When the Nazis created ghettos, they needed an efficient way to keep them under control. Rather than tie down German troops to do the job, the Nazis established a Judenrat and an Ordnungsdienst (“Order Service”), or Jewish police, in each ghetto.
This Jewish administration answered to a German commander, who answered in turn to the General Government, a Nazi-created administrative area that covered all of central Poland, including the major cities of Krakow and Warsaw.
The role of these Jewish officials has been a subject of great interest to Holocaust historians. They were placed in an impossible situation, between saving their own people and Nazi genocide. In that moral no-man’s land, they had to follow even the most brutal orders while rationing dwindling resources in order to keep the people in the ghetto alive.
From the vantage point of history, many say the councils brought sorely needed order to the ghettos, managing now and then to soften a harsh decree, free a Jewish prisoner, or establish special projects ranging from schools to community gardens. Others claim that the councils only made life easier for their Nazi masters.
The usual way to form a Judenrat was to select a prominent member of the local Jewish community and order him to compile a list of suitable candidates. This process was not always what it seemed, as the fate of the first council in the Tarnopol ghetto in the Ukraine demonstrates.
The German commandant summoned teacher Mark Gotfried to headquarters and ordered him to select at least sixty prominent Jews to serve on the Tarnopol Council. Sixty-three men followed Gotfried to Nazi headquarters and walked into a nightmare. German soldiers were ready and waiting. Laughing and jeering, they beat the Jews and forced them into trucks. After driving out of town, the soldiers gunned down their unarmed prisoners. Only Gotfried and two elderly men lived to tell about the massacre. Those picked for the second Tarnopol Council were understandably reluctant to serve.
Even without the threat of sudden death, most Jews had no desire to be part of a Nazi-controlled council. The Jews of Ejszyszki in Lithuania selected their council members by lot, like a lottery. In the Russian ghetto Vilna, the rabbi told those selected for the council to accept as if offering themselves for kiddush hashem (“sanctification of God’s name”), or martyrdom.
In Warsaw, Rabbi Yitzhak Nissenbaum called for kiddush hahayim (“the sanctity of life”). By this he meant that the best response to the Nazi threat was not to die for the Jewish faith, but to survive for the Jewish people. Simply staying alive was, in its own way, an act of resistance.
Early in the existence of the ghettos, most Jewish councils were direct and outspoken with the occupation authorities. It took time for them to realize that the Nazis followed neither the law nor ethics in their dealings with Jews.
Zalman Tenenbaum, chairman of the Piotrkow Council, sent a memo to the authorities protesting ghetto conditions: “Starving people, weakened by persistent freezing weather, . . . [living] without the most elementary conditions of hygiene . . . are liable to cause an explosion of epidemics.”1 He received no reply and the ghetto got no relief.
The council in Warsaw had an early and sobering encounter with the Nazi policy of collective responsibility, which held all Jews responsible for the behavior of every individual Jew. Any act of disobedience or defiance brought down punishment on the entire community. For example, when a Jew with a criminal record killed a Polish policeman, the German authorities promptly levied a fine of 300,000 zlotys against the entire Jewish community. To ensure payment, the Germans took fifty-three hostages, who would be shot if the council did not do exactly as ordered.
The council made the payment with a clear statement that it did so under duress: “The Jewish population cannot and will not accept the proposition that all Jews are collectively responsible for the act of an individual Jew. . . . We are paying the money not as a punishment, but only because we are forced to.”2
Statements such as this may have soothed Jewish feelings, but they did nothing to alter German behavior. The Nazis did not honor their side of the agreement and executed all fifty-three hostages after the payment was made. The Nazis were masterful manipulators, using people’s weaknesses and even their strengths against them. Collective responsibility kept open resistance to a minimum; lies and clever deception made victims cooperate in their own annihilation.
The Nazis were experts at stringing people along: cooperate and you’ll be safe; cooperate and things will get better; cooperate and you can live in peace. At first, the Nazis demanded only property, in the form of money and valuables. The Jewish administration gave it to them. Then they demanded slave labor, and the administration gave them that. Finally, they demanded people for deportation, and the councils were in no position to refuse.
The Nazis called deportation “resettlement.” The Jews were headed for labor colonies or farming cooperatives, they said. There they would have good food, decent housing, and honorable work until the end of the war. In the beginning, the councils believed these stories. They were easier to accept than the dark rumors of mass executions and extermination camps. “They say . . . that in Slonim [the Nazis] gathered . . . fourteen thousand people—women, children, men—and all were machine-gunned,” penned twenty-five-year-old Calel Perechodnik. “Is it possible to believe such a thing? To shoot without reason women, innocent children? Just like that? In full daylight? . . . who would . . . aim their machine guns at helpless, small children? . . . How can the world remain silent? It is probably not true.”3
The Nazis knew that people would rather believe a lie than face an unthinkable truth. They took that into account when they picked leaders for the Judenrat in each ghetto. They needed men who believed that the Jews had a chance for survival and would pass that belief on to the community. People who clung to hopes for the future would not be eager to risk everything on open revolt.
The Nazis chose fifty-nine-year-old Adam Czerniakow to lead the Warsaw Judenrat. By profession, Czerniakow was an engineer: well-educated, clear-minded, sensible to a fault. Because he based his own actions on the logic of a situation, he expected others to do the same. The Nazis probably thought they could use that cautious habit of mind to their own advantage. In some ways, they were right.
Czerniakow’s fundamental goal was to outlast the Nazi occupation and save as many Jewish lives as possible through any means necessary. In pursuit of that goal, he did not hesitate to make unpopular decisions such as levying taxes, conscripting workers, and granting or withholding special requests. Many Jews in the ghetto hated him for actions they considered high-handed and insensitive, but Czerniakow was the ultimate realist. He knew a no-win situation when he saw one, and he was not given to fighting impossible battles.
Czerniakow also knew that a thin line separated necessary cooperation from criminal collaboration. Whatever happened, he did not intend to be forced across that line. On the day he took office, he placed twenty-four deadly cyanide capsules in a locked drawer of his desk: one for himself and one for each of the twenty-three councilmen. He fully expected that the day would come when suicide would be the only honorable alternative to helping the Nazis kill thousands of Jews.
In the meantime, Czerniakow conducted himself with quiet dignity in his dealings with the Nazis. With the people of the ghetto, he tried to be compassionate when possible, strict when necessary. One of his earliest and most controversial actions was to supply the Nazis with forced labor. In the early days of the ghetto, German troops filled their labor battalions by grabbing anybody they could find: children, the elderly, the handicapped, sick or injured.
Czerniakow proposed an alternative idea: The Judenrat would supply a daily quota of workers if the Germans stopped kidnapping people off the streets. His idea was to replace chaos with an orderly process that would be less disruptive to the community. To this end, the council appointed organizers and crew chiefs to recruit and supervise the work brigades.
This new agency issued work permits, set the number of hours each person was expected to work, and saw to it that crews were assembled and ready when the Nazis wanted them. Without Czerniakow’s intending it, this labor bureaucracy became the nucleus of the much-despised Jewish ghetto police.
Also unintentionally, but with Czerniakow’s permission, anyone with money could escape work details by paying a poor Jew to go in his place. Many ghetto inmates became “professional substitutes,” selling their labor for the price of a loaf of bread. This was usually the only way a Jew could earn money for work; the Germans paid no wages.
In supplying forced labor, Adam Czerniakow believed he was making ghetto life more endurable. Jews had to work without pay under terrible conditions, but at least they did not have to worry about getting snatched off the street. Substitutes carried more than their share of the load, but at least they earned a pittance to stave off starvation for one more day.
Not everyone in the ghetto agreed with this position. Organizing evil might have made it neater, cleaner, and more efficient, but it did not make it right. Slave labor was slave labor, no matter who set up the work brigades. Many Jews simply refused to show up when they were ordered to report for work. To fill their daily quota, the council sent the Jewish police to track down no-shows or find replacements.
The council also imposed a variety of taxes and fees to pay for ghetto social service programs. This created a gulf between the people and their Jewish leadership. Diarist Chaim Kaplan called the Warsaw Judenrat:
Strangers in our midst, foreign to our spirit . . . the president of the Judenrat and his advisers are muscle-men who were put on our backs by strangers. Most of them are nincompoops whom no one knew in normal times. . . . All their lives until now they were outside the Jewish fold; they did not rejoice in our happiness nor mourn our misfortunes.4
Even people who didn’t like Adam Czerniakow generally regarded him as an honorable man placed in an untenable position. This was not the case with Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski of Lodz. Appointed “Eldest of the Jews” on October 13, 1939, he was approaching seventy years old, silver-haired and dignified, with a tendency to dramatize himself and the importance of his role.
Rumkowski transformed the ghetto into his own little dictatorship, keeping tight control of everything from work assignments to food rations. They called him “King Chaim” because of his high-handed style among his fellow Jews. To the Germans, he was deferential. “May a Jew speak?” was his way of addressing them. He portrayed the ghetto as a kind of workers’ paradise, a place where hard-working Jews took care of themselves while making a valuable contribution to the German economy. “We have gold currency in the Ghetto!” he once boasted. “The labor of our hands is our gold!” When someone pointed out that this was a German theory, Rumkowski immediately replied: “We’re willing to learn from everyone.”5
The “Eldest of the Jews” of Lodz never missed an opportunity to hold steadfast to his vision for an enduring community of Jewish workers: “Our children and children’s children will proudly remember the names of all those who contributed to the creation of the most important Jewish achievement in the ghetto: the labor opportunities which grant justification to live.”6
Rumkowski wasn’t alone in his ideas about the life-saving value of work. Jacob Gens of the Vilna ghetto called upon the people to “increase the output of the workers and thus enhance the justification for our existence.”7 Ephraim Barasz of Bialystok echoed the same theme: “Steps have to be taken so that our 35,000 inhabitants achieve justification [for their existence], so that we may be tolerated.”8
The rescue-through-work proponents apparently failed to realize that they were playing a deadly game against an opponent who made all the rules. According to those rules, Jewish life had no value, and nothing the councils could do would change that.
In the town of Otwock, close in proximity to Warsaw, Calel Perechodnik made a fateful decision: “In February 1941, seeing that the war was not coming to an end and in order to be free from the roundup for labor camps, I entered the ranks of the Ghetto Polizei [ghetto police].”9
At the time, joining the force seemed to be a sensible choice. Ghetto police not only escaped the brutal slave labor camps, but got better food rations for themselves and their families. Aiding his family was the deciding factor for Calel Perechodnik. He thought that by joining the police, he could better protect his wife and baby daughter. Like many who took this “opportunity,” Perechodnik did not realize how high a price he would pay.
In Warsaw, the Jewish police began operations at the end of November 1940, just two weeks after the ghetto was sealed. At first, the people of the ghetto welcomed them. Chaim Kaplan wrote glowing praise for these “strong, bona fide policemen from among our brothers, to whom you can speak in Yiddish!” Jewish policemen might yell at people, he noted, but “a Jewish shout is not the same as a Gentile one. The latter is coarse, crude, nasty; the former, while it may be threatening, contains a certain gentility, as if to say: ‘Don’t you understand?’”10
This admiration did not last long. In many ghettos, the Jewish police attracted people with few morals, who saw a chance to benefit from the misery of their fellow Jews. Others had a mean streak and simply liked the idea of venting their anger on victims who could not fight back.
Ghetto police collected taxes and conscripted workers for the forced labor crews. They arrested starving Jews for smuggling food into the ghetto, confiscated property that had been declared contraband, and reported anyone who advocated resistance to German directives. In the Bialystok ghetto, the Jewish police took away bread ration cards as punishment for the “crime” of an untidy yard. In Bedzin, a town near Krakow, the Jewish police arrested the parents of people who failed to report for forced labor, and held them in the ghetto jail.
Ghetto policing was harsh duty that brought out the worst in those who performed it. Emmanuel Ringelblum concluded that the Jewish police of Warsaw were “fearfully corrupt.” Corruption extended through every level of the department. “This is because . . . recruits had to pay [the chief of police] to be taken on. The result was that a very bad element was accepted in the police force.”11
Not all ghetto policemen and council members were self-serving and dishonest. Many were normal everyday people, neither evil nor heroic, trapped between an enemy they despised and a community they could not protect. Under such conditions, even the most decent among them were not always just or fair, and they were never comfortable with the role they were forced to play.