The Jewish Warsaw

The first documented Jewish settlement in Warsaw – a small fishing village on the banks of the Wisla River – dates back to 1414, after several dozens of families were granted a special permit to settle down in the region and engage in commerce. With the years, the small fishing village became a center for commerce and government, its history interwoven with the Jewish history.

Despite decrees and pogroms – there were long periods during which Jews were prohibited from taking up residence in Warsaw – the Jewish population expanded, and by the end of the 19th century 127,000 Jews lived in Warsaw – one third of the city’s population.

The population growth persisted at the beginning of the 20th century as well. In spite of recurring scenes of anti-Semitism and decrees, the Jews stood out in most spheres of life in the city: approximately 80 percent of the bankers, 70 percent of the craftsmen, two thirds of the merchants and one third of the lawyers in Warsaw were Jewish. Warsaw was the capital of world Jewry and Jewish culture.

370,000 Jews lived in Warsaw on September 1st 1939, the day the German army invaded Poland. Almost all of them were trapped in the city, bombed from the air, bombed from the ground and preparing themselves, like millions of other Polish citizens, for the invasion of the German conqueror.

Nicht für Juden

The harsh decrees came down immediately with the German arrival at the city, and with them the humiliations, the beatings, the tortures and the executions. Within less than a year, the hundreds of thousands of Warsaw Jews turned into citizens deprived of rights and source of income. Banned from cafés and restaurants, prohibited from public parks, cinemas, post-offices. Their children were removed from the schools and universities. They were expelled from their workplaces, kidnapped off the streets and sent to forced labor. They were not allowed to travel on trains or trolleys, forced to step off the sidewalk and remove their hats upon seeing a uniformed or civilian German, forced to wear a yellow Star of David armband, having had all their property confiscated, they lived in constant fear.

Yet despite all, the Jews of Warsaw believed they could survive the war- Poor, hungry, beaten and humiliated, but still alive. Most of them did not know that the worst is yet to come. Not one of them considered Hitler’s words spoken less than a year earlier: “ If the Jewry again succeeds in plunging the nations into a world war – the end result will be: the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”.

The Judenrat and the Police

One of the first institutions formed by the Germans following the occupation of Warsaw was the Judenrat – an all male Jewish council of elders. 24 leaders of the city’s community who were forced to execute the commands of the Gestapo – the special security police. Many of the Warsaw Jews, particularly the youngsters and members of youth movements, accused the Judenrat and especially the assimilated Jew who headed the council, Adam Czerniakow of blindly obeying the German orders. The Judenrat was in charge of the everyday life of the city Jews, particularly after they had been confined to the ghetto walls.

Alongside the Judenrat operated the Jewish police, the Order Police, which at first was comprised of several dozens of policemen responsible for escorting the forced-laborers to their workplace, and later evolved into an enormous body approximating 2,500 policemen. Many of them, notorious for their cruelty, became servants to the Germans, particularly following the establishment of the ghetto and the great deportation to Treblinka in the summer of 1942. The viciousness of the Jewish policemen did not save them from sharing the same fate as the Warsaw Jews: they were all executed when the Germans no longer required their services.

The Largest Prison in Europe

On October 12, 1940, Yom Kippur eve, the Germans announced the establishment of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, a third of the city’s population, were forcibly confined to a small area of about 4 percent of Warsaw’s territory, surrounded by a three-meter high brick wall. Within less than a month dozens of families had to vacate the homes and neighborhoods in which they have lived for years, leaving behind all their belongings, and move to the area designated by the German rulers. Inside the ghetto, Jews were condemned to starvation, poverty, humiliation and murder. On November 16th the gates of the ghetto were sealed. All the property the Jews had left outside the Ghetto – apartments, furniture, businesses and factories – was expropriated and transferred to the Germans. The largest prison in Europe was sealed off and in it were 500 thousand Jews.

Hunger was Everywhere

The Ghetto gates were closed and the hundreds of thousands of Jews inside were destined to a slow and brutal death: from hunger – a Jew in the ghetto received a daily food ration of 184 calories a day, as opposed to 2,612 for a German; from disease –tens of thousands of people died in the ghetto from typhus, tuberculosis, various intestinal diseases, and horrendous edemas; and at the hands of the Germans who attached no importance or dignity to human life. Each morning would find the street strewn with corpses, corpses of those who died of starvation or disease and of those who were murdered by the German soldiers and policemen.

Hundreds of smugglers operated in the Ghetto – some alone and some in organized groups – in order to supply food and provisions. Many of the smugglers were caught and executed next to the Ghetto walls.

The Ghetto Jews were divided into three classes: The Prospering Jews– 20,000-30,000 smugglers, social elite, and Judenrat employees and Jewish policemen. The Dying Jews – 250,000 who were on the brink of death and barely managed to survive on a bowl of soup and a slice of bread distributed by the crowded kitchens. And the hopeful Jews – those who still believed they shall be able to somehow live through the hard times in the Ghetto.

Beside their attempt to physically destroy the Jews, the Germans made every possible attempt to break the Jewish spirit: special decrees banned all characteristics of Jewish culture: schools, libraries, newspapers, religious studies, theatre plays. An attempt to completely annihilate Jewish legacy.

The Death Trains to Treblinka

After the famine, plagues and non-methodical murders, the Germans moved on to the next stage of the ‘Final Solution’ program: the transfer of the Warsaw Jews to the Treblinka death camp that was set up in early 1942 - one of several death camps built on Polish soil – in the center of which stood the gas chambers and crematorium.

300,000 Jews were brutally abducted from their homes and workplaces, gathered in a loading square and transferred on death trains to Treblinka. The German SS soldiers, accompanied by Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Latvian collaborators and assisted by thousands of Jewish policemen raided the Ghetto and began the big manhunt. Thousands of infants were separated from their parents; women, youngsters, elders. Entire families were led to their death. The first Great “Aktzia” began on July 22nd, 1942. When it ended, on September 9th, merely 55,000 Jews were left in the Ghetto. The last remains of a distinguished community which had been degraded, starved and annihilated by the Nazis.

The Jewish Fighting Organization

In the midst of the great deportation, while thousands were making their way to the loading square in which they were gathered to be sent on the death trains to Treblinka, representatives from the ghettos entire political spectrum convened for an emergency secret meeting and decided to form a Jewish resistance organization. The initiative was not embraced by all parties – particularly, the revisionist Beitar movement representatives who objected to the plan. The meeting ended with a decision to establish a Jewish resistance organization– the Jews will no longer be led like sheep to the slaughter. Heading the Jewish Fighting Organization were five young people: Joseph Kaplan, Yitzchak Zuckerman, Zivia Lubetkin, Shmuel Braslaw and Mordechai Tenenbaum. They will later be joined by Mordechai Anielewicz who was not in Warsaw during the Great Aktzia. And so, empty handed but determined to fight till death, the first Jewish fighting organization was established in the Warsaw ghetto.

Death to the Collaborators

The first operations carried out by the Jewish underground were directed towards the Jewish collaborators: high-ranking officials in the Jewish Police and Judenrat accused of assisting the Germans, Jewish traitors who helped the SS soldiers capture their own people and lead them to their death. Along with the execution of traitors and collaborators, the underground began collecting money for funding the purchase of weapons and ammunitions from the rich people of the ghetto.

The establishment of the Jewish Fighting Organization and the revenge in the traitors and collaborators marked a new era in the life of the Warsaw ghetto. The Judenrat and Jewish police were no longer the sole rulers of the ghetto. The Jews now had a new leader: the Jewish Fighting Organization.

The Jewish Commander

It is hard to tell exactly when Mordechai Anielewicz turned from just another vigorous and idealistic Jewish youth into the leader of the Jewish resistance movement in the Warsaw ghetto. The Jewish boy, who grew up in poverty in one of Warsaw’s poorest neighborhoods, had devoted himself at a young age to the HaShomer Hatzair youth movement in Warsaw, passionately dreaming of immigrating to Israel.

Under Nazi occupation, Anielewicz remained committed to his values and tribal members from HaShomer HaTzair. Committed to the Hebrew language, Hebrew labor, Hebrew resistance. The first news of the mass executions of Jews and of sparks of Jewish resistance left Anielewicz in turmoil. He headed off to the towns and villages in the west of Poland in an attempt to spread the news and organize cells of resistance against the Nazi conqueror. He then returned to Warsaw – from which most Jews had already been transferred to the death camps – to head the Jewish Fighting Organization and to prepare it for its last battle against the SS battalions.

Arming for Battle

When the Jewish Fighting organization was founded, in July 1942, there was only one pistol in the Ghetto. The following months were dedicated to one sole objective: obtaining weapons and ammunition. For the lowly organization, every pistol, every bullet, every grenade was like another breath of air. As the affluent Polish underground refused to lend a hand, the Jewish underground had to operate agents in the Aryan section of Warsaw and to buy the weapons from smugglers, fugitives and private arms dealers. At the same time, small weapon-factories started working inside the ghetto, manufacturing mainly home-made hand grenades and Molotov bottles. In January 1943, when the Germans stormed the ghetto once again, the Jewish fighters had in their possession several pistols, about 50 hand grenades and a few rifles. With this small amount of weapons they set off to fight the well armed and well trained German army.