IN 1972, MORE THAN A quarter of a century after the end of the Holocaust, Isaiah Trunk published his pathbreaking Judenrat, the first major attempt to portray in systematic terms the institutions and conditions of Jewish life in the ghettos of Nazi Eastern Europe.1 It is a big volume, some seven hundred pages long, but, despite its size, it is also an understated work, for Trunk is one of those uncommon authors who promises less than he delivers. His preface deals with limits and limitations: an outline of Nazi administration in the East and a recital of sources at his disposal. The introduction, which was written by Jacob Robinson, is partly philosophical, partly polemic, and in no event foreshadows the dimensions of the contents. The substantive account is presented by Trunk in ordinary matter-of-fact language without intensification or climax. As he traverses his terrain, from schools to synagogues, or from labor to deportations, his tone remains constant. In this evenness, Trunk has managed to submerge everything: his range, depth, and findings.
The title of the book is Judenrat, “the Jewish Council,” or, rather, hundreds of them in various Eastern European ghettos. Trunk wanted to “achieve an objective history of the councils,” and thereby “find the key to internal Jewish history under Nazi rule,”2 but his book is not merely a depiction of that key; it deals with the whole house, for it is a full-scale political, economic, and social history of the ghetto as such. The various headings of chapters and subchapters indicate the scope of the discussion that comprises a gamut of topics including organizational developments in ghetto bureaucracy, commissions, and police; the problem areas of finances, taxes, production, and purchases; and programs involving bathhouses, kitchens, welfare, or medical aid.
There is a similar richness of documentation. Although Trunk calls special attention in the preface to a survey that netted replies from 927 respondents concerning 740 former council members and 112 ghetto police, this questionnaire material constitutes only about 5 percent of the two thousand citations in the notes, which are filled with references to orders issued by German supervisory agencies, reports of councils to the Germans, minutes of council meetings, newspapers, diaries, memoirs, and memorial books. Text and sources reveal the extent of Trunk’s effort, and intricate facts on every page reflect the author’s long preoccupation with numerous aspects of ghetto life.3
Trunk cautions against overgeneralization. At the outset, he stresses the importance of local conditions and the individuality of leaders in the Jewish communities.4 Yet he does not present the Warsaw ghetto in one chapter, Lodz in another, and additional ghettos down the line. The fragmentary nature of the source material would not in any case have allowed for an approach of that kind. Instead, he addresses himself to the essence of the ghettos, that is, the mode of their operations in regard to such all-pervasive problems as crowding, hunger, or the demands of the Germans; and he does so implicitly by using almost any item of information about a particular ghetto as illustrative of the situation in all of them. In this manner, he builds a mosaic that is generalization par excellence.
More than that, his whole book is a demonstration rather than a mere assertion that, notwithstanding the different internal structures of the Jewish communities or the diversity of personalities in the councils, the stories of all of these ghettos must be read as one history. This impression is underscored when we consider that Jewish perceptions and reactions were remarkably similar across the occupied territories, despite the relative isolation of the communities and their councils from each other. In the final analysis, the variation among ghettos is not as crucial as their commonality, nor is it primarily the classification of ghettos in terms of demographic or economic factors that counts, but the singularity of meaning in the phrase “Jewish ghetto” compared with everything else that has transpired in recent times throughout the world.
If Trunk had done no more than organize a compendium of facts in subject-matter categories, he would have furnished us with significant additions to our knowledge, but beyond any compilation, he also set forth a series of propositions about the nature of the ghettos and of the councils that governed them. Of course, it would be useless to look for these thoughts in some final chapter—Trunk eschews discoveries, and there is no recapitulation at the end. His summation is confined to five pages and there he considers solely an issue raised by Jacob Robinson in the introduction: the question of the councils’ “collaboration” with the Germans. Thus, an entire set of observations and conclusions is left buried in the text, some in lengthy passages, others in single sentences, still others in recurring themes and characterizations. For a review of Judenrat, nothing is more important than a consolidation of these points in analytic form. Here they are, under four headings, partly condensed from his account, partly developed from it, but mainly rooted in his evidence.5
The principal characteristic of the ghetto was the segregation of its inhabitants from the surrounding population. The Jewish ghetto was a closed-off society, its gates permanently shut to free traffic, so much so that Trunk labels as relatively “open” those ghetto communities in smaller cities that dispatched labor columns daily to projects outside the ghetto limits.6 That is not to imply the total absence of contacts with Germans or Poles. There were telephone, electric, gas, and water connections; removals of human waste; exports of manufactured goods; imports of coal, food, or raw materials; mail and parcel shipments through ghetto post offices; loans from banks, payments of rents, and so forth. In examining these links one must, however, always differentiate between institutional transactions that had to be maintained if the ghetto was to function and private bonds, across the boundaries, that could no longer be tolerated because they were incompatible with the function of the ghetto.
Even the official correspondence of Jewish ghetto authorities with neighboring German or Polish agencies or firms was largely severed, and the flow of orders and reports was confined as much as possible, though never completely, to a channel running from the German supervisors to the Jewish Council. The horizontal relationships built into so much of modern life were consequently replaced by an almost all-encompassing vertical regime, sometimes complex, as in the case of Warsaw and Lodz, often simple, as in outlying localities, but always standardized in a dictatorial manner.7
The hierarchical system of German supervision was designed for the purpose of absolutism. German orders were unqualified and council members were required to carry them out promptly and in full. Trunk underscores the fact that the members of the councils were not Nazi sympathizers, that, although some were ambitious and many deluded, they were not, and could not be regarded as, a German institution.8 They were, in short, Jews, and they could not fail to perceive the fate of Jewry as their fate as well.9 All the more bitter then was their task of receiving and implementing German decrees. Yet the directives of the Germans were only half of their problem. Less stark but equally burdensome was the necessity of asking for authorization to carry out every function of government, including duties expected of them. The councils had to obtain clearance for a variety of revenue measures; they had to “borrow” Jewish funds previously sequestered or confiscated under occupation ordinances; they even had to request permission to post German orders.
If the councils were rendered totally subordinate and dependent in their relations with the Germans, a corresponding status was fashioned for the Jewish population subjected to council rule. The German sentiment in this matter was expressed unambiguously by one official when he asserted, “It lies in the interest of the difficult administration of the Jewish district that the authority of the Jewish council be upheld and strengthened under all circumstances.”10
Jewish executives, like the Germans in charge, could make use of coercion and take advantage of helplessness. Compliance and acquiescence were ensured by the Jewish police who had the power to make arrests and guard prisoners.11 Relief could be dispensed in that the councils controlled food and space: the German shipments of flour, sugar, or coal were doled out under conditions of constantly increasing privation.12
Throughout the system, power was exercised in levels of dominance, and each level was fortified in every way. An illustration of such reinforcement was the principle of limiting correspondence and conversations to immediate superiors and inferiors. In conformity with this arrangement, the council could make appeals only to the German supervisory authorities in its locality—it could conceivably urge the city commander or ghetto commissioner to submit a plea to higher officials13—but it could not carry messages directly to regional governors or their staffs. The ghetto inhabitants in turn might stand in line to see the Elder of the council, but they had no ordinary access to German agencies. In fact, there is reason to suppose that the councils acquired a stake in establishing themselves as the sole representatives of the Jewish population vis-à-vis German officialdom. They certainly felt themselves empowered to govern the Jews, and, in some ghettos, announced that persons who had failed to pay taxes or report for labor would be handed over to a German office because of their recalcitrance.14 For Jewish bureaucrats, no less than German, there was no substitute for authority.
The physical and administrative constrictions of Jewry reduced its space and narrowed its horizon but, at the same time, intensified its organizational activity. While the Germans outside became invisible,15 the Jewish community machinery within evolved into the government of a captive city-state. Trunk explains the transformation as clearly stemming from two causes: one was the necessity of rendering those regular municipal and economic services from which the community was now cut off and without which it could not have survived; the other was the burden thrust upon the council by the Germans who used it as a tool to fulfill German needs.16 The multiplication of tasks inherent in this dual evolution, coupled with continuing unemployment and periodic fears of disaster, led also to swollen ghetto bureaucracies that were filled with minor functionaries and clerks, both paid and unpaid. In ghettos featuring public enterprise (particularly Lodz and Vilna), the council payrolls at the beginning of 1942 encompassed as much as a fifth of the employable population.17
Although ghetto office personnel were often doing very little, some of the officials wielded power—at times almost undisturbed power—in specialized spheres of jurisdiction. One area in particular lent itself to what Trunk calls, albeit between quotation marks, ghetto self-government. This island of Jewish freedom was located in the courts, where disputes between Jewish litigants were settled by Jewish judges without German interference.18 Consequently, the ghettos were political entities with governmental attributes much larger and fuller than the social, cultural, or religious functions carried out by the prewar communities. Soon, however, councils everywhere came face to face with the basic paradox in their role as preservers of Jewish life in a framework of German destruction. They could not indefinitely serve the Jews while simultaneously obeying the Germans. A good deal of what Trunk calls the strategy and tactics of the councils19 was in fact their futile attempt to resolve this contradiction. The Jewish leadership was completely nonprovocative. It did not fight the Germans—it seldom fought the orders—but in its distress, it made numerous offerings. From time to time the councils offered words, money, labor, and finally lives.
Appeals were probably the most frequently used device. They were often generated by upheaval, especially at the beginning of the German occupation, during ghetto formation, and at the onset of deportations, but anything could be the content of a plea. The councils asked for permission to turn on the lights after 8:00 p.m. (Lublin), for reductions of confiscations (Bialystok), or for the return of hostages (Warsaw). “Seldom did Jewish petitions have any success,” states Trunk, yet one has the feeling from such documents as the Czerniaków diary that an occasional or partial German concession, even if only for the mitigation or postponement of some harsh measure, fueled the pleadings time and again. They remained, throughout, the strategy of first resort.
Trunk devotes considerable space to bribes, which he believes to have been widespread, but which obviously could have been used only under special conditions. They must have been more successful than intercessions, but the objects attained by bribery are likely to have been limited and the effects short-lived. Typical were payments to effect the transfer of a particularly troublesome official or policeman, the ransom of young girls from forced prostitution (a practice that under German “race-pollution” law was in any case prohibited), or the tender of money to avert “resettlement.”
Most extensive is Trunk’s discussion of the “rescue-through-work” strategy20 that reflected the consideration that the Germans actually needed the products of Jewish manufacture, not only war material, but also simple things, such as brushes that in labor-hungry Axis Europe could not be turned out in quantity with ease. In Lodz, Vilna, and Częstochowa, this policy led to the construction by the councils of fairly large-scale industries. The factories bought time for tens of thousands, but the Jews were playing a predetermined game in which the outcome was always under German control.21
The mass deportations forced the Jews to the extreme ends of the spectrum of alternatives. There was no longer any middle ground between open opposition and total compliance: the Jewish communities were bound to choose the one or the other. Trunk gives some examples of councils with a “positive attitude” toward resistance. However, most of the manifestations of that inclination turn out to have been actions of individual council members in aiding escapes or in establishing contacts with partisans.22 The predominant pattern was the active implementation of German directives.
The councils themselves organized confiscations and forced labor. In most ghettos, they themselves delivered the victims for the death transports. Of course, the Germans would frequently ask for only a certain number of deportees. It is this request that ignited an internal Jewish argument to the effect that if one thousand Jews were given up, ten thousand would be saved, that if none were sacrificed, all would be lost. In delivering a part of the community, the councils could also choose the less worthy.23 Trunk quotes Zalman Shazar, a president of Israel, as pointing out in 1964 that the negative selections in the ghettos had been preceded by similar behavior in czarist times when the Jewish community leaders were forced to designate youngsters for twenty-five years of service in the imperial army. Then, too, the councils chose the simpletons.24
Because of the compliance strategy, the Judenrat could be a dangerous organization precisely when it functioned most smoothly. Impersonality, as in the recruitment of the strong and the weak or the healthy and the sick for heavy labor, could become brutality. Order, as shown in Lodz where smuggling was curbed, could intensify deprivation. Efficiency, in the collection of taxes or furs, could bring about more suffering. Thus many of the virtues of Jewish ghetto government became vices; responsibility was turned into unresponsiveness and salvage into loss.
The Jewish ghettos mark an interim phase between prewar freedom and wartime annihilation. These last moments of organized existence in the Jewish community were endured in a vise of progressively diminished space and gradually increasing hunger. If social and economic policies in normal societies may have long-range effects on large groups of people seeking comforts, security, or some pleasure in life, the internal measures and practices of ghetto councils were bound to have an immediate, massive impact on a population hovering between survival and death.
We may safely assume that many times the meager resources at the disposal of the councils were strained for the benefit of the community. There were occupational training programs, workshops, rationing systems, housing authorities, hospitals, ambulances, and other services in a large number of ghettos. Their very existence demonstrated what Jewish bureaucrats and technocrats could accomplish even under these conditions. At the same time, Trunk leaves little doubt that the ghettos as a whole were no triumphs of social equality and economic justice. The ghetto was the scene of all forms of corruption, including bribery, favoritism, and nepotism. Moreover, in the critical areas of labor, food, and taxes, the prevailing regulations were particularly harsh for the most destitute families.
Instances of dishonesty are difficult to document, but Trunk cites relevant testimony of survivors from several ghettos. Council members accepted personal bribes for exemptions from labor duty (Zamosc) or deportation (Horodenka and other ghettos).25 Bribes were said to have been taken for appointments to the ghetto police (Warsaw).26 Patronage in awarding jobs to inexperienced applicants, sometimes resulting in the employment of entire families, was apparently rampant in Warsaw, Lodz, Bialystok, Lublin, and elsewhere.27 Friendships were also important in the soup kitchens of Lodz, and the Lodz ghetto chairman, Chaim Rumkowski, is reported to have issued supplementary food ration stamps “at whim,” favoring particularly Orthodox groups and rabbis.28
While abuses for private ends may be regarded as transgressions of individuals, a regime of exploitation through official routines can only be described as systemic. The difference is important, for the concealed bribes and favors were intrinsically unjustifiable, whereas the open decrees and decisions, which so often took advantage of the most helpless of the population, were defended by councils as being the best they could do under the circumstances. Nowhere is this posture more clearly expressed than in the pronouncements, correspondence, and diary of Adam Czerniaków, chairman of the Jewish Council in the laissez-faire ghetto of Warsaw.
During the early days, Czerniaków excused the well-to-do from forced labor for a fee, in order to finance the compensation of poor families whose men were digging ditches for the Germans.29 Later, as he struggled with the council’s unbalanced budget, he proposed as his principal revenue source a monthly tax on bread.30 Still later, when the council was threatened with declining German food shipments, cash reserves were created as a precautionary measure by increasing the surcharges on the bread and sugar rations.31
One of the effects of ghetto class structure was the emergence of what Trunk calls a “food pyramid.” Quite simply, the social ladder became more and more conspicuous by the number of calories consumed. Thus a survey in the Warsaw ghetto in December 1941 revealed that council employees were receiving 1,665 calories; artisans, 1,407; shop-workers, 1,225; and the general population, 1,125.32 A similar picture of relative starvation may be observed in the Lodz ghetto. There, differential rationing, by type of employment, was official policy.33 This is how status became instrumental in the prolongation of sheer survival. Czerniaków himself made the point obliquely at the end of 1941 when he observed that the intelligentsia were dying now.34
In retrospect, the tiers of privilege in ghetto society should not surprise us. Ghetto life rewarded special talents such as smuggling or wheeling and dealing. It accommodated the more usual skills of the doctors, artisans, or people who could speak German. The ghetto protected its rabbis as well, for the Jews clung to the past and approached even their most extraordinary problems with all traditional means. Finally, the Jewish bureaucrat who ran the ghetto during its formation and who presided at its dissolution was granted his reprieve. In the vast majority of instances, however, the last occurrence of even the most shielded existence was a violent death.
Adam Czerniaków was the sort of man who did not want to draw a salary as long as there was not enough money to pay his staff.35 In the midst of starvation, he shunned elaborate meals, eating soup for lunch in his office.36 During a contraction of the ghetto boundaries, he refused a German offer that would have allowed him to keep his apartment on a street from which the Jews were being expelled.37 In July 1942, when he realized that the Jews were going to be deported en masse, he took his own life. Yet in February 1942, just about six months before that fateful day, Czerniaków had decided to have stained glass windows installed in the council chambers.38 Czerniaków, as well as most of the other Jewish leaders, acted on the premise that there was a future. From the outset, the councilmen at their desks and the crowds in the streets bore their crushing burdens as temporary inflictions to be suffered until liberation. To the end, Jewish hospitals were trying to heal the sick, schools were continuing to train the young, and kitchens went on feeding the starved. To the ghetto inmates, there was no alternative.
Many ghetto activities, especially in education and culture, bordered illusionary behavior. The Vilna ghetto, for example, established a music school in the summer of 1942.39 Readers in the Warsaw ghetto fantasized in the pages of Tolstoy’s War and Peace that a German collapse was imminent.40 In the upper echelons of ghetto leadership, a kind of unreality surfaced in power struggles in and around the council headquarters.
Jurisdictional questions were a major preoccupation of the ghetto managers. One of these contests was waged between the councils and a centralized Jewish Welfare Service (JSS), which reported to the German Population and Welfare Division of the Generalgouvernement in Krakow and maintained local committees in the ghettos.41 A complex federal structure with built-in frictions evolved in the Warsaw ghetto in which more than a thousand “house committees” began to perform all sorts of voluntary and assigned functions, including the provision of shelter for refugees, the staging of one-act plays, emergency assistance, reports of illnesses, and collections of taxes.42 In the same ghetto, the council was challenged by an organization known as the Control Office for Combatting the Black Market and Profiteering in the Jewish District under Abraham Gancwajch. Czerniaków won that battle when the Gancwajch apparatus was dissolved with provision for the incorporation of its members into the regular Jewish Order Service (police).43
The following story, told by Czerniaków in his diary, illustrates the manner and extent to which administrators in the Warsaw ghetto were absorbed with problems of entitlement. A Provisioning Authority had been formed as a quasi-independent agency in the summer of 1941 to deal with the approaching food crisis. In the council’s own labor department, an official wanted the local German labor office to approve applicants for positions in the authority. Incensed, Czerniaków wrote on 15 February 1942: “This clearly amounts to undermining the authority of the council and diminishing its prerogatives. According to the [council’s] legal department, there is no basis for this position in law.”44
Ghetto government at times became a distorted facsimile of a viable political system. The politics in the administrative processes of the ghetto may strike us as a caricature, because so many of the functionaries in this bureaucracy had come to think of life in a German enclosure as a stabilized condition of existence; they claimed not only some of the food, space, or medical services for themselves and their families, but they also fought for a share of power in this “weird, crippled structure.” Yes, even in this rundown machine, which could no longer cope with its narrowest tasks, they wanted a piece of the action.
Trunk speaks at some length of “The German Policy of Fraud and Deceit.”45 He says that the Germans kept the Jews in the dark about their intentions. Indeed, the German perpetrators did not install a warning system in the ghetto. They did not practice chivalry toward their victims. On the other hand, the Jewish leaders did not attempt to systematically acquire information about the Germans, and they did not come to grips with disturbing news in time.
At the start, the Polish Jews viewed ghettoization as the culmination of German plans. They failed to think in terms of a further, more drastic stage in the destruction process. The diary of Adam Czerniaków, leader of the largest ghetto in Europe, is the most detailed record of that characteristic train of thought in the face of the imperilment.
Anyone with a deep interest in the Warsaw ghetto might well approach the diary with the direct question, What were Czerniaków’s predictions? What were his plans? What did he think the Germans would do eventually, and what did he see as his alternatives? Nothing, almost nothing of this kind will be found in these notes.
Czerniaków does not make forecasts. He does not draw up options. He does not refer to the Germans as a foe. From October 1941 to the spring of 1942 he expresses himself only in subdued tones, very briefly in passing, about ominous reports. As early as 4 October 1941, he quotes an ambiguous and enigmatic statement of a German official: “Bischof disclosed yesterday that Warsaw is merely a temporary haven for the Jews.”46 The entry for 27 October states: “Alarming rumors about the fate of the Jews in Warsaw next spring.” On 17 January, he asks whether Lithuanian guards were coming. There are more rumors on 16 February. Disturbing news reached him on 18 March from Lvov (30,000 resettled) and from Mielec and Lublin. As of 1 April, he hears that 90 percent of the Jews of Lublin were to leave their ghetto within the next few days. All this was written in entries of a sentence or two, in the middle of paragraphs containing other sentences on other subjects.
Czerniaków viewed himself as having taken over an impossible task to be pursued from morning to night against increasingly unfavorable odds. He lived through daily nightmares of blocked funds, labor columns, apartment allocations, bricks for the wall, furs for the Germans, and soup for the poor. There was hardly anything that could be put off—everything was urgent. This is why, when the Germans accepted his revenue statute imposing a tax on bread, he felt that he had accomplished something and that he could face the next day. That is also why a modest collection of money for children was entered as a notable success. And this is the reason why in February 1942, when most of the ghetto had not yet starved to death, he could feel a sense of vindication.
Czerniaków and hundreds more on Jewish councils all over Eastern Europe had fallen into a cadence that did not allow for prolonged reflection about the real meaning of the ghetto in the Nazi scheme of things. In fact, any German laxity or inefficiency only served to reinforce the pace and to intensify the activities of the Jewish offices, which worked in tandem with their German supervisors, reporting to them, seeking clarifications, and requesting authorizations. Thus an administrative and economic dependence was increasingly becoming psychological as well. This was the trap into which the Jewish leadership had slipped and from which it could not extricate itself.
On 20 July 1942, the deportations in Warsaw were imminent. Trunk cites an excerpt from the diary describing that day.47 It was a moment of panic in the ghetto, and Czerniaków went from Gestapo man to Gestapo man in desperation to ask whether the rumors of a “resettlement” were true. The Germans assured him that they did not know anything and that the reports were all nonsense (Quatsch and Unsinn). The passage is a fairly good example of how crude the Germans could be in their policy of “fraud and deceit.” One has the feeling that their simple denials were almost lame. Not so simple are Czerniaków’s frantic requests for reassurances. He was not a naïve man. At the beginning of the paragraph, he himself states that he left the office of the Gestapo man Mende “unconvinced,” and later in the day he asked for permission to transmit the German denials to the Jewish population. The Germans could see no harm in that, and by evening in Kommissar Auerswald’s office, they promised an “investigation” of the rumors. Three days after that meeting all the camouflage was gone, and Czerniaków killed himself with poison. We do not know how long he had kept that pill in his drawer.
The Jewish communities were lulled by the continuation of ordinary routines, including the endless rebuilding of walls and fences, the periodic exactions, confiscations, and arrests, and even the desultory firing by German guards into the ghetto. Yet they did not lack indexes of danger. The whole economic system of the ghettos was not geared to long-term survival. There was large-scale, chronic unemployment, and, as Trunk points out in one of his important findings, a finite supply of personal belongings was mobilized to supplement the insufficiency of production in an effort to pay for legally and illegally imported food.48 The clock was running down, and soon there were signs of massive German violence. As German armies crossed the Bug and San rivers in June 1941 to assault the USSR, mobile units of the SS and Police began to kill Jews by the hundreds of thousands in eastern Poland, the Baltic states, White Russia, and Ukraine. By the spring of 1942, deportations to death camps commenced in the heart of Poland. The deported Jews were not heard from again.
In the remnant ghettos of 1943, the issue of life and death could no longer be avoided. The alternatives were brought forth and discussed: one could plan escapes, prepare resistance, or redouble an effort to produce goods for the Germans. Even in this drastic situation, there was a tendency to veer away from methodical dispersal or organized battle because of the belief that, while it was not feasible for the entire population to participate in acts of defiance, it was possible for everyone to suffer the consequences.49
This is how the doctrine of “rescue through work” became paramount from Upper Silesia to Vilna. It was, in more ways than one, the strategy of least resistance. It was founded also on the presumption that if only the Germans were rational, they would not obliterate the work force engaged in so much war production for them. The thought was, of course, a misconception. The Jews had once placed their trust in rules and regulations for protection against the ravages of totalitarianism; now they clung to contracts and deliveries for safety from destruction. Thus the Jews in Częstochowa were bewildered by the report that in the Warsaw ghetto workers had been dragged from their shops.50 Still, the rationale of work salvation was not dispelled. If the unskilled were lost, it was hoped that the skilled would remain, and when some of those were removed, it was reasoned that the raids would occur only once in a while. In this manner, Jewry sacrificed more and more for less and less until it was annihilated.
We have seen now that the Jewish ghetto was a provider of administrative services, a social and economic laboratory, and a state of mind. It was also a form of organized self-destruction.
It should be emphasized that the councils were not the willing accomplices of the Germans. Within the German superstructure, however, they were its indispensable operatives. Even when their activities were benign, as in the case of housing refugees or promoting sanitary conditions, they could contribute to the overall purposes and ultimate goals of their German supervisors. The very institution of an orderly ghetto was, after all, an essential link in the chain of destructive steps. In building this order and preserving it, the councils could not help serving their enemy.
We know, of course, that the Germans expected much more than general government of their Jewish deputies. It was German policy to transfer to Jewish middlemen a large part of the physical and psychological burdens of destroying millions of men, women, and children. One aspect of that assignment was financial, another entailed selections, and the third called for enforcement.
The destruction of Jewry generated administrative costs, and, throughout Europe, German agencies attempted to obtain some of the necessary resources from the Jews themselves. As far as possible, the destruction process was to be self-financing. In Poland, too, an effort was made to balance the books without drawing from the budget of the German Reich. Trunk cites the fact that the German administration of the Lodz ghetto (the Gettoverwaltung) covered expenses by taxing deliveries to the ghetto.51 In Warsaw, there was wall building. The Jewish engineer Marek Lichtenbojm and a large crew of Jewish laborers were engaged at the site, and financial responsibility for the wall was passed on to the Jewish community.52
Indirectly, the Warsaw Jews may have subsidized Treblinka. From a letter written to the Warsaw Ghetto Commissioner Auerswald by the first Treblinka commander, Dr. Eberl, it appears that the commissioner was to supply various materials to the camp where shortly afterward the ghetto inhabitants were to be gassed.53 This is not to say that the Jewish leadership was able to decipher the nature of Treblinka while it was under construction.54 There may also have been remote funding of death transports from Jewish sources. We know, for example, that the German railways in Lodz billed the Gestapo in the city for the one-way fares. The Gestapo passed the bill to the Lodz Gettoverwaltung for payment.55 We can only surmise how this debt was ultimately discharged.
First the Jewish councils handed over money; then they delivered human beings. Let us remember, though, that the process of selecting victims began with the social structuring of the ghetto population. We have seen that from the moment of their incarceration, the Jews were discernably divided according to their advantages and privileges in life. To be sure, few individuals had any inkling then that these stratifications would acquire a special meaning in the “Final Solution.” However, growing suspicions and forebodings had the effect of accentuating the differentiations. Everyone was now concerned with his position all the time, and soon the passes and identification cards made out by the councils became more varied and colorful.56 The papers spelled out a rank order of protection and, by the same token, vulnerability. At last, separation was bound to be a selection per se, since in the course of a roundup, quotas were often filled with readily available old people, hospitalized patients, or children.57 In the final analysis, the councils only had to save some to doom all the others.
Jewry became a participant in its own undoing at least passively, underwriting German operations through financial mechanisms and involvements and arraying its own people on an axis that defined degrees of safety or danger. Jews were engaged also in a more active and virulent mode of self-destruction when the Jewish police was employed for German designs. Trunk devotes an entire chapter to the order service.58 Much attention has always been riveted on the Jewish police because of the role that these semi-uniformed auxiliaries of annihilation performed in the pivotal occurrences of 1941 and 1942.
The order service exercised all the expected functions of a regular police department, such as traffic control and the pursuit of petty thieves. Furthermore, it carried out tasks that were normal only in an abnormal society, from the collection of ghetto taxes to the enforcement of compulsory labor and on to the seizure of families for deportation, including penetrating their hiding places. In some of the large ghettos, the organization of the Jewish police revealed distinctly German features, in particular a division into ordinary and security police components, but even more visible was the adoption of German methods, such as the arrest of parents whose sons did not report for labor duty59 or the sealing of houses in which individual tenants had not paid taxes.60 The Jewish police arrested people in the middle of the night and beat up smugglers or the reluctant volunteers for death transports. They ate well and frequently filled their pockets with the bribes and ransom payments of frightened fellow Jews. So many were the instances of sheer brutality and corruption that Trunk patiently recites case after case of exceptions.
Yet the composition of personnel for the order service deepens the paradox of Jew acting against Jew. Whereas some of the recruits may well have been drawn from the underworld, and Emmanuel Ringelblum complains that a hundred baptized Jews were serving in ranking positions of the Warsaw ghetto force,61 some were included for their prior military experience, a large number was fairly well-educated, and many were idealistic.62 Here there was a concentration of healthy young men, uniquely capable of conducting intelligence operations or psychological warfare against the Germans, or of aiding in escapes, or even engaging in physical resistance. On isolated occasions, Jewish police may have done just that, but most of the time they were the most conspicuous Jewish instrument in the German destructive machine.
Ringelblum wrote in his notes on 19 February 1941 that the Jewish population had an understanding of the difficulties of being a Jewish policeman. It was hard for Jews to take a Jewish policeman seriously, and often, in those days, the order service would refrain from ordering people around and would “discuss” things with them instead. At one point it was therefore said, “You would have minded a Polish policeman, so why don’t you mind a Jewish one!”63 However, this very trust in the Jewish police was to result in one of the greatest moral disappointments of the Holocaust—an experience from which Jewry has not recovered to this day. Irving Louis Horowitz, in reviewing Trunk’s Judenrat, concludes, “Jewish policemen of Lodz, Vilna, and Warsaw were, after all, still policemen.”64
The Jewish ghetto has just been opened, and we see it now with all of its institutions and processes. This is Trunk’s lasting achievement. On the other hand, the moral questions raised over so many years have not been closed; they have only become more complicated. We know that already the ghetto leaders themselves were fully aware of their dilemma and that for some it was always on their minds. A small, sensitive book by Leonard Tushnet recently illuminated the lives of just three of these figures: Rumkowski of Lodz, Czerniaków of Warsaw, and Gens of Vilna.65 They were different men by background as well as in their ideas, but in the end, all three declined to save themselves after they had not succeeded in saving their people.
1. Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (New York, 1972).
2. Ibid., xviii.
3. Trunk concentrates his attention on ghettos located within the prewar boundaries of Poland and Lithuania. There are a few details about Riga in Latvia and Minsk in White Russia, but the ghettos farther east as well as the Jewish communities under Romanian administration between the Dniester and the Bug are almost entirely, if understandably, omitted.
4. Trunk, Judenrat, xvii–xviii.
5. To allow for deeper treatment of some of the problems, illustrations in this discussion will be drawn mainly from the Warsaw ghetto.
6. Trunk, Judenrat, 104.
7. Trunk discusses at some length intra-German rivalries for control of the ghettos, Judenrat, 264–76. The police in particular wanted power over the Jews. See letter by the SS and Police Leader in Warsaw (Wigand), 11 November 1941, claiming jurisdiction of his Protective Police (Schupo) over the Warsaw Ghetto “Order Service.” YAD VASHEM microfilm JM 1112 (YIVO microfilm MKY 76).
8. Trunk, Judenrat, 572–74.
9. In statistical terms, membership in councils was in fact hazardous. Trunk reports on the basis of his questionnaires that the incidence of violent death among councilmen in the period before the deportations was somewhat high; in his group of 720, about one in four was killed in the ghetto, most were deported, and one in nine survived, Judenrat, 326–28. However, the ninety-nine councils covered in his survey must have cumulatively contained several times as many members as the number of recollected names. If the forgotten members died in the gas chambers, the ratios would be less striking.
10. Mohns, deputy chief of the Resettlement Division in the office of the governor of the Warsaw District, to Leist, plenipotentiary of the governor for the City of Warsaw, 11 January 1941, YAD VASHEM microfilm JM 1113 (YIVO microfilm MKY 77).
11. Trunk, Judenrat, 82–83.
12. Ibid., 99.
13. For an example of such a request, see the diary of Czerniaków, 7 Jan. 1942, in Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz, eds., The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow (Briarcliff Manor, NY, 1979), 312–13 (hereafter cited as Diary of Czerniakow).
14. See Trunk on Lublin, Bedzin, Zamość, Vilna, Judenrat, 484.
15. See Trunk, Judenrat, 528–29, on the psychological implications of this shift.
16. Trunk, Judenrat, 44.
17. Ibid., 50–51; see also Trunk, “The Organizational Structure of the Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe,” Yad Vashem Studies 7 (1968): 147–64.
18. Trunk, Judenrat, 180–81, 185; other areas of autonomy were Saturday as a day of rest and the use of Hebrew or Yiddish in schools, etc., Judenrat, 189, 196–215.
19. Trunk, Judenrat, 390–95.
20. Ibid., 400–420.
21. Trunk indulges in the thought that if in August 1944 the Red Army had not stopped about seventy-five miles outside Lodz, some 70,000 Jews in the ghetto might have been saved, Judenrat, 413. The same speculation is offered by Robinson in the introduction (Trunk, Judenrat, xxix) and was reiterated on another occasion by Yehuda Bauer (Holocaust Conference at the Hebrew College, Boston, 1973). The question is counterfactual. Red Army offensives, though broad, were conducted for limited territorial gain to allow for resupply and regrouping. The halting of the Russian drive so many miles from Lodz was in no sense an “accident.” The chance event would have been its opposite—a rapid German collapse.
22. In the Minsk ghetto, the entire council appears to have favored a liaison with partisans, Trunk, Judenrat, 466. Also of interest are the councils in Bialystok and Vilna that had “ambiguous” attitudes, Judenrat, 467–71.
23. See Trunk on the Lodz resettlement commission, Judenrat, 52.
24. Trunk, Judenrat, 435–36.
25. Ibid., 385–87.
26. Ibid., 385–87.
27. Ibid., 354.
28. Ibid., 385.
29. Czerniaków to plenipotentiary of the Warsaw District for the City of Warsaw, 21 May 1940, YAD VASHEM microfilm JM 1113 (YIVO Institute microfilm MKY 77). The Warsaw district chief was Gouverneur Fischer, his City Plenipotentiary Leist. For examples of similar labor recruitment in other ghettos, see Trunk, Judenrat, 379–80.
30. Czerniaków to Warsaw District Chief/Resettlement Division/Exchange, 8 Jan. 1941. JM 1113. (Schön was in charge of the Resettlement Division.) Krakow also instituted a head tax, see Trunk, Judenrat, 381. Levies on earnings were considered problematic because in ghettos like Warsaw smuggling accounted for considerable income.
31. Proclamation of the Warsaw Ghetto Provisioning Authority, signed by Czerniaków, 31 August 1941, Diary of Czerniakow, 273–74; on 2 February 1942, he noted that the reserve had made possible free distributions of bread and sugar, Diary of Czerniakow, 321–22.
32. Trunk, Judenrat, 356, 382. For a detailed discussion of the medical aspects of food deprivation in the Warsaw ghetto, see Leonard Tushnet, The Uses of Adversity (New York, 1966). See also Trunk, Judenrat, 146–48.
33. Trunk, Judenrat, 383. In several ghettos (Kutno, Kolomea, Chelm, etc.), the social pyramid was particularly visible in housing, Trunk, Judenrat, 374–77.
34. Czerniakow, Diary of Czerniakow, 4 December 1941, 305.
35. Ibid., 24 May 1941, 241–42.
36. Ibid., 23 June 1941, 251.
37. Ibid., 6 October 1941, 285–86.
38. Ibid., 4, 10 February 1942, 322, 324.
39. Trunk, Judenrat, 227.
40. Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto (New York, 1958), 300.
41. Trunk, Judenrat, 332–42.
42. Ibid., 343–45; Czerniakow, Diary of Czerniakow, 27 June 1941, 252–53, 3 December 1941, 304–5. Trunk mentions house committees also in Bialystok, Trunk, Judenrat, 515–16.
43. Trunk, Judenrat, 505, 644. The text of the agreement between the council and the “Control Office,” dated 5 August 1941, appears in the Diary of Czerniakow, 265–67.
44. Czerniakow, Diary of Czerniakow, 325–26.
45. Trunk, Judenrat, 413–36.
46. The remark is cited in another connection by Trunk, Judenrat, 292.
47. Trunk, Judenrat, 414.
48. Ibid., 101–2.
49. Ibid., see 451–74.
50. Ibid., 404.
51. Ibid., 282–83; see also requisitions of furnishings, etc., 66–67, 296; Diary of Czerniakow, 22 July 1941, 260, 28 Nov. 1941, 302.
52. Documents in YAD VASHEM microfilm JM 1112 (YIVO film MKY 76); Czerniaków letter of 8 January 1941, JM 1113 in Diary of Czerniakow, 5 July 1941, 254–55, 30 December 1941, 310–11. In Warsaw, Lodz, and Kaunas, the councils had to build bridges to connect ghetto sections divided by Aryan streets, Trunk, Judenrat, 110.
53. Eberl to Auerswald, 26 June 1942. Facsimile in Jüdisches Historisches Institut Warschau, Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1961), 304.
54. While Czerniaków became aware of “resettlement” and was told about Treblinka, he did not connect the two. On 17 January 1942, he asked whether Lithuanian guards were coming and was assured that the rumor was false, Diary of Czerniakow, 316–17. That same day, he talked to Auerswald who informed him of a conversation with Generalgouverneur Frank as a result of which Jewish prisoners held in Warsaw’s Pawiak prison would, if fit for labor, be sent to Treblinka to work. Two days after, Czerniakow noted that Auerswald was going to Berlin. In this entry, Czerniaków also expressed fear of mass resettlement. (In fact, a conference of bureaucrats on the Final Solution was held in Berlin on 20 January 1942. Trunk comments on Auerswald’s deception, Judenrat, 295–96.) On 19 February 1942, Czerniaków complains that German prosecutors had failed to produce the appropriate papers for the “release” of prisoners to Treblinka, Diary of Czerniakow, 323–24. A day later, the prisoners left. On 10 March, he records the departure of five Jewish clerks to the camp, and on 7 April some 160 young German Jews, recently arrived from the Reich, were sent there, Diary of Czerniakow, 333, 341.
55. Facsimile, Getto-Faschismus-Massenmord, 214; both items of correspondence, dated 19, 27 May 1942, on a single sheet of paper.
56. Trunk, Judenrat, 175–77. The crass illustration is Vilna.
57. Ibid., 507–8, 514.
58. Ibid., 475–527; see also passages in other chapters.
59. Bedzin, Sosnowiec, Zawiercie, Bialystok; Trunk, Judenrat, 584. In Warsaw, members of house committees were taken hostage, if a tenant did not present himself for labor. Ringelblum, Notes, 176.
60. Częstochowa, Radom, etc. Trunk, Judenrat, 483.
61. Ringelblum, Notes, 138.
62. Trunk, Judenrat, 489–998. The finding that Jewish militants (Betar, etc.) were well-represented in the police is interesting.
63. Ringelblum, Notes, 125–26.
64. Irving Louis Horowitz, Israeli Ecstasies/Jewish Agonies (New York, 1974), 197.
65. Tushnet, The Pavement of Hell (New York, 1972).
Hilberg, Raul, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz, eds. The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow. Briarcliff Manor, NY: Stein & Day, 1979.
Horowitz, Irving Louis. Israeli Ecstasies/Jewish Agonies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Jüdisches Historisches Institut Warschau. Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord. 2nd ed. Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1961.
Ringelblum, Emmanuel. Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958.
Trunk, Isaiah. “The Organizational Structure of the Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe.” Yad Vashem Studies 7 (1968): 147–64.
———. Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. New York: Macmillan, 1972.
Tushnet, Leonard. The Uses of Adversity. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1966.
———. The Pavement of Hell. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972.
Originally published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political Social Science 450, no. 1 (1980): 98–112.