Introduction
Nowadays, death rules in all its majesty; while life hardly glows under a thick layer of ashes . . . The very soul, both in the individual and in the community, seems to have starved and perished, to have dulled and atrophied.
ABRAHAM LEWIN, Warsaw ghetto, September 31, 19411
Abraham Lewin was forty-seven years old when the Warsaw ghetto was sealed on November 15, 1940. He had been a teacher and historian. In the ghetto, he joined fellow historian Emanuel Ringelblum in an attempt to document for posterity the experiences of Warsaw’s Jews. His last entry was dated January 16, 1943, just a few days before an Aktion took him to the Treblinka extermination center where he was murdered along with his daughter, Ora.2 Portions of his diary survived, buried in milk cans in what was left of the ghetto, and parts were discovered in 1946 and 1950. It describes the unbearable conditions in the Warsaw ghetto and the emotional toll ghettoization took on inhabitants. In May 1942, Lewin wrote “An unremitting insecurity, a never-ending fear, is the most terrible aspect of all our tragic and bitter experiences” and that “the most destructive aspect for our nervous system and our health was to live night and day in an atmosphere of unending fear and terror for our physical survival, in a continual wavering between life and death.”3
The experience of ghettoization—being confined to particular, small portions of cities and towns with insufficient food and the constant threat of deportation—was unique to the occupied East; the Nazis created no ghettos in Western Europe. Ghettos had existed across Europe in the medieval and early modern periods: the first official Jewish ghetto was established in sixteenth-century Venice. Often, these were voluntary communities. Indeed, even Jews themselves contested the nature of the ghetto: was it a forced, discriminatory confinement or a rich cultural community that served all Jewish needs?4 Ghettoization under the Nazis was a completely different process. It represented another development and escalation in Nazi anti-Jewish policy. At the same time, ghettoization should not be seen as a direct preparation for the Final Solution, though it greatly enabled the genocide. Approximately 500,000 Polish Jews died in the ghettos before systematic deportations to the gas chambers began.5
This chapter provides an overview of the process of ghettoization across Eastern Europe, highlighting the diversity of ghetto organization and forms as well as differing Nazi viewpoints on the purpose of ghettos. It also explores the experience of life and death there and how Jewish leadership and individuals reacted to ghettoization. Finally, drawing on material from inhabitants themselves, such as Lewin, as well as the Nazis, this section situates the ghetto in the larger context of the Holocaust.
A Difficult Birth: Nazi Ghetto Policy
The best solution would apparently still be the removal of the Jews to some other place. So long, however, as the Jews are still present here, the course of action adopted in Warsaw would seem to be the most appropriate: to seal off the Jews as much as possible from their surroundings, to exploit their labor, according to plan, and to allow them the widest latitude in regulating their own affairs.
HEINZ AUERSWALD, Warsaw Ghetto Commissar, November 24, 19416
Contrary to some conventional wisdom, the ghettos in Eastern Europe were not established to consolidate Jews for extermination. Auerswald here offers an economic rationale, for example. In fact, ghettos were created from 1939 to 1944 across the occupied East, usually by local authorities and often for differing reasons. Part of the confusion over the intended role of the ghetto stems from a 1939 directive from Reinhard Heydrich specifying that the “first prerequisite for the final goal is initially to concentrate the Jews from rural areas in the larger cities.” He went on to dictate that
As far as possible, the area referred to under 1) is to be cleared of Jews; at least, the aim should be to establish only a few cities of concentration. In the areas referred to under 2), as few concentration centers as possible are to be set up, to facilitate the subsequent measures. Here it must be borne in mind that only those cities which either are rail junctions or at least are situated on railroad lines should be selected as concentration points.
As a matter of principle, Jewish communities of fewer than 500 persons are to be dissolved and the people transported to the nearest city of concentration.7
This order might be read, with hindsight, as setting the stage for the murder of the Jews. In reality, it highlighted missteps in Nazi anti-Jewish policy more than evidence of a master plan. The creation of permanent ghettos resulted from failures of other plans. Furthermore, certainly in 1939 and even later into 1941, the “final goal” of which Heydrich speaks was still deportation and not murder. Thus, ghettoization would hopefully ease the mass deportation of Jews to a yet undetermined location. When German Jews began being deported, many of them ended up in eastern ghettos until the Nazis made a final decision regarding their fate. Particularly in Poland, the last thing high-level Nazi leaders wanted was a permanent concentration of Jews as they vied to make their territories judenrein (free of Jews.) As late as October 1941, Hans Frank, head of the Generalgovernment, still believed that his Jews would be resettled somewhere in Russia.8
Nazi mayor, Hans Drechsel, established the first ghetto at Piotrkó Trybunalski in the Radom district of the Generalgovernment on October 8, 1939. It had no fence and was simply marked with signposts.9 If we accept that ghettos first appeared as a stopgap measure to consolidate Jews in preparation for some future action, then the actions of the German authorities responsible for managing ghettos must be seen as a form of discovery learning. What were they to do with these concentrated populations, particularly when they were large and in major cities? History shows that individual officials devised different systems and envisioned different purposes for ghettos.
Historian Christopher Browning provides the useful categories of “attritionists” and “productionists” to describe the stances of ghetto managers. These contrasting viewpoints nicely illustrate the local influence on larger Nazi policy and the relative lack of coherence across Nazi occupied territory. “Attritionists” viewed ghettos as areas of confinement in which the largescale death tolls of Jews were inconsequential, or even welcome. For them, “the ghettos were vast concentration camps facilitating the total extraction of Jewish wealth through the leveraging of deliberate starvation” until eventually, the ghetto’s population died out. Himmler, unsurprisingly, was a firm attritionist, having stated in 1939 that “the time has come to drive this rabble into ghettos, and then epidemics will erupt and they’ll all croak.”10 “Productionists” on the other hand “viewed their task, at least until that future point when the Jews were finally removed, as the minimization of the burden of the ghettoized Jews on the Reich through the maximization of their economic potential,” that is through labor.11 These two perspectives, between temporary labor and decimation, clashed repeatedly, even among leaders of the SS.
This debate played out, for example, in the creation and evolving management of the Łodź and Warsaw ghettos. The ghetto in Łodź in the Warthegau was the first of the large, well-known ghettos. It had been established by May 1, 1940, with an estimated 163,777 initial inhabitants.12 Fences cut off Jews from food, and thus their provisioning quickly became the responsibility of the Nazi authorities. At first, the attritionist Friedrich Uebelhoer controlled ghetto policy in Łodź. His position was clear: “The creation of the ghetto is of course only a transition measure. I shall determine at what time and with what means the ghetto and thereby also the city of Lodz´ will be cleansed of Jews. The final goal in any case must be that we burn out this plague-boil.”13 However, the ghetto administrator, Hans Biebow, soon altered this extreme position, insisting that the ghetto must contribute economically to the German war effort and thus could not be left to wither on the vine. In this, his own deputy Palfinger opposed him, siding with others who advocated starvation as a tool to extract wealth and a little more. Palfinger, made his position clear, saying that “The rapid dying out of the Jews is for us a matter of total indifference, if not to say desirable.”14 However, Biebow prevailed in setting up the ghetto as a source of slave labor that could contribute both to the cost of its own existence and to German business needs. He created “four principal business subdivisions regulating labor creation and manufacturing, monetary conversion of goods removed from the ghetto, financial administration, and central purchasing.”15 For both Łodź Jews and Biebow, labor and production became necessary to justify the existence of the ghetto. Indeed, the predominance of Jews as skilled workers and craftsmen meant that they were needed in the local economy, despite their racial “inferiority.” In many ways, the Łodź ghetto would become the model for the large ghettos, created mainly in the former Polish territories.
The Warsaw ghetto, officially sealed in November 1940, took a slightly different path toward its final structure and purpose. First, in Warsaw, Nazi public health officials played a decisive role in the isolation of the Jewish population. Officials marshaled a military and medical argument. “The German Army and population,” they contended, “must in any case be protected against the Jews, the immune carriers of the bacteria of epidemics.”16 This motivation combined the real threat of disease (created by Nazi policy itself) with antisemitic stereotypes about Jews as disease carriers. Ironically, the attritionist Palfinger had left Łodź hoping to bring his perspective to the Warsaw ghetto. Here, too, he was defeated by forces seeking to make the ghetto economically viable in order to sustain itself and to support the Nazi war effort. Even though productionists initially prevailed, their actions did not radically relieve the suffering in the ghettos. Hunger, disease, and abuse remained constant traits of all ghettos.
Another variation in the establishment of ghettos came in Krakow, the capital of the Generalgovernment and site of Hans Frank’s palatial residence. Frank did not want a large concentration of Jews in “his” city. For him, it was “absolutely intolerable” that “thousands and more thousands of Jews slink around and take up apartments” in Krakow. He therefore sought to create “the most Jew-free city” in the Generalgovernment by driving Krakow’s Jews into the countryside. He even gave them the incentive of taking their property with them and choosing their destination.17 Of course, they had to pay their own way, a requirement which led to an official report suggesting the administration pay for transportation in order to speed the process.18
Regardless, Łodź, became the model for the establishment of many ghettos: a confined space which forced Jews to pay for their own existence and harnessing the captive population to the local economy and the war effort (and often providing funds for the personal accounts and projects of Nazi administrators). Indeed, corruption among Nazi officials such as District Governor in Galicia, Karl Lasch, not infrequently resulted in severe punishment. Lasch was arrested for his corruption as head of the Radom District and forced to commit suicide before his trial in 1942.19
Systematic theft of wealth from ghetto populations occurred almost universally. The Nazis believed, not altogether incorrectly, that valuable items, currency, precious gems, and so on, had been brought into the ghettos. They were anxious to force the Jews to surrender this wealth. Starvation was one method by which the Nazis extorted funds from Jewish communities. Ghetto populations paid exorbitant amounts for sustenance, of which only a small amount often went to food for the ghetto (if any.) In May 1941, the military commander of Warsaw reported, for example, on starvation in the ghetto. He noted that “No one has yet been able to deliver potatoes, for which the Jewish council made a prepayment of several millions.”20
Ghetto administrators frequently took hostages, often the Jewish Councils themselves, and demanded a “ransom.” In Lwów in August 1941, ghetto inhabitants were forced to collect 20 million złoty ($5 million in today’s currency).21 They surrendered 1,400 kg (3,080 lbs) of silver as well as gold and jewelry in an attempt to pay.22 A survivor recalled that Jews gave up wedding rings and gold but that “the people that they held for ransom never came back anyway.”23 In Łodź, a systematic plan of extraction was created. Ghetto administrators sought cash from “(1) the extraction of all currency from the ghetto, (2) the sale of goods produced by skilled Jewish labor, especially textile workers, within the ghetto, (3) the providing of unskilled Jewish labor for construction work in the city, and (4) ‘in the future’ the sale of goods held” in German warehouses.24 In Warsaw in January 1940, after an ethnic German was attacked, the Jewish Council was given 24 hours to raise 100,000 złoty in ransom money.25 In Łodź, the city government attempted to collect 275,000 RM from the Jewish community “to compensate for a drop in the city’s real estate and business tax revenues” created by the Nazis’ own policy of ghettoization.
Systematic looting of Jewish wealth extended into a myriad of other economic areas. In April 1940, the Generalgovernment issued a request for information that included the question: “What property is still in Jewish hands? Where is the Jewish property and of what does it consist?”26 The theft of residences by Nazis and/or their sale to local non-Jews accompanied the displacement of Jews into ghettos. In this way, valuable real estate was stolen along with most of the property that was left behind. During the first winter of the war against the Soviet Union, Jews were forced to give up furs, ski clothing, and any other warm garments for the woefully unprepared German Army. A survivor of the Krakow ghetto described the event in her memoirs:
These furs were to be brought to a building on Limanowskiego Street. Whoever did not give up their furs would be put to death immediately . . . So on a day that saw the temperature drop well below the freezing point, Jews in painfully thin cloth coats stood in line and handed over the warm furs.27
This “Fur Aktion” took place in many ghettos across the East. Systematic thefts of Jewish wealth greatly impacted ghetto inhabitants. As the number of these “ransoms” increased, the Jews became less and less able to pay, as they were unable to acquire new wealth. Second, the wealth they did bring into the ghetto was a vital means to acquire food, firewood, clothing, and other necessities and, as their reserves were depleted, it became increasingly difficult to survive.
In conclusion, ghettoization evolved organically, like many Nazi policies, as leaders on the ground sought to deal with their Jewish “problems” in a variety of different ways. These problems themselves originated from the failure of other options for the removal of Jews from Europe rather than from a set plan ending with their extermination. While ghettoization eventually proved useful in carrying out the murder of Jews, that was not the initial goal.
All Ghettos were Local: The Diversity of Ghettoization in the East
Everything depends on local conditions and on the particular despot on whom our fate depends. There are cities and towns where there is no ghetto, where shrewd authorities are ready to accept bribes. And in places where ghettos have been established, they are not all closed.
CHAIM KAPLAN, Warsaw, March 28, 194128
When most people envision a Holocaust ghetto, they see Warsaw, with its large wall topped with broken glass and bridges over streetcar lines passing through. They see thousands of people packed into a small area. And they see the massive train deportations to the extermination centers. While some of the larger ghettos conform to these iconic images, the diversity in ghetto geographies and experiences is actually quite surprising. Browning emphasizes that “There is no single interpretive framework that encompasses ghettoization in the German-occupied East throughout the war years . . . ghettoization occurred in different places at different times in different forms and for different reasons.”29 As Chaim Kaplan pointed out in 1941, the nature of the ghetto experience depended upon local conditions. The editors of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s comprehensive encyclopedia themselves add: “There was no clear definition of what a ghetto was. Even the wartime German authorities themselves had varying conceptions of a ghetto, using it to mean quite different things according to the time and place.”30
What we do know is that there were at least 1,150 different ghettos throughout occupied Eastern Europe, including in Nazi-allied countries like Romania and Hungary. Size, location, time, and leadership influenced the diversity of these places. No ghetto was like any other and many were wildly different from each other. The Lwów ghetto, for example, like a few others, ceased to become a ghetto entirely and was redesignated a concentration camp (Judenlager or JULAG) in February 1943.
Ghettos came in a wide variety of sizes and shapes. The largest, like Warsaw, Łodź, and Lwów, held hundreds of thousands of Jews. Others, like the Mrozy ghetto in Belarus, held only around 1,000, many of whom were refugees from elsewhere.31 As the Germans moved further east, there were fewer large cities, and ghetto populations dropped away somewhat. Ghettos in more rural areas became collecting points for Jews from even smaller surrounding towns. Two separate ghettos were established in the town of Proskurow in Ukraine to house between 10,000 and 12,000 Jews from the town and surrounding areas.32 In the town of Slonim in Belarus, the large number of Jews living in the market town plus the influx of refugees from other areas resulted in a majority Jewish population. The Nazi civil administrator, Gerhard Erren, was not at all prepared and lamented that “it was almost impossible to seal the ghetto as there was no barbed wire and insufficient security.”33 Erren’s local economic struggles to deal with his ghetto can be seen in his gleeful statement after the first murder of Slonim Jews: “The Juden-Aktion of November 14, 1941 has greatly ameliorated the housing problem and also rid us of 10,000 unnecessary mouths to feed.”34 Most ghettos were smaller than even this, meaning that Jews were often confined in close proximity to their erstwhile neighbors.
The Warsaw and Łodź ghettos were massive and tightly sealed. The Warsaw ghetto, in particular, was enclosed by a brick wall with 28 points of exit and entry for 53,000 inhabitants with the requisite passes.35 Other ghettos were not closed at all. In the town of Brzezany in Ukraine, the ghetto remained simply a designated area for over a year. Until mid-January 1942, its Jewish residents could “move quite freely in and around town.” Even when authorities began controlling their movements, the tactic was simply an announcement in the paper prohibiting Jews from leaving the ghetto area.36 In Budapest, the capital of Hitler’s ally Hungary, no ghetto existed at all (until two small ones were established). Even when Nazi authorities began controlling Jewish policy in Hungary, Jews were confined to individual apartment buildings that were marked as “yellow star houses” but scattered throughout the city. Here, the area the Nazis envisioned as the site of the future ghetto in 1944 was home to many Christians who governmental authorities were reluctant to inconvenience by forcing to move.37 Individual apartments were also seized in the process of ghettoization to house non-Jewish bombing victims.38 In other ghettos, a simple barbed wire fence and sign marked the ghetto, but security was rather haphazard. The Kishinev ghetto, created by Romanian officials, was contained via “makeshift barriers” on the streets surrounding the ghetto.39 It even had Christian residents who refused to move. According to one witness, these neighbors took advantage of Jews, stealing their possessions.40
Ghetto populations themselves could be quite diverse. Almost all ghettos forced together groups of Jews who had been divided by class, religious, social, and political status in close quarters. Often, rural Jews were consolidated in urban centers. The Warsaw ghetto contained 5,000 baptized Christian Jews and three working Catholic churches. Baptized Jews, too, were ghettoized because the Nazi definition of Jewishness did not recognize conversion. The head of the ghetto recalled meeting with the priest assigned to minister to these Jews, who told him that “after the war he would leave as much of an anti-Semite as he was when he arrived there.”41 Clearly, this priest cared for his “Christian” congregation only. As the Holocaust progressed, tens of thousands of Western European Jews arrived in ghettos in places like Riga, Minsk, Łodź, Warsaw, and Kaunas. Often, these highly assimilated Jews did not even speak the local language and had no connections outside the ghetto. In just these examples, we can see the local variations in the forms of ghettoization and begin to imagine the impact they had on life and death in these areas.
Chronology also played an important role in the form and function of ghettos in Eastern Europe: when was a ghetto established and how long did it last? The ghetto in Budapest did not appear until 1944 and did not last long. The first ghettos established in occupied Poland lasted the longest while those created as the Nazis moved east had much shorter life spans. This is, in part, due to the three waves of Einsatzgruppen killings. The second wave targeted non-working Jews in ghettos and the third consisted of the liquidation of the remaining ghetto populations. The second wave moved from east to west, leaving western ghettos in existence longer. Another reason for the shorter existence of ghettos established after 1940 was the accelerated process of expropriation, selection, and victimization first perfected in Poland. In addition, the (mis)fortunes of the German war effort meant that many ghettos were liquidated or deported as the Germany army retreated, so as to prevent them from falling into Soviet hands. The Vitebsk ghetto lasted only ten to twelve weeks before its 10,000 to 11,000 inhabitants were murdered in a nearby ravine.42 Likewise, the ghetto in Zhitomir, Ukraine, was established in July 1941 and liquidated in September.43 The Warsaw ghetto, on the other hand, lasted four years. The Kaunas ghetto lasted until 1944.
Chronology and location had a very real impact on the lives of its inhabitants. For example, shorter-lived ghettos had fewer opportunities to develop smuggling operations with the outside population or to build effective administrations and resistance movements. Longer-lived ghettos offered the possibility of preparation for liquidation, but also the increased risk of disease or starvation.
Finally, a Judenrat or Jewish council, usually headed by a chief managed each ghetto internally. The make-up and nature of these vital organizations, and even the personalities of the leadership, had significant repercussions for the average inhabitant. Particularly in the occupied Soviet Union, the formation, structure, and purpose of ghettos was uneven, inconsistent, and decidedly unsystematic. Thus, we see in this brief discussion that “the ghetto” is not a clearly defined concept that we can use uncritically. Ghettoization varied greatly from place to place and time to time. The evolution of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, the course of World War II in the East, and the individuals (Jewish and German) responsible for administering it all influenced ghetto experience. This great diversity of structure and conditions again highlights the developmental nature of the Holocaust and the importance of studying it at the local level.
“Choiceless Choices:” The Jewish Councils and Their Leaders
It seems that Rumkowski in Łodź issued his own currency “Chaimki.” He has been nicknamed “Chaim the Terrible.”
ADAM CZERNIAKOW, diary entry, Warsaw, August 29, 194044
He perpetuated his name by his death more than by his life. His end proves conclusively that he worked and strove for the good of his people; that he wanted its welfare and continuity even though not everything done in his name was praiseworthy.
CHAIM KAPLAN, diary entry, July 26, 1942, on the suicide of Adam Czerniakow45
Nazi authorities recognized that managing ghettos would be incredibly difficult and that local Jewish assistance would be required. However, as the quotations above illustrate, the nature and quality of ghetto leadership varied, as ultimately it was shaped by individuals. The Nazis still viewed Jewish leadership as necessary. Reinhard Heydrich dictated this in his ghettoization directive of September 21, 1939:
(1) In each Jewish community, a Council of Jewish Elders is to be set up which, as far as possible, is to be composed of the remaining influential personalities and rabbis. The Council is to be composed of 24 male Jews (depending on the size of the Jewish community).
It is to be made fully responsible (in the literal sense of the word) for the exact execution according to terms of all instructions released or yet to be released.
. . .
(3)
The Jewish Councils are to take an improvised census of the Jews of their area, possibly divided into generations (according to age)
. . .
(5)
The Councils of Elders of the concentration centers are to be made responsible for the proper housing of the Jews to be brought in from the country.46
These Jewish Councils or Judenräte were responsible for the day-to-day operations of the ghetto according to the orders issued by their German superiors. Not all ghettos had a Jewish council. For example, some, particularly in Romania and Hungary but also in the occupied Soviet Union, were controlled by “non-Jewish auxiliary forces (militias, gendarmerie, the municipality.)”47 The German Army directly administered some Jewish ghettos during the invasion of the Soviet Union until civil administrators arrived.
As the two introductory quotations indicate, the nature of ghetto leadership was as diverse as ghettos themselves. Proskurov (mentioned earlier), for example, had a Jewish council headed by a woman.48 The Jewish Council, in form and function, was, as Saul Friedländer aptly described it, “a distorted . . . replica . . . of self-government within the framework of the traditional kehilla, the centuries-old communal organization of the Jews.”49 Thus, just as the ghetto itself, the Jewish Council had an historic ancestor.
But, of course, the Nazis ultimately determined the work of these Jewish Councils for them to serve their goals, not those of the Jewish community. This forced cooperation makes the topic of the Jewish Council in the Holocaust a difficult and uncomfortable one. Many, if not most, decisions and actions fell into the category of “choiceless choices,” that is, choices between the least, worse alternative, creating a situation which calls into question the very possibility of choice.50 Councils and their leaders came to diverse decisions and responses to Nazi demands and to their own elevation to authority. Throughout Jewish communities then and now, some Jewish leaders are deeply condemned as having taken advantage of their position and collaborating with the Nazis. Others are seen as having done the best they could under impossible circumstances. Some members of the Jewish council were called to account by Jewish Courts of Honor after the war. However, lest we be too quick to judge, we should remember that, in the Generalgovernment, “of the 146 Jewish elders originally nominated by the Germans, 57 lost their positions because they were not willing to meet the demands that were placed upon them by the Germans: 11 resigned their posts, 26 were replaced, 18 were liquidated and 2 committed suicide.”51 This section examines the leadership of three ghettos and how ghettos were administered.
Historian Isaiah Trunk conducted some of the most in-depth research on the make-up and function of Jewish Councils during the Holocaust. Looking at a group of 740 to 850 members of Jewish councils, he paints a solid picture of who these men were. Most (85%) were older, between 30 and 60 years old. They were married and had at least a high school education, with 39 percent having a higher degree. The majority of Council members were merchants and professionals. They were overwhelmingly locals.52 Politically, the majority were Zionists of some kind and the vast majority (99.9 %) had been elected officials in the kehilla community self-help organization or in city government. They were also active in community organizations from the professional to the philanthropic.53 The Germans were thus savvy enough to impress into service already respected and influential members of Jewish communities.
The nature of many Jewish Councils began with the leadership, so we will begin by looking at three ghetto leaders and their approaches to governing: Adam Czerniakow in Warsaw, Chaim Rumkowski in Łodź, and Elkhanan Elkes in Kaunas. While this group provides a sample of differing experiences, each ghetto and its leadership was unique. In many ghettos, the decisions and behaviors of Council leaders were well documented, and many kept a diary.
Adam Czerniakow was born in 1880 in Warsaw. He studied chemistry in Warsaw and industrial engineering in Dresden.54 His time in Germany gave him an understanding of German culture and mastery of the language. Throughout his life, Czerniakow advocated for the rights of Jewish workers and craftsmen, and was a political activist. He was also a renaissance man, “representative of the Warsaw Jewish assimilated middle class,” educational activist, poet, teacher, journalist, and engineer.55 Thus, it is perhaps no surprise that he was chosen to lead what would become the largest ghetto in Europe. Ironically, the Polish mayor of Warsaw first appointed Czerniakow Chairman of the Jewish Council during the German attack on the city. On September 23, 1939, when he took over the task, Czerniakow wrote in his diary: “A historic role in a besieged city. I will try to live up to it.”56 This position did not last long, nor did Poland.
On October 4, Einsatzgruppe IV reaffirmed Czerniakow’s appointment. He was fifty-nine. He was then ordered to name twenty-four members to the council, which he did, choosing a variety of notable members of the Jewish community. Czerniakow answered to a variety of Nazi officials but, in arguably the most crucial period, to Heinz Auerswald, the Nazi administrator of the Warsaw ghetto, appointed on May 15, 1941. He faced challenges common to all Jewish Councils: the health, feeding, and municipal management of a large group of people with insufficient resources in the face of an unsympathetic Nazi administration. By mid-1941, the Warsaw Jewish Council employed 6,000 Jews in approximately 30 separate departments.57 As in all large government organizations, the Council included both selfless public servants and corrupt opportunists. Warsaw diarist Chaim Kaplan recorded that “according to rumor, the President is a decent man. But the people around him are the dregs of humanity.”58
Czerniakow’s greatest challenge was balancing the needs of the ghetto with the often-unpredictable cruelty of the German administration. The fundamental question facing all Jewish Councils was how to keep their population alive while simultaneously fulfilling harsh Nazi demands. Czerniakow seems to have chosen to appease German authorities by adhering to their demands as best he could. However, he spent much of his time meeting with SS and city officials in attempts to mitigate those demands. Czerniakow “tried to use logical arguments with the Germans; he used the arts of persuasion, managed to postpone some decrees, paid ransoms and bribes, gave presents.”59 Like all Jewish Council leaders, he always “negotiated” from a position of absolute weakness and zero power.
While Kaplan (and others) saw the council as “an abomination in the eyes of the Warsaw community,” those working closely with it and its elderly but tireless leader had different impressions.60 His personal secretary noted that Czerniakow “believed that the war would end soon, that it was necessary to hold on. He did not believe in the possibility of genocide.”61 It is in this last area, that Jewish Councils were most disadvantaged. Most did not believe that the Nazis intended to murder all Jews, so they chose different courses of accommodation. Czerniakow cultivated relationships with Auerswald and others to make the ghetto run as smoothly as possible. He was “ready to reach a compromise with the Germans in order to save the Warsaw Jews.”62
As we have seen, Jews in the past had faced violence and discrimination from non-Jewish populations. They responded by accommodating, forging communal bonds, and generally waiting for anger and violence to subside and for life to return to normal. Recognizing that Nazis eventually intended the complete physical annihilation of the Jews and that none of the past tactics could be successful was extremely difficult. Even after word of the extermination centers reached ghettos, it was often dismissed. Contemporary historian of the Warsaw ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum, wrote in December 1942:
Initially people did not believe at all in Treblinka, and anyone who spoke about it was shouted down as a spreader of panic, a pessimist who enjoyed wounding Jews. It was not understood that it was possible simply to murder tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children . . . Is this possible now, in the twentieth century?63
Czerniakow himself did not initially believe this possible and Nazi ghetto administrator Auerswald took advantage of Czerniakow’s “naïveté,” deceiving him into even reassuring worried ghetto inhabitants.64 Czerniakow finally came to terms with the harsh reality of the Final Solution during the massive deportations of July 1942. In the end, his desire to compromise with the Germans helped send them to their deaths. He wrote on July 22, 1942, “We were told that all the Jews irrespective of sex and age . . . will be deported to the East . . . The most tragic dilemma is the problem of children in orphanages, etc. I raised this issue—perhaps something can be done.”65 Instead, Czerniakow’s concerns were brushed aside and he was referred to the SS officer in charge of the deportations and told that the mass deportations would continue seven days a week. He likely realized neither the children nor the rest could be saved. At this point, Czerniakow resolved not to preside over the murder of his people and killed himself with cyanide in his office. Before committing suicide, he wrote two letters, one to his wife and another to the Jewish Council. He told his wife that “They are demanding of me that I kill the children of my people with my own hands. Nothing is left but for me to die.” To his colleagues, he wrote, “I am helpless, my heart is breaking with sorrow and pity; I can bear it no longer. My act will show the truth to all and will perhaps lead them to the right path of action.”66
Czerniakow’s death, like his work on behalf of Warsaw’s Jews, received mixed responses. Some, like Kaplan in the quote at the beginning of the section, praised his sacrifice. The leader of the underground, however, suggested that he “could have committed suicide in another way, as a leader of the community warning his people.”67 Another ghetto inhabitant accused Czerniakow of “cowardice,” writing angrily, “Believe me, in our circumstances nothing was easier than choosing to die; deciding to survive was harder by far. Czerniakow should have lived and led the rebellion.”68 However, with the availability of Czerniakow’s diaries to historians, it appears that under the circumstances, he worked tirelessly with some success to care for his people. Saul Friedländer praised his “basic decency” in a time of “unbridled ruthlessness.” Czerniakow “devote[d] every every single day to his community, but he particularly cared for the humblest and the weakest among his four hundred thousand wards: the children, the beggars, the insane.”69
The man in charge of the second largest ghetto in Poland, Chaim Rumkowski, was a different individual altogether. Born in 1877 in Russia, he was a failed industrialist who then became an insurance salesman and active member of the Jewish community in Łodź, eventually directing an orphanage.70 Rumkowski was ordered to establish a Jewish Council in Łodź on October 13, 1939. He was the only survivor of the mass murder of that council in November. Nazis sealed the Łodź ghetto on May 1, 1940. Rumkowski became responsible for over 144,000 Jews crammed into an area of 1.6 square miles with an average of almost six people living in each room.71
Chairman Rumkowski took his job as leader of the Jewish community seriously, but also reveled in the massive amount of power he wielded. He “developed a reputation as disputatious, long-winded, fiercely independent, and strong willed.”72 Many noted Rumkowski’s ambition as boundless. He worked from well-appointed offices in Jewish Council headquarters and traveled in an “impeccably lacquered” coach with a white horse and a driver “impeccably dressed in white livery.”73 Ringelblum described Rumkowski’s visit to Warsaw in 1940. “Today,” he wrote, “there arrived from Łodź, Chaim, or as he is called, ‘King Chaim’ Rumkowski, an old man of seventy, extraordinarily ambitious and pretty nutty.” He referred to Rumkowski’s “Jewish kingdom” and noted that “he considers himself God anointed.”74 Rumkowski could be quite petty in his exercise of power, demanding, for example, that all cultural organizations be controlled by his council.75
Even more problematic was Rukowski’s treatment of his own co-workers. When a prominent doctor refused to join the council, Rumkowski became wildly angry, screaming at him, “Do you think you can just do what you like . . . This is war and we are like soldiers, we have to carry out orders, obey without condition and fulfill our tasks unconditionally—or die! If you do not do what I, the president of the Jewish Council, order [you to do], I will crush you like an ant.”76 Such outbursts and megalomania were not the worst of Rumkowski’s excesses. Lucille Eichengreen was seventeen when she was deported from Germany to Łodź, where she found work with the Council. Rumkowski sexually assaulted her. She remembered, “And I was alone in the office and he would pull up a chair and we had a couple of conversations. He talked and I would listen, and he molested me.”77 Other accounts corroborate Rumowski’s habits of taking advantage of young women. Some even accuse him of having molested the children in his orphanage. He was known to deport people who had angered him in some way. In the summer of 1940, he arrested the leaders of a protest blaming him for ghetto conditions and had some deported to a labor camp.78
Thus, Rumkowski was, in many respects, a vile man. Yet, he was also complicated. He did seek to take care of his community as best he could. Rumkowski was legitimately concerned about the plight of ghetto children and worked to help them. He was deeply concerned with hygiene and health in the ghetto and successfully improved life there to the extent he could. His “energetic promotion of the health, welfare, and occupational development of the community, contributed vitally to its collective survival.”79 Rumkowski confronted authorities, attempting to end the practice of “[pulling] people off the street for work.”80 He demonstrated some real courage in this, challenging even the Nazi administrator of the ghetto, Hans Biebow. He routinely reported Nazis who misbehaved in the ghetto or mistreated inhabitants. One complaint drove Biebow himself to confront Nazi police authorities, saying, “they should in no way allow themselves to be drawn into further insults directed against the Eldest. In my view, no patrolman or sergeant has the right to confront the Jews, and especially not the Jewish Eldest, in such a way or manner that, instead of working to my department’s advantage, leads in a considerable degree to its detriment.”81
How did Rumkowski get away with such behavior? One can point primarily to his strategy for the survival of the ghetto: work. Unlike Czerniakow, Rumkowski was prepared to sacrifice some for the survival of the many. To him, making the ghetto an indispensable economic concern was the only solution. He was undoubtedly clever in this approach, for he “succeeded in engaging his German masters on the plane of reasoning where the authorities’ self-serving interests intersected with the immediate requirements of the beleaguered community [he] sought to preserve.”82 For example, while some Jewish councils encouraged smuggling to augment the insufficient rations available, Rumkowski cracked down, jailing and deporting smugglers. In short, he dedicated his full energy to labor in the ghetto. He told inhabitants “We must work in order to be able to exist . . . Do your work fully in peace, do not daydream. I stand watch over our common interests.”83 In another speech, he reiterated that “The plan is work, work, and more work!”84 Rumkowski’s authoritarian rule over the ghetto and single-minded focus on saving at least some Jews through labor bore fruit as it intersected with Biebow’s plans of making the Łodź ghetto an important economic force for his own purposes.
The most controversial element of this (and the best example of the “choiceless choices” faced by all Jewish Councils) was Rumkowski’s response to German demands for deportations. Most historians agree that Rumkowski knew Jews were being murdered after deportation, but he continued to publicly dismiss such claims. He employed a utilitarian, if brutal, methodology for deportations, selecting those who could not work and could not contribute to his overall strategy for survival. Because he had proved his value, he conducted selections and deportations on his own authority . . . and, in at least one instance in January 1942, was able to decrease the number of victims demanded from 20,000 to 10,000.85 The most horrifying example of his willingness to sacrifice part for the whole came in September 1942, when the Nazis demanded 20,000 Jews for deportation. Rumkowski appeared before the ghetto and told the assembled crowd:
Fathers and mothers, give me your children! . . . I must carry out this difficult and bloody operation, I must cut off limbs in order to save the body! I must take away children, and if I do not, others too will be taken, God forbid . . . Common sense requires us to know that those must be saved who can be saved and who have a chance of being saved and not those whom there is no chance to save in any case.86
This astounding speech represents clearly Rumkowski’s calculations on how to save the most Jews: keep working people by deporting children and the sick and elderly first. He also recognized that had the Nazis been forced to do the selection themselves, anyone was fair game. The roundups began the next day. 6,000 children were deported to the Chelmno extermination center. A sixteen-year-old ghetto resident saw “two wagons full of little children drive past the open gate. Many of the children were dressed in their holiday best, the little girls with colored ribbons in their hair. In spite of the soldiers in their midst, the children were shrieking at the top of their lungs. They were calling out for their mothers.”87
A child survivor of Łodź ghetto wrote of the Jewish Council that “These people, although they were Jewish, their sympathy had gone. We were being badly treated. We didn’t see the Germans any more, they were outside, we just saw our own people mistreating us.”88 Rumkowski’s corruption certainly characterized his reign as Chairman and he was usually reprehensible. However, his legacy remains complex. He was proud of his accomplishment of saving Jews, telling a colleague, “All my work here is to save as many as possible. Afterwards . . . if I survive, let them try me. Let them! I don’t care.”89 Rumkowski did not survive. In August 1944, he volunteered to accompany his family to Auschwitz, where, according to some accounts, he was murdered by Jews from his former ghetto.90 The nature of his death remains unclear. However, the Łodź ghetto outlasted any other ghetto in Poland. 68,000 Jews were still alive in July 1944, over a year after the Warsaw ghetto had been completely annihilated.91 It was only the fortunes of war that prevented the Red Army from liberating those 68,000, as they were but 60 miles away from the city. Thus, while historian Yehuda Bauer states unequivocally that “Of all the men who served on Jewish Councils during the Holocaust years, Rumkowski probably was the nearest thing to a major war criminal,” he also asks whether, had those 68,000 survived, “might not Rumkowski, despite all his crimes, have been hailed as a hero?”92 Thus, Rumkowski is both a stark comparison to Czerniakow and an enigmatic character in his own right.
For a final example of a ghetto leader, we turn to the Kaunas ghetto in Lithuania. Unlike Warsaw and Łodź, this ghetto was established much later, and as part of the “war of annihilation” in the occupied Soviet Union. These factors certainly influenced its leadership, but its leader, Dr. Elkhanan Elkes, was as strikingly different from Czerniakow and Rumkowski as his ghetto was from theirs. Elkes, born in 1879, had been a physician before the World War I and a doctor in the Russian Army in that war before becoming chief of the internal medicine department at the Jewish Hospital in Kaunas. His service as the personal physician to the Lithuanian prime minister and many in the diplomatic community enhanced Elkes’ public profile.93 Kaunas’s Jewish community widely respected him.
The German Army arrived three days after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Bloody pogroms against Jews soon broke out. Lithuanian Mayor, Kazys Palčiauskas ordered a ghetto created on July 10 in the poor section of Slobodka. It is noteworthy that the Jewish community of Kaunas elected a Jewish Council and a chairperson before they were ordered to do so by the Nazis. Jewish leaders approached Dr. Elkes on August 4, 1941, urging him to accept the position of Chairman. His future deputy, Leib Garfunkel, described the scene after Elke first declined. A respected rabbi rose and said, “please understand, dear and beloved Dr. Elkes, that only to the Nazi murderers will you be ‘Head of the Jews,’ in our eyes you will be the head of our Community, elected in our most tragic hour, when blood runs from all of us and the murderer’s sword is suspended over our heads.”94 Garfunkel recalled that “Dr. Elkes stood pale and silent.”95 Reluctantly, he accepted despite his age and poor health.
Unlike Czerniakow and Rumkowski, who only faced deportations to killing centers much later in their tenure, Elkes confronted the murder of his community rather quickly. Indeed, he had already lived through the mass violence of the early days of occupation. As Einsatzgruppe A reported as of July 11, 1941, “in Kaunas, up to now a total of 7,800 Jews have been liquidated, partly through pogroms and partly through shooting by Lithuanian Kommandos.”96
Eleven days after Elke’s election, the 30,000 Jews of Kaunas were moved into the ghetto (which temporarily consisted of a “Large” and “Small” ghetto connected by a footbridge). Dr. Elke faced the same challenges as other Jewish leaders in terms of health and food, but also the Nazis’ murderous anti-Jewish policies. By this point in the Holocaust, many of the “standard operating procedures” regarding ghettos had been established by the Germans. In addition, the evolution of Jewish policy was beginning to close in on physical annihilation as the “Final Solution.” Finally, the treatment of the Jewish population in the occupied Soviet Union was more violent from the first moments.
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
On October 27, 1941, the Jewish Council was told that all Jews were to assemble the next morning on an open ground known as “Democracy Square.” The Jewish Council, torn over how to respond, finally turned to Chief Rabbi Shapiro for advice. Shapiro spent the night studying Hebrew scripture, searching for an answer to this impossible problem. He determined that, as diarist Avraham Tory recounted, “When an evil edict had imperiled an entire Jewish community . . . communal leaders were bound to summon their courage, take the responsibility, and save as many lives as possible.”97 Elkes made the decision to order the assembly.98 He hoped, like Rumkowski, to save some portion of his community by allowing others to be “selected.” In the end, 9,200 Kaunas Jews were marched out and murdered in the nineteenth century Fort IX, on the outskirts of the city.99 This became known as the “Great Aktion.” Ghetto diarist Tory wrote that “Some thirty thousand proceeded that morning into the unknown, toward a fate that could already have been sealed for them by the bloodthirsty rulers.”100 To his great credit, Elkes forbid his Jewish council from giving preferential treatment to friends and relatives.101
Elkes wrote later what the responsibility of leadership felt like, saying, “We are steering our battered ship in the heart of the ocean while every day waves of persecutions and harsh decrees hasten to drown it.”102 However, unlike Rumkowski, Elkes personally went to the square to intervene. He successfully saved some families and was nearly beaten to death for his efforts.
Like ghetto leaders elsewhere, Elkes focused on making his ghetto as productive as possible. Tory wrote on March 16, 1943, “Lately, we have been inclined to connect our fate with the growing demand for Jewish labor . . . the Ghetto has eight to nine thousand productive and creative workers, who contribute their part to the German war effort.”103 The Jews of the Kaunas ghetto worked as slave laborers at a variety of locations and this did probably prolong the ghetto’s existence, even when it was turned into a JULAG concentration camp. Ultimately, the ghetto was liquidated in 1944, with surviving inhabitants being sent to concentration camps in the Reich.
Two other elements distinguish Elke from his peers: support for resistance and the behavior of his ghetto police. Unlike some ghetto leaders, Elkes supported the underground and resistance in Kaunas. Many ghetto leaders actively opposed armed resistance, fearing collective reprisals against the ghetto population. Elkes, on the other hand, “financed the purchase of arms for the local resistance organization and provided facilities for manufacturing grenades and explosives.”104 In addition, the ghetto police, often corrupt and vindictive elsewhere, were resisters and generally honorable men in Kaunas. Indeed, during the liquidation of the ghetto, the Nazis arrested the remaining policemen and tortured them to discover hiding places in the ghetto. Thirty-six policemen were killed as a result.105
The examples of these three men—Czerniakow, Rumkowski, and Elkes—give only a brief illustration of the various tactics taken by ghetto leaders as they faced an impossible situation. Their choices reflect the influence of their own personalities, the disparate times and places in which they served, and differing strategies for ensuring the survival of their communities. Ghetto leaders in the thousands of Eastern European ghettos faced similar circumstances and were forced to navigate local conditions in the face of overwhelming Nazi power.
Ghetto Life: The Daily Struggle for Survival
The ghetto was a captive city-state in which territorial confinement was combined with absolute subjugation to German authority . . . Each ghetto was on its own, thrown into sudden isolation, with a multiplicity of internal problems and a reliance on the outside world for basic sustenance. Fundamental to the very idea of the ghetto was the sheer segregation of its residents . . . Physically the ghetto inhabitant was henceforth incarcerated. Even in a large ghetto he stood never more than a few minutes’ walk from a wall or fence.
Historian RAUL HILBERG106
All ghettos had much in common, not the least of which was the sheer physical confinement that Hilberg describes above. Hunger, slave labor, and a constant fear of abuse or death meted out at the hands of the Nazis characterized daily life for most inhabitants. On top of this, the ghetto leadership faced the task of essentially running a municipality. As we have seen, the size of these ghetto “city-states” varied from the massive Warsaw ghetto (460,000) to Kaunas (30,000) to Młynów (ca. 1,500). Each had to carry out the normal functions of a city (health, sanitation, education taxation, etc) and confront the abnormal challenges presented by the Nazis (starvation, forced labor, deportation, “ransoms.”)
Some ghettos administrations were more complex than others. Size and duration of the ghetto helped determine how effective such administrations could be. While the Łodz´ ghetto lasted from 1939–44, for example, the Młynów ghetto survived less than a year.107 The Łwów ghetto administration was divided into 22 divisions and employed around 4,000 people, which constituted 4.5 percent of the ghetto population.108 The Warsaw ghetto had 38 different departments, offices, and agencies, not including subsections. It employed 6,000.109 Sometimes ghettos were fortunate to have officials with pre-war experience working in their areas of expertise; others, such as the police, often learned on the job.
The most pressing of needs was food. Starvation and malnutrition shadowed every inhabitant of the ghetto. Children and the elderly were particularly vulnerable. German authorities, reluctant to expend German resources on Jews, often supplied the ghetto with insufficient or inedible supplies. For some ghettos, no food was supplied. In most cases, German authorities sought to extract some form of payment in exchange for food. The Polish underground resistance organization reported on May 23, 1941, that, in the Warsaw ghetto, “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 . . . Meanwhile the Germans continue to plunder the wealthy Jews.”110 In Łwów, a boy recalled seeing “people fighting in the street below. One guy was running with a knife and stabbed a man in the back for food. Other people were just sitting in the street dying.”111
Ghetto communities attempted to alleviate suffering in two ways: official and unofficial (smuggling). Official means consisted of the tireless work of the departments responsible for arranging food shipments into the ghetto as German officials begrudgingly supplied some food. However, the food was never in sufficient quantity . . . or quality. A German official in Łodz´ stated that “preferably the most inferior merchandise” should be sent to the ghetto.112 In addition, the quantity of food supplied never approached the required daily caloric intake. In Łodz´, Jews received less than one and a half pounds of meat, twelve pounds of potatoes, and one egg for an entire month.113
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In the traditional spirit of Jewish self-help (kehilla), ghetto organizations eased conditions somewhat. These efforts resulted in varying levels of success, though they never were sufficient to solely guarantee survival. Before America entered the war, some support came from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Soup kitchens proliferated. In Warsaw, almost 2,000,000 meals were served in March 1940.114 In the Łwów ghetto, the Food Supply Department managed a total of 49 distribution sites.115 The ghetto there also supplied packages of food to the Janowska concentration camp in the city . . . for a certain period of time.116 In Minsk, the Jewish Council operated a canteen where most of the food “consisted of waste from German kitchens; potato peels were a staple.”117
Almost immediately, however, smuggling became vital in providing food and other supplies to the ghetto. Jewish councils were often divided in their attitudes toward smuggling. On the one hand, they did not want to antagonize their German overlords but on the other, they recognized the ghetto could not survive without additional sources of food (and fuel). Local non-Jews often took advantage of the situation to enrich themselves in exchange for food. As a survivor from Łwów recalled, “rations for Jews were at a starvation level. We were giving away, piece by piece, what we still had at home in exchange for potatoes, flour, vegetables, and other foodstuffs to supplement the inadequate rations. This was a great opportunity for peasants from the nearby villages . . . The farmers were evading the ban [on illegal trading] not for humanitarian reasons but because they got such good deals in these exchanges.”118 Children, often the most adept smugglers, crawled through small holes in the fence or wall and returned with food. Other food sources included workers employed outside the ghetto who had contact with non-Jews. Historian of the Warsaw ghetto, Ringelblum, recorded in January 1941: “Heard marvelous stories of the smuggling that goes on via the Jewish graveyard. In one night they transported twenty-six cows by that route.”119 Smugglers, of course, risked being killed by German or local police. Sometimes, as in the Kaunas ghetto, smugglers were even arrested by Jewish police. Tory recalled the arrest of a man who had taken up the “ignominious business” of black-marketeering. He wrote that the ghetto population was so frightened of Gestapo reprisals that they were moving out of their homes: “they fear that all the inmates of this street will be arrested.”120
Despite official and unofficial efforts of the Jewish Councils and ghetto populations, starvation and hunger continued to kill. In addition, it weakened immune systems and, combined with poor sanitation and hygiene, led to the outbreak of disease, particularly typhus. Ironically, therefore, Nazi authorities created precisely the conditions in the ghetto for the epidemics they used as an excuse for ghettoization in the first place. Overcrowding simply multiplied the effect. Even in areas with slightly more space, the locations chosen often lacked sanitation and infrastructure.
As a result, Jewish ghetto administration strove valiantly to provide medical treatment, even when facing a constant shortage of medicine and equipment. Dr. Blady-Szwajger, who worked in the children’s hospital in Warsaw described the ghetto doctor’s task as “superhuman medicine.” “We had our duty as human beings,” she later wrote, “but first you had to be made of stone.”121 Everything about the ghetto system made medical care extremely difficult. Indeed, in many places, Germans stole all valuable equipment and supplies from Jewish hospitals. In Częstochowa, the building itself was confiscated. Medical personnel established their own hospitals which varied in size and capability. In Krakow, a former prayer house and Jewish school housed the contagious disease hospital. A “primitive wooden shack” was the hospital in Kutno.122
Doctors were often in short supply; many had been murdered by the Einsatzgruppen as “Jewish intelligentsia.” In the smaller ghetto of Brzeziny (ca. 7,000 inhabitants), the local doctor wrote: “I am the only Jewish doctor in the ghetto . . . A house has been given to us . . . Ladies go around from home to home collecting underwear, beds, dishes, and other things for the hospital.”123 The Kaunas ghetto yearbook noted that “doctors and nurses of the Sanitation Service were often called on to attend to patients at night. To walk around in the ghetto after 10pm is forbidden. With the armbands of the Sanitation Service, they can do their work even at night.”124 Knowing the German fear of epidemic, doctors often sought to hide patients with infectious disease for fear they would be murdered. In Brzeziny, this is precisely what happened as typhus patients were rounded up and killed in a gas van in April 1942.125 Even with the best of efforts, ghettos remained deadly places. In 1942, Warsaw Jewish authorities reported that the death toll “still hovers around 5,000 per month;” in Łodz´, 40 percent of the ghetto was ill by 1944. In three years, 83,000 Jews died of “natural” causes in the Warsaw ghetto.126
Despite the daily horrors of ghetto existence, life went on. Orphanages were established for increasing numbers of children without parents. Parents and authorities both were concerned with children, often trying to protect them from the horrors around them. Though the Nazis outlawed education, underground schools flourished. Both religious and secular schools were established. One survivor from Warsaw recalled that “we learned all that from books which were pre-war and out of date, but we learnt with great enthusiasm. People learnt foreign languages: Latin, Greek, German, French, English. People were continuing with higher education; there were university professors who were also giving courses in everything.”127 Schools struggled with the unique conditions of ghetto life. One teacher asked, “How do you make an apathetic, hungry child, who is all the time thinking about a piece of bread, interested in something else?”128
Cultural life also flourished in many ghettos, despite restrictions placed upon inhabitants. Renowned Jewish artists, musicians, and writers were naturally interned as well. Many continued to practice their art, even in the oppressive setting of the ghetto. Much of the artistic material created in the ghettos of Eastern Europe was destroyed along with its creators, but some has survived. For example, Władisław Szlengel, a well-known journalist and theater director before the war, became a prolific poet during his time in the Warsaw ghetto. He called himself “the chronicler of those drowning.”129 Szlengel was murdered during the ghetto uprising. Official cultural departments arranged events in many ghettos. Photographer George Kadish documented Kaunas ghetto life in a series of photographs which he hid and retrieved after the war. An entry from the Łodz´ Ghetto Chronicle illustrates the breadth of cultural activities that took place there in 1941:
In 1941, the House of Culture performed its one hundredth in a series of concerts. This jubilee concert took place on the last day of the year and was devoted to a violin recital by Bronisława Rotszat accompanied by maestro [Teodor] Ryder. The program consisted of works by Bach, Glazunov, and Mozart. Aside from the one hundred concerts, the House of Culture, which was created on March 1, has presented 85 revue performances . . . there were two special shows for children.
ŁODŹ GHETTO CHRONICLE, December 29–31, 1941130
Theodor Ryder was a famous conductor who had performed at the Lyon Opera House in France. Even Germans attending his concerts reviewed them positively. One stated, “Ryder led the evening with talent.”131 Orchestras and theatrical performances were common. Cultural events allowed both ghetto inhabitants and the artists themselves some freedom of expression and escape from the hardships of daily life as did religion.
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Contrary to Western European Jews, Eastern European Jews were generally more religiously observant. Thus, many approached their persecution from a religious perspective. One example of this response comes from the Kaunas ghetto, where observant Jews turned to their rabbi for advice on their behavior. This was an ancient and critical practice of rabbinical Judaism. Individuals with disputes or questions turned to their rabbi, who would research scripture and come to a resolution. In Kaunas, Rabbi Ephraim Oshry and other rabbis sought to give advice on very new problems. Rabbi Oshry kept notes on the questions he was asked. Some examples are below:
Is one permitted to commit suicide?
Can you take the property of murdered Jews who have no surviving heirs?
May a Jew cook on the Sabbath if he was working in the ghetto soup kitchen?
May a woman who has become pregnant have an abortion?
Can one eat in the presence of a corpse?132
The nature and seriousness of such questions indicate the new and awful dilemmas Jews faced in the ghetto.
We owe much of our knowledge of ghetto life to the hundreds of individuals and organizations who dedicated themselves to preserving the history of their experience even in the face of their own deaths. The most well known of these projects was that of Warsaw historian, Emanuel Ringelblum, and the Oneg Shabbat archive he and his colleagues assembled and buried in milk jugs. Ringelblum systematically collected information on every aspect of life in the Warsaw ghetto. Similar efforts were conducted elsewhere. Avraham Tory managed to escape the Kaunas ghetto after hiding his diary and other documents.
One of the most controversial organizations in the ghettos was the Jewish Police, sometimes known as the jüdische Ordnungsdienst (JOD). Nazi officials required the establishment of a police force in the ghetto, ostensibly to deal with day-to-day policing. Often, the police came from the privileged class or intelligentsia or had bribed their way into such a position. A position in the police force was desirable for several reasons. First, it protected the policeman and his family from German authorities and from most deportations. Second, the job usually paid well and offered opportunities for other forms of enrichment, some less ethical than others. For example, in the Warsaw ghetto, police took bribes in exchange for letting ghetto inhabitants remain outdoors after curfew.133 Daily duties included investigating ordinary crime, maintaining law and order, and controlling smuggling. However, often both the Jewish Councils and the Germans used Jewish Police for tasks related to anti-Jewish policy. Police guarded the ghetto interior, collected taxes and ransoms, escorted inhabitants to slave labor, and ultimately, assisted in rounding up their fellow Jews for deportation. Frequently, the police were threatened with a selection of their own families if they failed. A diarist in Łodz´, for example, wrote that “To encourage the Jewish police and the firemen to conduct the operation conscientiously, promises that their closest relations would be spared had been made.”134 In Vilnius, ghetto police handed over the elderly and sick for deportation and were so helpful that German officers praised them for “enforcing a strict regime” and for “handing over to the Gestapo ‘Jews who had sinned.’”135 Without the assistance of the Jewish Police, deportations of Jews would have been more difficult for the Germans, but we must recognize that they would have taken place regardless.
While membership in the police could certainly represent a “choiceless” choice, many ghetto inhabitants had little sympathy for those who joined. A survivor from the Warsaw ghetto stated, “We knew they were treacherous and we disliked them for cooperating with the Germans. I wouldn’t do it for anything in the world.”136 Samuel Golfard from the Ukrainian town of Peremyshliany described the corruption of the police during deportations in his diary: “For thousands of złoty and for dollars they saved certain people. In this respect, they were not better or worse than many Germans, who for a bottle of vodka or a can of sardines spared one’s life. They [Jewish militia] were just somewhat cheaper.”137 In Lwów, a survivor remembered that “the Jewish police often used their truncheons against their fellow Jews. On the whole, the members of this police force were very unpopular, and the gulf between them and the general population widened daily.”138 Indeed, when the Lwów ghetto police were rounded up and brought to the Janowska concentration camp to be shot, the former ghetto inhabitants took revenge. One prisoner recalled the scene, writing angrily “Before the execution, crowds of inmates rushed at the policemen, savagely beating them. These traitors and Judases had earned their punishment at the hands of their own brothers, and their masters’ prize for their faithful service.”139
However, the situation remained complicated. A former member of the ghetto police in Warsaw remembered that “right from the start, the people of the ghetto developed antagonistic feelings toward the Order Service . . . At every step and every opportunity, the Order Service men were made to feel the community’s resentment and this naturally led to the Order Service reacting by closing ranks in defense of their own interests . . . This point of view created selfishness within the Service and contributed enormously to its fall into the whirlpool of decadence.”140 Other observers were more forgiving or, at least pragmatic. One survivor frankly characterized their service by saying, “were the Jewish police traitors . . . to their fellow Jewish brothers? I wouldn’t call them traitors. I think it was their way how to survive maybe a little longer, hoping that that they can save their families, when frankly they did it. If they didn’t do it somebody else would have done it.”141 In the Vilnius ghetto, resistance leader Abba Kovner singled out the Jewish Police as a “blind tool in the hands of our murderers.” However, he pointed out that “you, Jewish policemen, have at least a chance to demonstrate your personal integrity and national responsibility!” Among other things, he demanded that “Any act which threatens Jewish life should not be performed!”142
Many Jewish policemen across the ghettos of Eastern Europe heeded such calls. In the Kaunas ghetto during its liquidation, “No less than 140 policemen and officers of the . . . police were arrested and tortured to force them to reveal hiding places of the children and the elderly.” All refused, and only seven broke under torture.143 The Kaunas police also had a high representation in the underground. Other police decided individually to refuse to act against their consciences. In Lwów, during an Aktion, a Jewish policeman was ordered to murder Jewish children. He refused, telling the Gestapo he would rather be killed himself. The Nazis then killed him and murdered the children.144 Police often tried to warn people of forthcoming Aktions as well. Even during deportations, some policemen behaved honorably, saving their fellow Jews. One inhabitant of Łodz´ wrote that “Intervention was possible on the spot, and, in many cases, actions taken by our police proved effective.”145 Despite many actions of rescue and charity, the Jewish police remain an organization many view as tarnished by its behavior during the Holocaust.
The deaths of the ghettos, like their lives, took different forms at different times. As we have seen, some ghettos lasted weeks and some lasted years. The precise timing of ghetto liquidations varied. The ghetto in the small town of Skvira near Kiev, for example, lasted little more than month. On Friday, September 20, 1941 (three months after the invasion), the 850 Jews in the partially fenced-in ghetto were taken to the Jewish cemetery and shot by members of Einsatzkommando 5.146 Conversely, the Łodz´ and Warsaw ghettos lasted much longer. Larger ghettos were generally liquidated via large-scale deportations to extermination centers. For example, the remaining Jews in the Minsk ghetto were gassed at the Sobibor extermination center in September 1943. The Vilnius ghetto was shot at the Ponary Forest mass shooting site. Nazi authorities simply converted remaining ghetto space into a concentration camp for only working Jews. Only a few ghettos received this designation. Kaunas and Lwów ended their days as these so-called Judenlagers or JULAGS. In the end, all ghettos were liquidated in one way or another, with surviving remnants escaping or transferred into the concentration camp system. Death tolls were catastrophic. In Lwów, of the estimated 160,000 Jews in the ghetto in 1941, only 800 resurfaced in the city after the war (and they included people from the surrounding countryside). In most smaller towns throughout Eastern Europe, the liquidation of the ghetto meant the vanishing of centuries-old Jewish communities.
The ghetto formed an essential component of Jewish life during the Holocaust and was a singularly Eastern phenomenon. The concentration of Jews began in a relatively haphazard manner as a temporary measure, as the final disposition of the Jews of Europe evolved in Nazi circles. While ghettoization would eventually be very helpful in organizing the Final Solution, ghettos were not initially established with that end state in mind. The conditions and experiences of the ghettos also illustrate the diversity of responses to Nazi oppression by Jewish communities and the various tactics taken in an attempt to survive the intolerable situation in which ghetto Jews found themselves.
Selected Readings
Engelking, Barbara, and Jacek Leociak. The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City. Translated by Emma Harris. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
Lower, Wendy, ed. The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia. Lanham: Altamira Press in association with United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2011.
Michman, Dan. The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Tory, Avraham, Martin Gilbert, and Dina Porat. Surviving the Holocaust: The Kaunas Ghetto Diary. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Trunk, Isaiah. Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.