.80
The smuggling and profiteering of all sorts created a new class: Warsaw’s nouveaux riches thrived—for a while. They had their restaurants and cabarets where, sheltered from the surrounding misery, they enjoyed their ephemeral wealth and mixed with Poles and Germans, often their associates. “At Number 2, Leszno Street,” the Bundist Jacob Celemenski reminisced, “there was now a cabaret called Sztuka [Art]…. When we reached the nightclub the street was dark. My escort suddenly said to me: ‘Be careful not to step on a corpse.’ When I opened the door the light blinded me. Gas lamps were burning in every corner of the crowded cabaret. Every table was covered by a white tablecloth. Fat characters sat at them eating chicken, duck, or fowl. All these foods would be drowned in wine and liquor. The orchestra, in the middle of the nightclub, sat on a small platform. Next to it, a singer performed. These were people who once played before Polish crowds…. The audience crowding the tables was made up of the aristocracy of the ghetto—big-time smugglers, high Polish officers, and all sorts of big shots. Germans who had business dealings with the Jews also came here, dressed in civilian clothes…. The audience ate, drank, and laughed as if it had no worries.”81
Of course the ghetto’s “new class” represented just a minute segment of the population. The majority went hungry, despite smuggling, self-help, House Committees, and packages which—until June 1941—mostly arrived from the Soviet Union or Soviet-occupied Poland, and the like. Increasingly so, potatoes became the basic staple, as in Lodz. “It seems to me,” Hersch Wasser, the secretary and coordinator of Oneg Shabat, recorded on January 3, 1941, “there’s a sound economic basis underlying the plethora of new latke-shops [latkes are potato pancakes, usually prepared for Chanukah]…the public eats one or two latkes instead of breakfast, lunch or supper, and thereby stills its hunger. Bread is becoming a dream, and a hot lunch belongs to the world of fantasy. Things are certainly grave if potato latkes are becoming a national dish.”82
Starvation spread, mainly among refugees from the provinces. The number of deaths from starvation and disease between the closing of the ghetto in November 1940 and the beginning of the deportations in July 1942 may have been as high as 100,000 (at the same time the population was “replenished” by waves of refugees from the provinces and, in the spring of 1942, also by deportees from the Reich). Yet despite the overall misery, maintaining education for children and youngsters remained a constant and partly successful endeavor.
With younger children the educational and play-center activities faced the formidable obstacle of hunger. The Ringelblum archives include abundant material sent in by teachers and social workers confronted with this insoluble problem. “How do you make an apathetic, hungry child, who is all the time thinking about a piece of bread, interested in something else?” asked one; another wrote that a meal “was a point of departure for any activities in which we would like the children to participate.”83 Yet another volunteer teacher stated after the war: “I tried to give tuition to children living in the same courtyard as myself but my attempt failed because they were hungry.”84
Nonetheless high school and even grade school activity was intense and clandestine libraries in the three languages of the ghetto attracted a vast readership. Children and youngsters had their preferences: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Edmondo De Amici’s The Heart.85 To many of these children, though, much of the “normal” world was unknown. According to a survivor’s testimony, “Children confined to the ghetto did not know anything about animals and plants. They didn’t even know what a cow looked like.”86
It seems that one of the favorite books of the adult ghetto population was Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel set during the genocide of the Armenians by the Turks in World War I, telling of the heroism and endurance of a group of Armenians—and of their ultimate rescue.87 In more general terms cultural activities, ideological debates, and any expression of the “life of the mind” became both an instinctive and a willed reaction in the face of daily degradation and an ephemeral refuge from utter misery.
Music played a special role in the larger ghettos, mainly in Warsaw and Lodz. Orchestras were established, and a relatively rich and intense musical life developed. Thus in Warsaw, the initiative of setting up a symphony orchestra came from a few musicians; but, was it their intention “to serve the noble art,” in Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s words, “or to provide joy and pleasure to others? Nothing of the sort—they wanted to earn some money in order to assuage their hunger.”88 An additional reminder of what counted most in ghetto life.
Reich-Ranicki, who enthusiastically and expertly went on to describe the accomplishments of the ghetto musicians, did, at the time, try his hand at occasional pieces of criticism for the German-licensed Gazeta Zydowska, under the pen name Wiktor Hart.89 Twenty-one years old in 1941, he came from a Jewish family from Wloclawek but had attended high school in Berlin before being sent back to Poland, in the fall of 1938, during the Nazi expulsion of Polish Jews from the Reich. The family moved to Warsaw, where, after the setting up of the council, Reich-Ranicki, fluent in German, soon found a position as chief of the “Translation and Correspondence Bureau.”90
His comments regarding the avid attendance at the symphony concerts shed further light on what could be surmised about cultural life in the ghetto in general. “It was not defiance that brought the hungry and the wretched into the concert halls, but a longing for solace and elevation—however hackneyed these words, they are appropriate. Those who were ceaselessly fearing for their lives, those who were vegetating in the ghetto, were seeking shelter and refuge for an hour or two, searching for some form of security and perhaps even happiness. They needed a counter-world.”91
In Lodz, too, musical life was intense. During the first three weeks of March 1941, for example, the ghetto “Chronicle” mentions concerts on the first, the fifth, the eighth, the eleventh and the thirteenth: “On the 13th, which was Purim,” the “Chronicle” recorded, “there was a violin performance by Miss Bronislawa Rotsztat, as well as a symphony concert conducted by Dawid Bajgelman in which Hazomir [“the nightingale,” in Hebrew] chorus participated. On Saturday, March 15, that program was repeated in a performance for invited guests, the chairman chief among them. This performance had a special ceremonial quality and lasted until ten o’clock in the evening. On March 17, the School Department organized a performance of music and vocals for schoolchildren. On the 18th, the 20th and the 22nd of March there were symphony concerts for factory workers and, finally, on the 22nd, there was a symphony concert dedicated to classical music and conducted by Theodor Ryder.”92
Grassroots intellectual (ideological) activity was probably even more intense than public cultural manifestations. On May 8, 1941, Sierakowiak recorded his intention to meet on that same day with three other high school members of the [communist] “all youth unit of lecturers” to “discuss Lenin’s famous work, State and Revolution, and then…lecture on it to all other active youth units in the ghetto.”93 On May 10, “Comrade Ziula Krengiel lectured on the significance of the first of May holiday…. In the afternoon,” Sierakowiak added, “we had a meeting with girls, during which our most active members (Niutek, Jerzyk and I) had a difficult time explaining the concept of surplus value.”94
Among the young Lodz ghetto Marxists, intellectual instruction went along with organized action and action itself was induced by misery: “A student from the same grade as ours died from hunger and exhaustion yesterday,” Sierakowiak recorded on May 13. “He is the third victim of the class.”95 Sierakowiak led the action against his school’s authorities to get additional food. He won, in principle at least.96 On the sixteenth he was examined by the school doctor: “She was terrified at how thin I am. She immediately gave me a referral for X-rays. Perhaps I will now be able to get a double portion of soup in school. In fact, five such soups would be even better, but the two will do me some good, too. In any case, one soup is nothing.”97
It was among the politically organized “youth movements” that ideological and general educational activities naturally were the most widespread and systematic. From the beginning of the occupation to the end of 1941, these activities were hardly interfered with; they were of no interest to the Germans. And thus, in the larger ghettos, the youth movements created a distinct subculture: The anti-Zionist Bund youth movement Zukunft (Future), the Zionist-Revisionist Betar, and the Center-Left and mainly left-wing “pioneering” Zionist youth, each created a world of its own.98
Organized Jewish youth had been left to its own devices following the hasty departure of the envoys from Eretz Israel and of much of the senior political or communal leadership, at the beginning of the war. Whereas Bundist youth stayed in close contact with a senior leadership that remained in occupied Poland (or, for a while, in the Soviet Union), the Zionist youth movements gradually lost touch with party headquarters in Palestine, despite their own entreaties that they keep in contact and receive help. The ideological fervor of this Zionist youth did not falter—it was possibly even heightened by the surrounding circumstances; the response from Eretz Israel, however, soon dwindled to increasingly unrealistic and perfunctory advice and instructions, and often, as we already saw from Zivia Lubetkin’s letter, it lapsed into silence.99 Such indifference created a growing rift and soon turned into a desperate sense of independence among the local youth leaders, the oldest of whom were in their early twenties at most.100
While the ongoing and intense debates that divided movements sharing, for example, the same Zionist-socialist outlook (like Hashomer Hatzair, Gordonia, or Dror) appear incomprehensible from hindsight, the considerable effort invested in these ideological-cultural activities and the publication of a large number of underground newspapers and periodicals (also geared toward the general Jewish population)—either in Polish, Yiddish, or Hebrew—became a form of resistance and, possibly, a psychologically necessary preparation for the armed resistance of later
days.101
The council remained at the center of ghetto life. By mid-1941, the Warsaw Judenrat, for example, had become a tentacular bureaucracy employing some 6,000 people in a whole array of departments (almost thirty at some point); its achievements were real given the dearth of means, and yet, as already mentioned, it encountered intense hostility among most of the Jewish population, a hostility that grew as time went by. “The Community Council is an abomination in the eyes of the Warsaw community,” the acerbic Kaplan noted on April 23, 1941. “When the Council is so much as mentioned, everyone’s blood begins to boil. If it were not for fear of the Authorities there would be bloodshed…. According to rumor, the President is a decent man. But the people around him are the dregs of humanity. There are two or three exceptions who have no influence…. All the rest are the scum of the [Jewish] public…. They are known as scoundrels and corrupt persons, who did not avoid ugly dealings even in the period before the war…. Everything is done in the name of the President. But in truth, everything is done without his knowledge and even without his consent, and perhaps also against his decisions and wishes.”102 A ghetto joke noted by Shimon Huberband expressed the gist of the populace’s attitude: “A contemporary Jewish prayer—O Lord, help me become a chairman or a vice-chairman, so that I can allocate funds to myself.”103 Above and beyond the anger triggered by widespread corruption, popular resentment focused particularly on forced-labor conscription, taxation, and the brutality of the Jewish police.
While Jewish workers were increasingly employed by ghetto workshops, “labor battalions,” set up by the councils, were daily marched to work. Moreover, let us remember, in Upper Silesia tens of thousands of local Jews were toiling in the special labor camps of “Organization Schmelt,” and Jewish slave laborers were ruthlessly driven by the SS in the eastern part of the General Government, mainly in Globocnik’s Lublin district. There the laborers were kept digging antitank trenches and constructing a defense line for no clear military purpose. The OKH had agreed to the enterprise, but its implementation was left entirely in the hands of Himmler’s henchmen.104