Jewish Ghosts

I belatedly watched the Hungarian film 1945 a couple of days ago and found it mesmerizing and powerful. The performances were understated and gripping, the cinematography masterful, the subject matter riveting, devastating, and infuriating.

The film depicts a Hungarian village shortly after the end of the Second World War in Europe, which is thrown into a collective panic at the news that two Jews have arrived. It turns out that the mayor's drug store actually was taken from his Jewish friend whom he, the mayor, had denounced to the Germans during the war. Other villagers live in homes and proudly show off goods that previously had belonged to Jews. When hearing of the Jews' arrival, one woman frantically hides the silverware and other valuables in case they have come to collect their possessions, and she impatiently urges her sons to do the same. Her husband, on the other hand, feels gnawing guilt over the dispossession of his Jewish friends and neighbors and, no longer able to bear it, drinks himself into a stupor and hangs himself. Meanwhile, the two Jews, who walk silently and erectly, have come only to bury the shoes and prayer shawls of a few of the countless murdered. But the village's frenzied guilt is the point. It points toward an important historical phenomenon.

A still from the film 1945.

The non-Jewish populations of Eastern Europe were largely indifferent, if not gleeful, about the disappearance of their Jewish neighbors. The Jews' houses, businesses, valuables, and clothing were for the taking. And given that the non-Jews knew where the Jews were being taken, if only vaguely, they did not expect any Jews to return. The vast majority of Jews, of course, did not. However, when some did trickle back, after having witnessed the humiliation, torture, and murder of their loved ones, they almost universally faced overwhelming, even murderous, hostility. The Hungarians, Poles, and others knew very well the provenance of their newfound and ill-gotten possessions - the sight of returning Jews caused a flare-up of intense guilt, leading to a defense mechanism manifesting itself in disbelief, then righteous anger, and then, occasionally, outright physical violence (for example, in the pogrom in Kielce, Poland in July 1946). When Toivi Blatt, a survivor of the Sobibór extermination camp, visited his hometown of Izbica, Poland decades after the war, he was greeted by suspicious Poles warily eyeing him, anxious that he was there to demand his family home, although this was hardly the case. Blatt's experience was not an isolated one - throughout much of rural, and once-heavily Jewish, Poland, visitors are often suspected of having come to take back their things.

No sooner had the Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka death camps ceased operations than Polish peasants swarmed the sites, shovels and pickaxes in hand, anxious to find any valuables left behind by the murdered Jews. These macabre scavenger hunts have been described in terrifying detail by Jan Gross in his book Golden Harvest. In Polish peasant lore, it was typically believed that all Jews were rich, as Jews had historically served as middle men between the Polish aristocracy and the peasantry, and were viewed as the taxman, the unyielding creditor, and the well-to-do merchant. After the Jews were deported to their deaths, their houses were ripped up, their walls knocked down, their furniture chopped up in a frenetic, fruitless hunt for the non-existent, but fervently believed in, "Jew Gold" that had to be somewhere.

Polish peasants pose after hunting for Jewish treasure; Treblinka, Poland.

Jews had lived in Poland for over half a millennium and had had direct contact with all classes of Polish society, having intricate commercial relationships and even, albeit limited, personal ones. But they were ultimately strangers to their neighbors. Jews were different: in their garb, their mannerisms, their religion, their diet, their habits, and their language, and were largely unknown despite their proximity. The strangeness and remoteness of the Jews lent them an aura of the mysterious, and even the malevolent. The Jews were for many rural Europeans the diabolical "other" whose ways were unknown. The lack of understanding easily led to fear and suspicions, which took on ridiculous proportions: the Jew was simultaneously a Bolshevik and an arch-capitalist, too parochial and too cosmopolitan, too pushy and too pacifistic, too assimilative and too distinctive, controlling the weather and poisoning wells, and murdering Christian children, using their blood to bake Passover matzo - the blood libel - a demonic inversion of the Eucharist. The Jews had murdered Christ, and his blood was upon them for all eternity. This was fused with exclusivist Polish nationalism (as preached by politician Roman Dmowski) and socioeconomic tensions in the immediate years after Polish independence (1918), which saw the consolidation of Bolshevism in Russia as well as other attempted Communist revolutions throughout Central and Eastern Europe, all of which were seen as the handiwork of the Jews. The beginnings of the delicate independence of the states of Central and Eastern Europe coincided with the rise of Communism in what was seen to be their most dangerous neighbor: this was to have cataclysmic consequences for the Jews. The stage was set for a conflagration, and the Nazis gladly set a torch to the explosive situation. Poles burned their Jewish neighbors alive in the town of Jedwabne and Ukrainians massacred Jews by the thousands in the streets of Lwów in the terrible summer of 1941. 

A Ukrainian mob chases a bloodied Jewish woman in Lwów, Poland, summer 1941.

The peoples of Eastern Europe have a complex vis-a-vis the murdered Jews, their former neighbors. It is a historical fact that the death camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka were staffed largely by Ukrainians and that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Jews were shot into ditches by their Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Belarusian neighbors in what had been the Pale of Settlement, the area to which Jewish settlement was limited between the years 1791 and 1917. These same nationalities assisted in the liquidation of the ghettos and the rounding up of Jews (of this latter charge, all Europeans save the Danes are guilty). Adolf Eichmann arrived in Hungary with a couple dozen men, so he could not have accomplished his murderous task without local assistance - the Jews were marched to the deportation trains by Hungarian gendarmes.  

Eastern European SS volunteers look at the bodies of murdered Jews during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; May 1943.

It is a fact that the Poles largely did not view Jewish citizens of Poland as fellow Poles - Jews were in Poland but not of it. Therefore, the Polish underground never sabotaged a railway leading to a death camp, or attacked a camp itself, or lent more than grudging support, at best, to Jewish resistance in the ghettos. As stated above, many Poles took their Jewish neighbors' homes, businesses, and possessions. And yet the Poles fought ferociously and honorably against the Germans and the Polish underground did more than anyone else to bring the extermination of the Jews to the attention of the Allies (let it be known that President Franklin D. Roosevelt cared not one whit when he was told by Polish underground agent Jan Karski, a true hero, of the murder of the Jews of Poland). The Poles did not collaborate in the fashion of the other nations above. Individuals who tried to blackmail Jews - called szmalcowniki - were sentenced to death by the Polish underground. 

Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground and a Righteous Among the Nations.

The Jews made up 10 percent of the Polish population at the eve of the war and the Jews were a fixture in Polish life. And yet the great Jewish communities of Poland, the gravitational center of world Jewry, are no more. The Poles feel their absence, a phantom limb, as well as a collective guilty conscience that can manifest itself in obstreperous pride impervious to argument and a martyr complex. (The Poles, in fact, have long had a martyr complex, dating back to the years 1795-1918, when Poland did not exist, and was partitioned between three great European powers: Russia, Prussia, and Austria). While many Europeans courageously fought back against the Nazis and did everything they could to help the Jews, the vast majority of Europeans did absolutely nothing, while others collaborated willingly. Europeans know this, and their feelings of guilt go far in explaining that continent's largely antagonistic relationship with Israel ("You see, Jews aren't so great either - we're not the only bad ones!") - although, interestingly, that is not the case in Poland or Eastern Europe as much as in Western Europe.

The Jewish ghost haunts European memory and sits in silent judgment of their crimes of both commission and omission. The film 1945 beautifully captures this psychological reality in microcosmic and artistic form.

The Myth of the "Żydokomuna": Its Origins and Impact

Anti-Semitism is a truly remarkable phenomenon. To their enemies, the Jews can play any role: they are shapeshifters who can take on any form to represent deeply-held fears, anxieties, and resentments. To the right, the Jew is a communist; to the left, he is a capitalist exploiter. The Jew is simultaneously too assimilated and not assimilated enough. On the one hand, the Jew is overly cosmopolitan and internationalist; on the other, he is too narrow-minded, clinging to absurd, outdated traditions and to Israel. There is one constant that ties all of these together: the Jew is the very personification of the other, of evil on earth; a god-killer, a blood-drinker, a liar, a swindler - Satan himself. In every epoch, the Jew becomes what is most feared. Anti-Semitism differs from racism in that it is, among die-hard haters, a conspiracy theory that defines entire worldviews. 

The most significant form of anti-Semitism in the first half of the 20^th century was the identification of Jews with communism (in the second half of that century, and today, it is the unhinged, obsessive, and disproportionate hatred heaped upon Israel from all quarters). The notion of the Jewish communist (Żydokomuna in Polish) had a shattering impact on the Jews of Europe, directly leading to the extermination of two-thirds of their number. The events of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War in the east, which were (rightfully) terrifying for Europeans to behold, were conveniently laid at the feet of the Jews. So while the fear was not irrational, what was was the analysis of the circumstances and the prescribed remedies, which included discrimination against Jews and, ultimately, their murder.

It is nearly impossible to overstate the devastating impact of the First World War on European society. The conflagration witnessed the deaths of 10 million people and the mutilation of twice that. It also destroyed three empires: the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Habsburg Empire. In the wreckage, new nation-states began to take shape including, most importantly for our purposes, Poland, which, once a mighty empire, had declined in status and then been wiped off the face of Europe via three partitions, enacted by Prussia, Russia, and Austria, and culminating in 1795.

The Poles celebrate November 11, 1918 (Armistice Day to several Western countries) as their independence day. Russia capitulated in February 1918 after the Soviets signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany. This treaty gave present-day Poland, Belarus, parts of Ukraine, and the Baltic States to Germany – however, after Germany was defeated on the western front, it was forced to surrender these territories. In light of the German relinquishment of the territories and United States President Woodrow Wilson’s promotion of self-determination, the Poles took this opportunity to declare their independence and sovereignty, after months of intensive diplomacy. For the first time in 123 years, Poland appeared on the map of Europe.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, two dominant strains of Polish nationalism took shape. One, whose standard bearer was Józef Piłsudski, the first leader of modern, independent Poland, wanted Poland to be inclusive: it would welcome the Jews, Ukrainians, and Belarusians who lived in the Polish lands and incorporate them as full citizens into any Polish state that would take shape. He was also open to the Ukrainians and Belarusians having their own states and to form a confederacy of Slavic nations to push back against the traditional enemy, Russia, now under the rule of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The other form of nationalism was sharply exclusivist and was argued most consistently and vociferously by Roman Dmowski, the leader of the right-wing National Democracy party. Dmowski believed that Polish identity applied specifically, and only, to Polish Catholics who spoke the Polish language. Neither of these conditions applied to the Ukrainians and Belarusians, who spoke their own language and were overwhelmingly Greek Catholic and Orthodox in their religious identities, respectively; nor did they apply to the Jews, who obviously were not Catholic and predominantly spoke Yiddish, although there was an urban stratum that was increasingly assimilating and speaking Polish as their mother tongue, primarily in large cities like Warsaw and Lwów. To Dmowski, these minorities could never be Poles, no matter how much they spoke the Polish language or adopted Polish culture; they could be in Poland but not of it because, to his mind, Polishness and Catholicism were essentially synonymous. After Piłsudski’s death in 1935, Dmowski’s became the dominant form of Polish nationalism, leading directly to ghetto benches in Polish universities (where Jews had to sit in a particular section of the lecture hall), the boycotting of Jewish goods, and the use of quotas in the acceptance of university students as well as in certain professions. So, in other words, by the eve of the Second World War, life had become decidedly uncomfortable for the Jews of Poland.

Dmowski in particular was quite animated by the notion of the Jew as communist. He elaborated on this theme in his treatise W kwestii komunizmu (“On the Question of Communism”), in which he laid out his belief that communism was essentially a Jewish plot. When the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in September 1939, and some Jews welcomed them enthusiastically, this was all the evidence that Poles prone to anti-Semitism needed that Dmowski was correct in his analysis: the Jews and communists were one and the same.

Further east, in Russia, the Bolsheviks were fighting for their very lives in a horrifically bloody, and confusing, civil war against various anti-Bolshevik forces and Ukrainian nationalists, who fought both sides. While both sides committed pogroms against the Jews, it was the anti-Bolshevik forces (the “Whites”) and particularly the Cossack legions fighting alongside them who did the lion’s share of the killing and destroying of Jewish communities. In this context, naturally, Jews gravitated to the Bolsheviks (the Reds), which was done not out of any love for them, but out of fear and the need for security. When the Bolsheviks eventually won the war, due to the Whites’ lack of equipment, insecure supply lines, and inability/unwillingness to coordinate their efforts, Jews in the lands they had conquered were able, for the first time in their history, to serve in government institutions and rise in the military above the NCO level.

The visibility of Jews in these areas jolted the average Russian, who had never seen such a thing and did not believe it possible. Their perception that Bolshevism was Jewish in nature was fueled by the Jewish origin of certain prominent Bolsheviks (such as Leon Trotsky, Grigorii Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev). Practically no Jews had lived in Russia until the partition of Polish lands in the late 18^th century, when hundreds of thousands came under Russian control. Beginning in 1791, the Jews were forced to live in the Pale of Settlement (which includes modern day Belarus, Lithuania, and western Ukraine), with only extraordinarily wealthy and educated Jews allowed to live in the Russian lands. In 1916, after hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported from the Pale to interior Russia (following German and Austro-Hungarian military defeats of the Russian army and pursuant to the belief that the Jews were pro-German traitors and spies), the Pale essentially came to an end. The Pale was officially abolished by the Russian Provisional Government in 1917.

Seeing Jews serving as local customs and post office officials where literally none had lived before was a jolting experience to the average Russian. So, concurrently with the Bolshevik coming to and consolidation of power, there was an increased visibility of Jews in public life and the concomitant impression that it was the Jews who were gaining from the Bolshevik coup, not the average Russian (in fact, most Russian Jews were Zionist in their inclinations and, to the extent that they favored the left, they supported the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who the control-obsessed Bolsheviks abhorred). The Russian right-wing, already infused with an anti-Semitism (some of it formed by the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was of Russian provenance and became particularly influential in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, when devastated and traumatized people sought answers for these calamities), inculcated this belief. In their defeat in 1921, they emigrated from Russia, many to Germany. There, they explained their defeat by attributing it to a malevolent Jewish conspiracy, of which the Bolsheviks were the most visible manifestation. After all, look at the Red Army’s leader, the decidedly violent and hateful Leon Trotsky; was he not a Jew? Therefore, a German nation that was trying to come to grips with having lost a war that it believed it was on the cusp of winning, and already prone to blame the Jews and the Left for having stabbed the German army in the back, was infused with a potent strain of anti-Semitism from Russian rightists that ultimately helped to convince Adolf Hitler of the symbiosis between Jews and Bolshevism. Hitler came to his anti-Communism via his anti-Semitism, not the other way around. Ironically, the Nazis’ fervently-held belief that the Soviet regime was Jewish, which ultimately led to Operation Barbarossa – the German invasion of the Soviet Union that unleashed the bloodiest war in history, killing millions of Russians – was largely attributable to Russian influence. Hitler’s chief “philosopher”, Alfred Rosenberg, was born in Estonia in what was then the Russian empire, and traveled in these Russian monarchist circles.

The Żydokomuna concept that Dmowski had done so much to popularize was largely internalized by certain swathes of Polish society, particularly in the lower-middle and middle-classes where there was direct economic competition with the Jews. Many Poles of this socioeconomic class believed that, now that Poland was free, Poles and not Jews, should have their livelihoods and opportunities improve. Hence the economic boycotts, alluded to above, in parts of eastern Poland in the mid- to late-1930s. Because the concept of the Jew as the ultimate other was so taken for granted, Jews were held to be more aligned with communism than they actually were. In the 1928 parliamentary elections, for example, only seven percent of Jews voted for the Communist Party; half of them voted for Piłsudski’s Sanacja bloc. On the other hand, nearly half of Belarusians, who were largely peasant and almost uniformly Orthodox, and not integrated into the Polish body politic, voted for Poland’s Communist Party. But when push came to shove, it was the Jews who were associated with the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik Party, and communism writ large – not the Belarusians. This has to do with several reasons, including traditional anti-Semitism, the sense of economic competition, and the general sense of there being an alienness to the Jews, an alienness that set them apart even from the other minorities in the Polish midst. Yes, Trotsky and Zinoviev were Jews prominent in the Bolshevik movement and therefore visible to the masses; but if not for them, other scapegoats would surely have been found to “prove” that Bolshevism was but a Jewish conspiracy.

When the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in September 1939 and instituted its communist system, destroying civil society, church and synagogue finances and administration, and deporting hundreds of thousands of Poles to Siberia and Kazakhstan, many Poles came to blame the Jews. While surely there were young Jews who not only welcomed the Red Army but lorded it over the Poles in their new roles, the vast majority of Jews did not welcome Soviet rule. After all, the Soviets destroyed religious institutions as well as the livelihoods of business managers, merchants, and artisans – in all of which Jews featured prominently. In fact, Jews were deported out of all proportion to their actual percentage of the Polish population during the 21 months of Soviet occupation. Large portions of Belarusians were involved in the Soviet administration, but for the Poles, there was a perception that only the Jews had benefited from the Soviet occupation. Just as Russians farther east had never seen a Jew, let alone in a position of power (even at a local level), so too were Poles taken aback by seeing Jews – a tolerated minority, at best – in positions of influence. It was this shock to the system that made the “arrogant Jews” stick out so sharply in the Polish collective memory – significantly more so than Belarusians, Ukrainians, and indeed Polish Catholics themselves who also collaborated with Soviet power. They too came to associate the rise of Jewish influence and opportunity with the influx of Soviet institutions and domination – and it formed an indelible image in their mind of the Jewish-Communist, an image that has not been erased even to this very day.

So when the German armies invaded the Soviet Union and its occupied territories on June 22, 1941, they unleashed a tsunami of ethnic hatreds. The combination of emergent, exclusive, integral nationalism, combined with economic anxiety and both traditional and modern anti-Semitism, and oftentimes sheer thuggery and the desire to loot, was a combustible mix that needed but a match to strike it. The German invasion was that match. Comparable and analogous views of the Jew as the ultimate other and as a communist overlord had also been forged in the Baltic States and in densely Ukrainian-populated areas of eastern Poland (eastern Galicia and Volhynia). Upon the Nazi invasion, cities such as Lwów and Kaunas, as well as villages such as Jedwabne and Radziłów, were the sites of extremely bloody and ruthless pogroms. In Jedwabne, the Jewish-Bolshevik theme was underlined when Poles forced the Jews to tear down the statue of Lenin that stood in the town, carry its pieces to a pit to be buried, and recite prayers for the statue. Subsequently, the Jews were beaten to death and buried alongside the pieces of the statue; those that could not fit were marched into a barn, which was lit on fire. Anyone escaping was hacked down with axes, drowned in wells, and so forth. In Lwów and other cities, the Soviet NKVD had massacred thousands of civilians it had taken prisoner; when the Germans opened these prisons to the public and revealed these atrocities, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and others took their considerable fury out on the Jews, much to the Germans' delight. Then, and ever after, it became a convenient “explanation” for these atrocities that the Jews had been willing collaborators of the communists and had deported and killed the Poles’ family members to the east. What this elides is that the Poles themselves often collaborated, as did other minorities, and in even larger numbers, both absolutely and relatively, and the fact that the Jews themselves were destroyed economically and deported (to repeat, disproportionately) to Siberia and Kazakhstan. But in the context of a historically anti-Semitic Europe, it was the canard of the Jewish Communist that stuck, and has continued to stick.

A bloodied Jewish woman being chased by a Ukrainian mob; Lwów, 1941

It  has been a popular trend in the countries of Eastern Europe to continue to identify Jews as communists, or at least communist sympathizers, which explains why so many of their national heroes committed atrocities against them (this is particularly true in Ukraine and Lithuania). Poland in particular is prickly about being accused of any sort of complicity with the Nazis, or anti-Semitic violence committed by Poles, or the Polish repossession of Jewish property, money, and valuables. This is understandable. The Holocaust was planned and administered by the Germans, and they slaughtered the majority of European Jews on Polish soil because that is where the majority of Jews already were. It is a canard and historically illiterate to suggest that the Nazis built the death camps on Polish soil because Poles are somehow uniquely anti-Semitic, which is a popularly held idea. It is also ridiculous to call Treblinka or Auschwitz-Birkenau “Polish death camps.” In fact, no country of Europe acquitted itself well during the Holocaust with the exception of Denmark – to be blunt, no one really cared. That is the horrific reality. The Poles have a severe complex vis-à-vis the Holocaust and Jews more generally because they witnessed the extermination on their very soil, they did very little to try to stop it, and they know very well the provenance of some of their belongings. This has led to an extreme sensitivity on the part of the Poles about the entire time period, and a quick trigger finger to accuse the Jews of communist collaborators. As explained above, that is nonsensical and deeply misconstrued, yet has caused the deep suffering of Jews, who suffered pogroms in various parts of Poland in 1946-47 and state anti-Semitism (promulgated by the allegedly Jewish Communists in power) in 1968, both leading to floods of emigration.

The bill that recently passed the lower house and Senate of the Polish parliament – which stipulates that any mention of the term “Polish death camp” or accusation of Polish complicity or crimes against Jews during the Holocaust is a crime – is deeply disturbing and, ironically, Stalinist in its overtones. The Poles were heroic during the Second World War. They fought and died in the skies over the English Channel and on the slopes of Monte Cassino. The single largest uprising against Nazi rule was the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when hundreds of thousands of Poles were killed and their capital city was completely obliterated. More than two million non-Jewish Poles were murdered by the Germans. Thousands of righteous Poles risked their lives to save Jews from certain death. However, it must be stated that there were many more who either did not care or who collaborated with the Nazis. This is simply, and sadly, factual. The Poles will not be able to come to grips with their history during the Second World War – warts and all – until they face some hard truths. Simply waving away historical investigation or asserting “but the Jews were communists” will not do.

The Polish government, in collaboration with other governments and private Jewish groups, has done an exemplary job of preserving such sites as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and Bełżec. Many young Poles are fascinated by Jews, genuinely interested in their history and their nightmarish fate, perhaps haunted by ghosts, and have done profoundly moving research into the former Jewish communities of Poland. I speak specifically, but not exclusively, of the work being done by the Teatr-NN in Lublin, which is doing everything it can to document and commemorate the lost world of Lublin Jewry. But the complex persists, and this latest law is but the latest manifestation. For one who has a high estimation of the Polish people, their history, and their culture, I hope the day of genuine, widespread, and official self-appraisal comes sooner rather than later.  

The Warsaw Ghetto: A Narrative and Reflection

The Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw. Photo taken by the author, September 2014.

It was May 1943 and the Warsaw ghetto, the largest ghetto of Nazi-occupied Europe, lay in smoldering ruins. Warsaw’s Grand Synagogue, which had dominated Tłomackie Street, was nothing but a pile of bricks, its demolition personally carried out by SS General Jürgen Stroop. What had once been a densely-populated area, a cacophony of voices of Jews of all sorts - secularists, socialists, Zionists, Orthodox, men, women, children - was now quiet as the tomb. The rest of Warsaw would join it in the autumn of 1944, when the Germans systematically obliterated the city during and after the Polish uprising.

How had it come to this? How had the Warsaw ghetto fit into Nazi policy and intentions? What had life been like in the ghetto? Why had it been destroyed? What were Polish reactions to the ghetto and its destruction?

The Establishment of the Ghetto

After the fall of Warsaw to German forces in September 1939, the Nazis, who were driven by a fanatical anti-Semitism, were faced with a dilemma: what to do with the city’s Jews? The Jewish population of Warsaw was the largest urban center of European Jewry and the second largest in the world after New York. One-third of the people residing in Poland’s capital was Jewish.

While Nazi policy in the Reich (Germany, Austria, and the Czech lands) had been to expel the Jews under their rule, this became orders of magnitude more difficult once Germany had occupied Poland, the center of world Jewry. Old methods of forced emigration were not possible. The Germans planned to send the Jews to a “reservation” in a swampy part of the Lublin district, then the easternmost part of the Nazi empire. There they would be decimated by impoverishment, starvation, and disease before being sent somewhere to the east as part of a “Final Solution.” When this did not work out for all sorts of logistical reasons, the Nazis considered deporting the Jews en masse to the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. When this also did not pan out, due to British control over the necessary sea lanes, the Nazis in effect decided to keep the Jews penned up pending a future decision.

The Nazis immediately tried to isolate the Jews of Warsaw from their “Aryan” neighbors. According to their ideological reasoning, the Jewish community was a bastion of criminal elements, epidemics, and some kind of wizardry that would cast influence over the Poles. Therefore, the Jews had to be monitored and contained - the original conception was to ghettoize them in Praga, the part of Warsaw east of the Vistula River. Originally, the Polish municipality disagreed with establishing a Jewish ghetto, as the Jews were vital to Warsaw’s economy. The German military commander agreed, so plans for a ghetto were shelved.

Eventually, however, ideological considerations superseded economic and rational ones. The working neighborhood of Muranów, in central Warsaw, which was predominantly inhabited by Jews, was selected as the heart of the ghetto. Jews were forced into the specified area and Poles were forced out. In typical Nazi fashion, the ghetto was formally announced on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Thirty percent of the city’s population, in addition to more forced in from surrounding towns and villages, was crammed into 2.4% of its area. The ghetto was sealed on November 16, 1940, surrounded by a 10-foot-high wall.

Life in the Ghetto

From the very beginning, Nazi policymakers debated whether the Jews of the ghetto should be allowed to work for a living or if they should just be starved so they would die off. Proponents of Jewish labor won out - Jews would be forced to work for the German war industry. Contractors for the German Army set up shop in Warsaw to take advantage of Jewish labor.

Jewish life in the ghetto varied, but was generally miserable. The typhus epidemics that the Nazis feared became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the Jews lived on top of one another in wretched conditions.The caloric intake allowed by the Nazis was literally a death sentence, so Jews needed smuggled food to live: many smugglers were small children whose families relied on their daring to survive - frequently, if the children were caught, they were shot on the spot. More complex smuggling networks, made up of adults, were also set up. Eventually, these smugglers became the elite of the ghetto, frequenting fancy restaurants and nightclubs. Nonetheless, the average inhabitant of the ghetto was fighting a daily struggle for survival. Nearly 100,000 Jews were to die from starvation and disease during the ghetto’s existence. Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto eventually became inured to the sight of emaciated bodies on the streets before they were dumped into anonymous mass graves in the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street.

The ghetto was administered by the Jewish Council, known in German as the Judenrat. A concept originally conceived by Reinhard Heydrich, the second-in-command of the SS, Judenräte were established in every ghetto, where they were to enact every German demand to the letter. The members of the Judenräte were in an impossible position. While sometimes doing everything they could to lessen the blow of German policies, even the best of them were usually considered to be nothing more than German lackeys. Warsaw’s Judenrat consisted of 24 individuals and was led by Adam Czerniaków, an engineer and native of Warsaw. It was responsible for budgeting, social welfare, taxation, and food distribution.

Another important body within the ghetto was the Jewish police. While at first they were a source of pride for the Jews, eventually they became deeply associated with the Germans’ policies of destruction, particularly the mass deportations from the ghetto beginning in the summer of 1942.

The Jews tried their best to cultivate cultural events in the ghetto. Plays and concerts were put on. There were poetry recitations and literary discussions. While Jewish communal prayer was expressly forbidden by German law, many ghetto inhabitants performed religious ceremonies clandestinely, which provided a desperately needed hope and strength to many. Jewish underground newspapers engaged in vociferous political debates between socialists, communists, Zionists from across the political spectrum, and the Orthodox. A group called Oyneg Shabbos, led by the historian Emmanuel Ringelblum, thoroughly documented everyday life in the ghetto and provided analyses of the current situation. Many, although not all, of the documents collected by this group were unearthed after the war, having been stashed in milk cans and buried.

Großaktion Warschau

On July 19, 1942, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered that the Jews of Nazi-occupied Poland were to be killed by the end of the year. Three days later, on the eve of Tisha B’Av (a fast day in Judaism commemorating the anniversary of the destruction of both Jerusalem temples), Adam Czerniaków was summoned to the office of Hermann Höfle, an SS deportation specialist normally based in Lublin. Czerniaków was told that 6,000 Jews were to report to an embarkation point known as the Umschlagplatz at 4:00 pm that day to be resettled. This would be repeated indefinitely. Czerniaków, knowing what this meant, committed suicide the next day.

What did it mean? In October 1941, Heinrich Himmler and his representative in Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, decided to build the Bełżec extermination camp, which was outfitted with homicidal gas chambers. Beginning in March 1942, Jews from the Lublin district were deported to Bełżec, where they were, almost without exception, gassed immediately. A sister camp, Sobibór, began operations in May. In July 1942, a third camp was ready.

This was Treblinka. Treblinka was located in a remote, heavily-forested region about 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. Like Bełżec and Sobibór, it was manned by former personnel of the “euthanasia” program, which had killed the mentally and physically handicapped, and approximately 100 Ukrainians. It was a pure death facility, unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau. One arrived in Treblinka, as at Bełżec and Sobibór (and Chełmno further west) for one reason and one reason only: to die.

The memorial at Treblinka

It was this abattoir that awaited the Jews of Warsaw. The 6,000 Jews demanded by Höfle were gassed the following morning. Between July and September 1942, at least 265,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw and killed at Treblinka. Among them was the prominent educator Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage in the ghetto. Although he was initially spared, the children under his care were not, and he insisted on boarding the train with them. The Jewish police and their families, initially spared as an incentive for them to assist the Nazis with the roundups, were sent on the final trains on September 12.

The Germans allowed 35,000 Jews to remain in the ghetto to continue working for the German war industry, this time under the direct auspices of the Gestapo. In reality, there were many more Jews in the ghetto - perhaps 20,000 - in an unofficial, unregistered capacity.

Resistance

Some of the more politically-minded Jews of the ghetto had considered resistance even before the deportations began. Members of the Jewish Labor Bund, who were socialists who saw themselves as part of the broader Polish underground and were fervent anti-Zionists, did not think it prudent to resist without the support of the Poles, which was decidedly not forthcoming. Many who had wanted to revolt were seen as hotheads.

A prevailing view was that any armed resistance by the Jews would lead to extreme violence against the residents of the ghetto. When the deportations actually began, many Jews told themselves that the deportees were being sent to labor camps and not to their deaths, as Nazi lies told them. Nevertheless, the Jewish Fighting Organization (Polish: Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ŻOB) was formed during the first week of the deportations. The political tensions within the ŻOB, which was made up of a smattering of groups with different leanings, as well as the lack of arms and Polish support, prevented them from carrying out any acts of resistance. Another group of right-wing Zionists was formed as well - the Jewish Military Union (Polish: Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, or ŻZW). Both groups gathered “taxes” - sometimes at gunpoint - from ghetto inhabitants to finance the purchase of weapons from the Poles and embarked on a campaign of assassination and intimidation against members of the Jewish police and the Judenrat.

A young leader of the leftist HaShomer HaTzair Zionist group, Mordechaj Anielewicz, had been outside of Warsaw during the Aktion, trying to drum up Jewish resistance. Upon his return, he assumed command of the ŻOB. Through the courier Arieh Wilner, the ŻOB was able to obtain weapons from the Polish Home Army (Polish: Armia Krajowa, or AK), albeit on a paltry scale (about which more in a moment). The ŻZW, which had closer ties to the AK as several of its men had served in the Polish Army, was able to obtain a higher quantity of more lethal weaponry.

Mordechaj Anielewicz, commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization

The Jews of Warsaw had been so intent on their own survival during the Aktion that the implications of what was happening were almost lost on them. After the totality of what had happened began to sink in, feelings of depression, shame, survivors’ guilt, and rage consumed them. The men of the ŻOB and the ŻZW harnessed that rage and were intent on one thing: armed revolt.

The Poles

Polish-Jewish relations had become toxic in the years just preceding the German invasion. Fervent, traditional Catholicism and a belief that the Jews were behind the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Army’s failed attempt to conquer Poland in 1920 led to a nasty strain of anti-Semitism in many quarters, particularly in the country’s rural east. Jewish shops were boycotted and attacked, Jews were set upon by youngsters. So called “ghetto benches” were set up in the lecture halls of Polish universities, in which Jews had to sit. After the German invasion, the Nazis did their best to increase the antagonism, by marking the Jews and isolating them, both physically and economically. While many Poles were horrified to see what was happening to the Jews, many others saw the Jews’ forced impoverishment as a bonanza: they were able to move into the Jews’ apartments, keep their property, and take over their businesses. Therefore, they had no incentive to help the Jews, which would mean a reversion to the status quo ante.

The Polish underground did report about what the Nazis were doing to the Jews, in detail - the ghettoization, the shootings, the deportations, the exterminations. The Polish government-in-exile in London was updated regularly. While the mainstream Polish underground and the Polish government condemned the atrocities in strong terms, they also made clear that their opposition was only rhetorical. There was nothing, they said, that they could do to stop the carnage. Generally speaking, the Polish government-in-exile did not want to highlight Jewish suffering too much, because it would, in their estimation, minimize the agonies of the Polish nation, which were shattering and enormous.

It seems unlikely that the Poles could not have blown up railway tracks or even attacked the death camps themselves if they had so chosen. The constant excuse was that the Polish underground had to husband its resources for a final confrontation with the Germans and could not spare them to save the Jews. The Polish underground and government were fearful that the Germans would move on to the non-Jewish Poles once they had finished with the Jews, so they had to prepare for this eventuality with all the force they could muster. The unspoken assumption, of course, was that the Jews, although Polish citizens, were not really Poles, and therefore were not worth full-throated, or any-throated, Polish resistance.

The Polish underground largely held the Jews in contempt, seeing them as going to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter. They did not, they said, want to waste arms on such people. So despite the repeated calls for help by Warsaw’s Jewish underground, the AK only provided a handful of revolvers, some of which were defective. The ŻZW, as mentioned above, fared a little better due to close personal ties with AK officers.

Many Poles, however, were profoundly distressed by what was happening to their Jewish neighbors. After the Aktion, the Polish government-in-exile set up the Council to Aid Jews (Polish: Rada Pomocy Żydom, code name Żegota), which helped thousands of Jews to survive through providing false documentation, food, medicine, and shelter. Every Jew who survived the war in Nazi-occupied Poland only did so through the help of non-Jewish Poles, who assisted Jews at risk to their own lives (and that of their families). But it must be said that the majority of Polish society was indifferent to the slaughter of the Jews, which was also the case in almost every society in Europe.

Revolt

Himmler ordered the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in October 1942. What he foresaw was the elimination of unregistered Jews and the gradual removal of war industries from Warsaw to the Lublin district, where the Jews would be worked to death or exterminated in Globocnik’s nearby death factories. When SS men marched into the ghetto on January 18, 1943, however, they were met with gunfire, grenades, and Molotov cocktails. The Germans, accustomed to a more obedient quarry, were stunned, although they still managed to deport more than 5,000 Jews to Treblinka (short of their goal of 8,000).

The sight of Jewish resistance was a source of elation for the resistance movements, and also a sign to the Polish underground that perhaps the Jews were worthy of their respect, and more importantly arms, after all. More weapons, at this point, flowed into the ghetto, albeit still on a meager scale. Assistance also came from the Gwardia Ludowa (People’s Guard, or GL), a communist underground movement. The Jewish rebels, knowing that the Germans were licking their wounds and would be preparing a major, final assault on the ghetto, began building hidden bunkers all throughout the ghetto - underground, in attics, behind false walls, etc. The general population was to ignore the German lies about “resettlement” and stay in the bunkers at all costs while the rebels did all they could to fight the Nazis.

The Germans entered the ghetto in the early morning hours of April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover, for the final liquidation. The Jews were to be either shipped to immediate death at Treblinka or a more gradual death in the camps of the Lublin district, including the infamous Majdanek. When the Nazis first entered, they were welcomed with quiet streets. More on their guard after their experience in January, they walked the streets cautiously. The Jewish fighters launched their initial attack on the corner of Zamenhof and Miła Streets, where today there stands a memorial to and mass grave of dozens of ghetto fighters. They fought the Nazis openly, in the streets, before deciding, after heavy casualties, to take full advantage of their knowledge of the city and their small quantity of both personnel and weapons by fighting a guerrilla war. Much to the fury of the Germans, and especially Himmler when he was informed, members of the ŻZW raised the Star of David and the red-and-white flag of Poland above their headquarters, which became the site of some of the most ferocious fighting of the revolt. Many of the Jews died with the word Polska on their lips while, devastatingly, the denizens of “Aryan” Warsaw looked on mostly in indifference, as captured in the magnificent poem “Campo dei Fiori” by the poet, and Warsaw resident, Czesław Miłosz.

The Anielewicz Mound in Warsaw. It is located on the intersection of Zamenhof and Miła Streets, where the first shots of the uprising were fired. It was also the site of Miła 18, the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters. It contains the bodies of some of the ghetto fighters and rubble from the Warsaw ghetto. Photo taken by the author, September 2014.

The SS general tasked with putting down the uprising, Jürgen Stroop, decided to methodically destroy the ghetto, house by house, street by street. His troops used flamethrowers and toxic gas to either burn the Jews inside to death or to flush them out. According to his own notes, whole families jumped from the windows of buildings to escape the flames. In other instances, Stroop observed, the Jews decided to turn around and die in the fire, rather than give themselves up to the Nazis. It became increasingly embarrassing to the Germans that it was taking so long to squelch this Jewish rebellion - they felt the eyes of the Poles, particularly, and the world in general, judging and mocking them. No less a personage than Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister for propaganda, expressed a certain sense of admiration for the Jews in his diary:

There is nothing sensational in the reports from the Occupied Territories. The only thing noteworthy is exceptionally sharp fighting in Warsaw between our Police, and in part even the Wehrmacht, and the Jewish rebels. The Jews have actually succeeded in putting the ghetto in a condition to defend itself. Some very hard battles are taking place there, which have gone so far that the Jewish top leadership publishes daily military reports. Of course this jest will probably not last long. But it shows what one can expect of the Jews if they have arms.

The news of the uprising, needless to say, did not reach Goebbels’ typical audience in Germany.

The Warsaw ghetto in flames

For the Jews, their resistance, while hopeless, was exhilarating. Anielewicz wrote in a letter to his deputy, Yitzhak Zuckerman, “The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts. I have been a witness to the magnificent, heroic fighting of Jewish men in battle.” It should not go unmentioned that Jewish women also took part in the fighting, at times hiding grenades under their blouses until they were captured by German soldiers, at which time they would detonate and throw the explosives. Anielewicz, Wilner, and dozens of the ŻOB’s top command died when the Germans surrounded their headquarters at Miła 18 on May 8, opting to commit suicide rather than surrender to or be killed by the Germans. Stroop announced the end of the fighting on May 16 with the demolition of the Grand Synagogue and with the exclamation that gave the title to the report he prepared for Himmler: “The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is no more!”

Stroop kept a daily tally of the Jews captured and killed in the course of the uprising. According to his tabulations, 7,000 Jews were killed in the ghetto itself; nearly 7,000 were deported to Treblinka; and the balance, about 42,000, were sent to labor camps in the Lublin district such as Poniatowa. Spooked by the specter of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, as well as revolts at Treblinka and Sobibór later that year, Himmler ordered the annihilation of the Jews in the Lublin district. 43,000, many of them from Warsaw, were murdered in a one-day massacre on November 4, 1943 in the Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki camps. One can still see today the jagged moonscape of the mass graves behind the crematorium at Majdanek.

The mass graves at Majdanek. Photo taken by the author, September 2014.

The Poles, for their part, had a varied response to the uprising. As noted above, many residents of Warsaw were shockingly casual about what was happening. Some even expressed pleasure: the Jews had it coming, and the Germans were doing a dirty, but necessary, job. Some anti-Semitic outlets stated categorically (and absurdly) that the Warsaw ghetto was the Soviet Union's forward operating base on Polish soil and the uprising was being led by Soviet operatives who had parachuted in: therefore, it was to the good that the Germans were destroying it.

Other newspapers expressed admiration for the Jewish uprising and sympathy for the Jews. Myśl Państwowa called the Nazis’ brutality the “ultimate act of German bestiality” and declared that the Jews had “demonstrated their right to national existence.” The newspaper Polska Walczy bluntly stated that “every echo that reaches us from the burning ghetto racks our consciences and grieves us...It is a battle of the hopeless against a berserk beast of prey.” For his part, Polish Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski called the Germans' crushing of the uprising "the greatest crime in human history."

At times, admiration for the Jews was couched in contempt for what the Poles perceived to be Jewish passivity and cowardice, so unlike what they saw as the martial virtues of the Polish nation: “This is probably their first show of revenge since the days of Bar Kochba,” Nowa Polska, an underground newspaper, opined. “The last time the Jews fought was 1800 years ago...Who knows whether the spirit of Israel will not rise out of the ashes of Warsaw?” rhetorically asked Prawda Młodych, a traditionalist Catholic and anti-Semitic organ.

During the fighting itself, the AK and the GL made some, albeit limited, attempts to assist the Jewish fighters, including an unsuccessful effort to breach the ghetto walls and engaging German soldiers on the "Aryan" side of the city.

Reflections

The first thing I felt upon setting foot in what had been the Warsaw ghetto was a sense of awe. To stand in this place of mass suffering and death, and also heroism, was a lot to absorb - too much, in fact, as awe gave way to a sense of disbelief. The sheer enormity of what had happened here - both the evil and the nobility - made the event hard to grapple with, made it seem like it had happened ages and ages ago, like it had come from the pen of a Tennyson or a Milton, or from the Bible itself.

Everywhere I looked was once filled with teeming masses of Jews leading miserable existences, often starving to death on the streets, and yet striving to live a life with meaning despite it all. Here was once a wooden bridge to prevent Jews from "tainting" an "Aryan" Polish street below; impoverished peddlers hawking their pathetic wares; young men and women sunbathing to escape reality for a while; parents teaching their children the very concepts of forests, fields, rivers, and mountains, which were beyond the imaginations of the imprisoned children, even though the mighty Vistula flowed not even a mile away; SS men laughingly cutting off the beards of pious men or setting them alight; men and women trudging off to perform labor to sustain the military machine of the nation that was destroying their people. And then the scenes of destruction: the clatter of boots on pavement; the shootings; the barking dogs; the forced processions to the Umschlagplatz; the women, children, and the elderly dying of thirst in the sweltering summer heat; the trains being stuffed with their human cargo. And finally, the crescendo: the sounds and smells of combat; the cursing of Nazis by Jews and of Jews by Nazis; the explosions and gun battles; the fire; the coughing of the gassed; the demolition of the Grand Synagogue.

Umschlagplatz memorial, Warsaw. Photo taken by the author, September 2014.

These thoughts and more swirled through my head and ultimately paralyzed my imagination: I just could not process where I was standing and what scenes this place had witnessed. I sat on a park bench near the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, which stands on a plaza surrounded by four streets, one of them now named Anielewicz Street (and formerly the site of a concentration camp that the Nazis established on the ruins of the ghetto) and smoked cigarette after cigarette in the drizzling rain. I sat and I sat, but as much as I tried, I could not think, or, to the extent that I could, it was as though I were conjuring up half-remembered images from an old film. "The Warsaw ghetto," I thought, its very name sending goosebumps up my arms; but when I looked around, I could not connect the pictures and facts in my head with what I was seeing before me. I could name the names and the dates, but I couldn't square them with the fact that it had happened here, where I sat.

While my mind could not bridge the gaps between historical knowledge and physical presence, and never really did, my feelings, at first numbed in the same way, did give way on one occasion. I recall wandering from the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes and having a few drinks at a bar while still failing to process my experience. I walked back to my hostel, slightly buzzed, and found myself approaching Warsaw's beautiful National Theater. I saw the flags of several nations fluttering in the breeze, one of which was the flag of Israel. I recalled the raising of the Polish and the Jewish flags in the early stages of the uprising, and the heroism of the fighters, and was struck by a powerful wave of emotion. I continued the walk back to the hostel with my vision clouded by my tears - perhaps too clouded, because I became hopelessly lost and wound up having to speak pidgin German (at the time I could not even eke out a dzień dobry) in a pathetic attempt to find Nowy Świat Street. It was simply overwhelming.

The Jewish fighters of the Warsaw ghetto only killed a relative handful of German soldiers and the vast majority of them were killed outright or died later. But that was not the point. The Jews of the Warsaw ghetto did not fight to win, or even to live. They fought for their dignity, to avenge their loved ones, and to be remembered.