Adolf Hitler knew how to keep his enemies guessing. He was a master of saying one thing, doing another, and somehow escaping the consequences. Germany took over Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938. The world watched and did nothing. On September 1, 1939, German troops launched a massive invasion of Poland, triggering all-out war in Europe.
Troops and tanks attacked from the ground; planes attacked from the air. The German army quickly pounded Poland into submission. Just three weeks after the invasion, on September 21, 1939, a fateful order came down from Nazi headquarters: The Jews of Poland should be “concentrated” in designated areas, and a Judenrat (Jewish Council) appointed to implement Nazi orders within each Jewish community.
The ghetto order came from Reinhard Heydrich, a former naval intelligence officer with a psychopathic personality and an almost total lack of human feeling. Heydrich was expelled from the navy in 1931 for misconduct. Less than a year later, he had become an important member of the SS (Schutzstaffel), Hitler’s personal guard unit. Members of the SS were also known as the “black shirts,” because of their uniforms. Heydrich formed a security division of the SS, called the SD (Sicherheitsdienst).
The original function of the SD was to oversee the loyalty and behavior of the Nazi party membership. Heydrich built the SD into a vast surveillance network, using hidden microphones and thousands of informers to keep watch. Under his leadership, children informed on their parents, friends betrayed friends, workers watched suspicious-looking coworkers.
Together with the Gestapo (short for Geheime Staats-polizei, “Secret State Police”), the SD spread terror all over Germany and Europe. Heydrich used the same cold-blooded efficiency with which he built the SD to establish the ghettos. The first ghetto was created in Poland in the autumn of 1939; the last was created in Budapest on November 13, 1944. Heydrich knew from the beginning that the ghettos would be a short-term solution to a long-term problem. Jews would be gathered from the countryside and isolated from the Gentile population. The ultimate fate of these Jews remained to be decided, but Heydrich ordered that ghettos be located near railway lines to make liquidation easier.
The order set forth the bare outlines of how a ghetto should be organized and governed. The specifics depended upon local conditions. Some ghettos were walled; some encircled by barbed wire. Some had invisible walls in the form of posted boundaries that were not to be crossed except under specified conditions. Some ghettos allowed Gentiles to enter in the course of their normal business; others did not.
The first step in isolating the Jews from the rest of the population was to identify and mark them for easy recognition. Many Orthodox Jews were Hasidim and readily spotted by their black garb, their full beards, and their Yiddish language. Yiddish is a blend of Hebrew and German, written in Hebrew characters. But not all Jews could be so easily identified. Despite Hitler’s insistence that the Jews were a race, there were thousands who simply did not “look Jewish.”
To deal with this embarrassing “problem,” the Nazis required all Jews to wear a special badge on their outer garments. In Warsaw, it was a white ribbon imprinted with a blue Star of David. In Kovno, it was “a yellow Shield of David, diameter 8–10 centimeters [about 3 inches].”1 Any Jew caught without the badge was subject to immediate arrest.
Once symbolically separated from the rest of society, the Jews were systematically impoverished. The Nazis confiscated their homes, businesses, and life savings. With nowhere to go and no way to support themselves, the Jews put up little resistance when they were “resettled” into ghettos.
Wearing badges or armbands and living in segregated neighborhoods was nothing new to the Jews of Europe. In the thirteenth century, the Church required them to wear a yellow star. In the 1400s, many nations of Christian Europe forced Jews into ghettos. In the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great of Russia restricted Jews to a specific area which became known as the Pale of Settlement.
The purpose of this discriminatory treatment was to protect Christians from nonbelievers, and to prevent Jews from gaining too much economic or political power. There was prejudice, brutality, and even murder in this suppression but there was not systematic extermination.
Looking to their own history, the Jews had reason to believe that this latest oppression would be much like all those which had gone before. Be patient, they told one another. Endure. This too shall pass.
They were wrong.
German forces entered the Polish city of Piotrkow, near Lodz, on September 5, 1939. They stormed the predominantly Jewish section of the city, setting fires and shooting Jews who ran out of the burning buildings. When the fires had turned to embers, squads of soldiers entered homes that had escaped the flames to rob and kill the occupants.
These soldiers had been exposed to anti-Semitic propaganda for years. They were not only ready to kill, but to be pitiless and vicious in all their dealings with Jews. To them, killing was like a sport. One group ordered six captured Jews to run, then shot them as they fled. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), which fell on September 13 that year, the occupation forces ordered all Jews to be off the streets by 5:00 P.M. At least one man was shot dead because he was five minutes late getting home.
On October 8, 1939, Piotrkow became the site of the first Jewish ghetto of the Nazi era. In what would become a familiar pattern, Jews who lived outside the designated area were forced to move into the ghetto. No sooner was the ghetto established than it began to fill with Jewish refugees from surrounding towns, who were trying to flee the Germans.
While the Judenrat of Piotrkow struggled to provide for the ghetto’s ever-growing population, the German military commander of the city presented them with a decree from Hans Frank, governor-general of the region. They were to pay 350,000 zlotys (Polish money) into the treasury within a matter of hours. Three Jews were held hostage to ensure payment.
This huge sum was only the beginning; no sooner had the council delivered the money than the Germans demanded more. In addition to cash payments, they wanted huge quantities of foodstuffs: flour, sugar, butter, eggs. The Jews of Piotrkow ghetto went hungry in order to meet the demands of the anti-Semites who held them captive.
Before the war, 233,000 Jews lived in Lodz, a third of the city’s total population. It was the second-largest Jewish community in Poland. As soon as the Nazis occupied the city, the military government established a Jewish Council and began planning for a ghetto.
On November 11, 1939, the German occupation authorities called a meeting of the Lodz Jewish Council. The Jews who had been selected to serve assembled at the appointed place. They weren’t able to get much work done that day because a Gestapo official sat in on the meeting and at every opportunity berated and insulted the members.
The next morning, twenty council members were ordered to the Gestapo office. They arrived not knowing what to expect and were promptly placed under arrest. Only five survived the horrors of a Gestapo jail.
In February 1940, the Germans set aside two of the most neglected districts in Lodz to serve as a Jewish ghetto. The area contained a total of 31,721 apartments, most of them nothing more than single rooms without running water. More than 160,000 Jews were crammed into this dismal neighborhood. The Nazis took over their homes and any valuables that could not be removed. On May 1, 1940, the ghetto was sealed behind a hastily erected barbed wire fence; any Jew who approached that fence could be shot without warning.
The Germans justified the abominable conditions in the ghetto by claiming that it was a quarantine facility, intended to protect the public from epidemics spread by Jews. Portraying Jews as naturally “infectious” was a favorite tactic of the Nazis.
In November 1940, a propaganda film called The Eternal Jew was shown in Germany and the occupied countries. Scene after scene cut back and forth between groups of Jews and hordes of particularly repulsive-looking rats. The message was clear: both Jews and rats were vermin, infecting the world with their filth.
Given the lack of sanitation, medical care, and decent food, the Lodz ghetto was, in fact, a breeding ground for disease. Between May 1, when the ghetto was sealed, and the end of 1940, 6,560 Jews died in Lodz, nearly four times the number that perished in an entire year before the Nazi occupation.
The largest ghetto of the Holocaust was Warsaw. An eight-foot-high wall encircled a sealed quarantine area of about one hundred city blocks. Nearly a half million Jews struggled to survive in the face of incredible odds. There, a small band of survivors mounted a doomed rebellion, choosing to die fighting rather than being shipped like cattle to death camps.
The quarantine area was officially established in October 1940. On October 12, when Jews were observing Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), the holiest day of the Jewish year, loudspeakers blared the news through the neighborhood: Gentiles had to move out and Jews had to move in. The entire operation was to be accomplished in just a few weeks. It was a time of confusion and fear, of dashing about, and never quite knowing what was going on.
“We move along the earth like men condemned to death,” teacher Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary on October 28, 1939.2 On November 15, 1940, the ghetto was sealed; Jews couldn’t leave without special permits and Gentiles couldn’t enter. Kaplan and a few others began to sense the scope of the danger.
The gigantic catastrophe which has descended on Polish Jewry has no parallel, even in the darkest periods of Jewish history. First, in the depth of the hatred. This is not just hatred . . . which was invented for political purposes. It is a hatred of emotion . . . which imagines the object of hatred to be unclean. . . . The masses have absorbed this sort of qualitative hatred. . . . [They believe that] the Jew is filthy; the Jew is a swindler and an evildoer; . . . the Jew is Satan.3
Two months after the Nazis conquered Poland in September 1939, historian Emmanuel Ringelblum began to keep a record of the occupation in Warsaw. He was well suited to the task. Part scholar and part social activist, the thirty-nine-year-old Ringelblum had a hunger for truth and a talent for research. He had already published four books and countless articles in scholarly journals.
In the ghetto, Ringelblum formed a circle called the Oneg Shabbat (“Joy of Sabbath”). He chose the name carefully, to hide the group’s true purpose from the Nazis. The name sounded like that of a religious discussion group. In fact, this group was a well-organized archival committee dedicated to recording and preserving a social history of the ghetto.
Keeping such a record was not an appealing job, but it was one that somebody had to do. Emmanuel Ringelblum was determined to leave a record that would pay tribute to the dead and warn the living about the dangers of racism and hatred. The Oneg Shabbat Archive would be the result of Ringelblum’s determination.