Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (21 page)

Just as conditions in the Ghetto were to deteriorate from the bad to the terminal, so conditions in the rest of the city, once the Ghetto was suppressed, deteriorated from the bad to the unbearable.
²⁷

Nazi cultural policy was based on the open assertion that German culture was infinitely superior to anything else. Polish cultural institutions, in so far as they were temporarily allowed to survive, were to be tailored to the needs of a semi-educated, non-executive caste of helots. In a discussion on the treatment of the Polish population on 2 October 1940, Hitler had stated his belief that ‘the Poles were born just for heavy labour’.
²⁸
As a result, all Polish universities, technical colleges, and
secondary schools were shut. All museums, galleries, libraries, theatres, cinemas, concert halls, and theatres were taken over by German administrators for German use. A residue of Polish-language primary schools, newspapers, and meeting-places was permitted to function under the strict supervision of the Gestapo.

Nazi economic policy was no less ruthless. All state enterprises, all major private businesses, all factories, all professional firms, and all large or medium-sized estates were sequestrated without compensation. The country’s managerial elite was dispossessed en masse, their property distributed to German companies, and their posts handed over to the incoming swarms of Schindlerite German adventurers. Agriculture was run on the basis of forced deliveries. The entire industrial production of the General Government was put at the disposal of the economic department of the RSHA (‘Reich Security Main Office’). Nowhere in the whole Nazi empire was the ‘Master Race’ given such complete control over a conquered nation so comprehensively enslaved.

The Nazis’ ideal
Lebensraum
would clearly take time to emerge. But two groups of people were subjected to extreme measures from the outset. In 1939–40, SS agents toured the General Government’s hospitals, psychiatric wards, and asylums, quietly listing the mentally sick or physically sick for ‘euthanasia’. At the same time, other specialist agents (often ‘brown sisters’ from the NSV, the Nazi welfare organization) were rounding up children for the improvement of the German gene pool. During his first visit to Poland in October 1939 aboard his special train, Heinrich Himmler had noticed that many Polish children were tall, blond, and blue-eyed. To the Nazi mind, their appearance revealed the presence of millions of inappropriately polonized youngsters of disguised German stock. So the answer was simple. ‘Good blood’ had to be saved, just as inferior blood had to be destroyed. Tens of thousands of suitable boys and girls were snatched from orphanages or simply kidnapped on the streets and shipped to the Reich either for adoption by German families or for the breeding programmes at
SS Lebensborn
homes. The feelings of their relatives did not come into the reckoning.
²⁹

Knowledge of these matters in the outside world remained sketchy. A few American correspondents, who were not yet enemy subjects, visited Warsaw in 1939–41, but their contacts were limited. The exiled Polish Government did its best to publicize the realities of Nazi rule. But it could not receive reliable information without delay, and its revelations were not universally believed. After all, horror stories about the ‘pitiless Hun’
were well known from the First World War, and were well known to have been exaggerated.

Historians, therefore, have a very different perspective from contemporaries. Whilst recording contemporary confusions, they are fully entitled to make assessments on the fuller information which was made available later. In this regard, they can hardly avoid the conclusion that Nazi repressions in the German Zone were not so extensive in 1939–41 as those perpetrated in Soviet Zone. For the newfound KZ-system was minuscule compared to the well-established Gulag. The social engineering of the SS was not so ambitious at this stage as that of the NKVD. And the death toll to the west of the River Bug was not yet as high as that to the east.

In the era of Hitler’s partnership with Stalin, the General Government was not completely cut off from the Soviet Union. Limited traffic crossed the ‘Peace Boundary’. Trains passed through Warsaw every day carrying oil, chemicals, iron ore, and steel to Germany. Selected travellers moved back and forth, and refugees from the Soviet zone, including Jewish refugees who couldn’t imagine a German-run territory to be so bad, arrived every day. The news from the east was uniformly grim. Stalin’s paradise was a place of terror. People in the Soviet Zone were being dispossessed, persecuted, beaten, deported, and killed.

The story of the Warsaw Ghetto has been told many times, and rightly so. It was an episode of unbounded inhumanity and sorrow. It is essential to understanding both the Jewish Holocaust and Warsaw’s wider wartime tragedy. The celebrated picture of a family being led away to their deaths, hands held high, is perhaps the most stunning image of the Nazi Occupation (see ‘Roundup at gunpoint’ in the first plate section).

Crammed to bursting with people from outside and abroad, the Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of some eight hundred Nazi-built ghettos in the General Government. At the peak, it contained 380,000 inmates. It was completely under Nazi control, though the SS appointed a Council of Jewish Elders to administer it and a Jewish police force to do most of the dirty work. The Chairman of the Jewish Council, a Warsaw lawyer, committed suicide when the strains of his position became unbearable.
³⁰

The Ghetto was divided into two sections joined by a large wooden footbridge over Cool Street. The northern section, or ‘Big Ghetto’, was at least three times the size of the southern section, the ‘Little Ghetto’. The
former was dreadfully overcrowded from the start, and was undoubtedly the worst place to be. The latter, which contained more than its fair share of affluent residents and superior shops, was regarded as a haven of relative peace. The main street of the northern section ran as far as Bank Square. For two or three years, it was thronged with passers-by, with rickshaws and with its own trams mounted with a blue Star of David. It had cafes and restaurants, at number 40 a ‘Soup Kitchen for Writers’, and places of amusement. The Fotoplastikon at 27 Leshno Street offered a popular eye on the outside world by showing a series of still pictures of exotic places like Egypt, China, or California. A clown with a red nose stood on the pavement, cajoling people to buy a ticket for 60 groszy. At 2 Leshno Street, the Arts Coffee House laid on a daily cabaret and a stream of concerts featuring singers such as Vera G. or Marysha A., ‘the Nightingale of the Ghetto’, and musicians such as Ladislas S. and Arthur G. At 35 Leshno Street, the ‘Femina’ music hall mounted more ambitious productions from a wide Polish repertoire including the ‘Princess of the Czardas’ revue, and the aptly named comedy
Love Seeks an Apartment
. It was all a desperate form of escapism. As someone remarked, ‘Humour is the Ghetto’s only form of defence’.
³¹

The Ghetto functioned from November 1939 to May 1943. In that span, it passed through five phases. At first it was open to visitors, and inmates, who were required to wear a yellow Star of David on their armband, were free to pass through the gates during the daytime. From 15 October 1941, the gates were permanently closed, inmates were subject to immediate execution if discovered outside, and the Ghetto gradually assumed the characteristics of a concentration camp. From January 1942, the Ghetto began to be emptied by regular, forced deportations to the death camps, principally to Treblinka. After an armed uprising in April and May 1943 it became a silent, smouldering graveyard inhabited only by a handful of SS guards and a body of prisoners detailed to tidy up the ruins. It was an unspoken warning of what could happen to the city as a whole.

The predicament of the Ghetto within Warsaw as a whole is not easily described. One may liken it to a sealed and watertight torture-chamber deep in the hold of a ship that had itself been hijacked by pirates. What is more, the perfidious progression of Nazi policy long prevented people from recognizing the ultimate objective. The deliberations of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, when Nazi leaders decided to perpetrate ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ with all speed, were kept strictly secret. When this stage started, and victims were dragged or
driven to the cattle wagons waiting on the
Umschlagplatz
(shipment centre), the Nazis used the same euphemism that was familiar from earlier Soviet deportations – ‘resettlement in the east’. The gates of the Ghetto carried a health warning: ‘
BEWARE OF TYPHUS
.’

The variety of people who were herded into the Ghetto was surprising. The native Varsovians, who spoke either Polish or Yiddish, could not easily speak to the Germans, French, and Greeks shipped in from abroad. Though Orthodox Jews probably formed a majority, there was a large group of secularized or non-religious Jews; and there was a sizeable contingent of Jewish Catholics. This last group, whose main Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary stood at 34 Leshno Street, had been common enough in pre-war Warsaw. They came from convert families who had shed their Jewish identity at various points over the previous two hundred years. According to reports reaching London, they were discriminated against by the Jewish police. Yet the Gestapo, when classifying people, were not interested in religion or in disputes among Jews. They were only interested in ‘blood’.

The Gestapo’s supervision of the Ghetto centred on a building at 13 Leshno Street, which housed the Bureau for Combating Bribery and Speculation. This agency formed the cover for an operation with much wider and more sinister functions. Universally known as ‘the Thirteenth’, it employed several hundred men who acted as the eyes and ears of the Gestapo and who, from their hats with green piping, attracted the label of ‘gamekeepers’. Its director was a colourful figure, a pre-war journalist called Abraham G., who enjoyed complete immunity from the Ghetto Police and Jewish Council, reporting directly to Dr Ernst Kah, the Chief of Department III of the Warsaw SD.

By all accounts, Abraham G.’s motives were somewhat contorted. He was certainly an opportunist, who rapidly made a large fortune from the extortionate rents of properties which he had licensed from the SS. At the same time, he seems to have harboured a scheme for setting up a Jewish autonomous region, where he and his fellow Jews could survive. And he used his money to patronize the Ghetto’s cultural and artistic activities. After a long absence in 1942, when he probably lived on the ‘Aryan Side’ under a false name, he briefly reappeared in the Ghetto early in 1943. He and his family are thought to have been shot in the Paviak Jail soon afterwards.

Huge discrepancies existed in the Ghetto between rich and poor. In the early days, well-heeled inmates could buy spacious properties from departing owners and bring in luxuries, valuables, and jewellery, which could later be exchanged for food and services. As late as 1943, the Ghetto still contained islands of affluence amidst the sea of starvation and misery. One honest survivor reported how his own family was able to sit down to a complete table at their annual Passover feast, even when the bombs and bullets of the Ghetto Rising were exploding outside. Dances and concerts were arranged right to the end.
³²
Ghetto life was infinitely harsher for most. But the reality becomes all the more poignant when one realizes that most of that family’s neighbours had already been exterminated, or had died from exhaustion on the street. Overall, the survival rate was less than 1 per cent.

By general consent, the most blood-chilling scenes in the Ghetto were those of starving, suffering children. From 1941 onwards skeletal waifs expired on the open streets, hundreds every day, and often in the vicinity of well-stocked foodstores where the wealthy spent their money. The race for survival did not encourage charity. Ragged urchins, who were thin enough to squeeze through the cracks in parts of the wooden Ghetto Wall, risked their precarious lives smuggling. Others, inured to the sight of death, played street games amid the corpses of their dead or dying fellows.
³³

Once the deportations started the pressure of sheer numbers diminished, but the murder rate increased. The agony of one day was recorded by a diarist whose account, secretly buried, survived when he did not: