This copy of a German photograph of women prisoners was taken during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, Poland in 1943.
Jews in many other ghettos tried to organize resistance groups of their own, but there was not much time. The deportations and murders continued into the summer; normal life began to disappear from the remaining ghettos. Many ghettos were already dead; the rest were dying. On July 21, 1943, Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler made it official, ordering the liquidation of all ghettos in Poland and the Soviet Union.
When the liquidation order came down, German troops were already retreating before a fierce Soviet counterattack. The alarm passed quickly from one ghetto to the next: The Nazis were no less deadly because they were on the run. As Avraham Tory of the Kovno ghetto put it, “We have no doubts as to who will emerge victorious from this war. At the same time, however, we have grounds to believe that the Germans will not be eager to please us by leaving us alive so we can witness their defeat.”1
In Vilna, Jacob Gens reacted to the increasing danger by trying to tighten his control of the ghetto and show more “cooperation” with the Nazis.
In his diary entry for July 2, 1943, Avraham Tory related a shocking story from Vilna. A Jew was arrested for trying to escape the ghetto and taken to the jail. Terrified of what would happen to him and his family when the authorities discovered he was carrying a gun, the man begged a Jewish policeman to let him go. When the policeman refused, the prisoner shot him to death. Gens promptly took his own gun in hand, marched into the jail and killed the prisoner with a single shot.
Gens was equally ruthless with “troublemakers” whose activities threatened the “security” of the ghetto. Not long after he shot the prisoner in jail, he played a major role in the capture of partisan leader Yitzhak Wittenberg.
The extraordinary sequence of events began on July 8, 1943. Three underground fighters slipped out of the ghetto and blew up a military train on the nearby railroad tracks. The Gestapo was determined to make an example of those responsible for this attack. They arrested and tortured people on the slightest excuse until they finally forced one prisoner to reveal the name of the Jewish resistance leader.
Gens may or may not have aided in Wittenberg’s initial capture. Many suspected that he set up a bogus “strategy meeting” to bring Wittenberg out into the open. Whether by accident or design, the result was the same. On the night of July 16, the Gestapo burst into the Judenrat office and hauled Yitzhak Wittenberg away in chains.
A group of partisans abandoned caution and staged a daring daylight raid. They freed their commander and took him into safe hiding. The Nazis were furious and more determined than ever to make an example of this defiant young Jew.
The Nazis invoked collective responsibility, offering a terrible choice: Hand over Wittenberg, or they would burn the ghetto to the ground. Gens was terrified. “Because of this one man, Wittenberg, the ghetto may be destroyed and annihilated,” he told the people.2 In a mass rally that was more like a riot, hundreds demanded that the partisans deliver their leader to the Nazis.
The standoff between the partisans and those who listened to Gens could have turned into a “civil war,” pitting Jew against Jew. Wittenberg refused to let that happen. He appointed Abba Kovner to serve as leader in his place. Then he surrendered voluntarily to the authorities and died a brutal death in the Gestapo jail. Abba Kovner called it “one of the greatest acts of heroism of the Jewish fighting underground.”3 If Gens had regrets about his part in this tragedy, he never spoke of them in public.
In the end, sacrificing Wittenberg did not save the ghetto. Six weeks later, five thousand Jews were deported to labor camps in Estonia. Gens supervised the selections, and when the deportees were gone, he called a meeting of the ten thousand Jews who remained in the ghetto. They came, perhaps expecting words of comfort or defiance. Instead, Gens called upon them to register for work so the ghetto could “return to normal life” as soon as possible.4 In less tragic circumstances, his words would have been laughable.
Anyone could see that there would never again be “normal life” in the ghetto. Some people escaped to the forests to join the partisans. Some committed suicide. Some were so numbed by horror that they waited for the Nazis to do the job for them. They did not have to wait for long.
On September 14 or 15 (sources differ), Jacob Gens was shot dead in the office of the Gestapo commandant. Less than two weeks later, more than sixteen hundred Jewish men were sent to labor camps in Estonia and Latvia. More than four thousand women, children, and elderly men were shipped to the Majdanek death camp, where they died in vast gas chambers made to look like showers.
Abba Kovner and one hundred of his fighters escaped through the sewers and made their way to the Rudniki Forest. There they continued to fight, harassing the enemy whenever and wherever they could.
By September 25, the Vilna ghetto was no more. Only two thousand slave laborers remained in the area, remnants of a community that once numbered fifty-seven thousand.
Hayke Grossman of the Bialystok underground risked her life to bring news of the Vilna deportations to Judenrat leader Ephraim Barasz. He assured her that such a thing would never happen in Bialystok. So long as the people were “useful” as workers for the Germans, the ghetto would be safe. “They need us,” he said. “Whatever may happen later, we may live in peace for the time being. . . . I shall always know in advance if something is going to happen.”5
It is unlikely that Hayke Grossman believed these reassurances. As an experienced underground operative, she knew what the Nazis were doing throughout Poland. Relying on her blonde, “non-Jewish” appearance and a set of false identity papers, she smuggled money, goods, and information from one ghetto to another. When a Jewish fugitive needed a place to hide, Grossman would find it. She did what she had to do to help the cause of survival.
Barasz clung to his rescue-through-work idea until the bitter end. He squelched acts of open defiance for fear that the Germans would invoke collective responsibility, punishing the entire ghetto for the actions of a few of its members.
On August 16, 1943, Barasz finally realized that his strategies had failed. At 4:00 A.M. that morning, German soldiers surrounded the Bialystok ghetto. They took over all the factories where Jews had worked as slave laborers and established a base of operations in the Jewish council offices.
In the confusion, many could not decide whether to go into hiding, run to the partisans in the forest, or just wait to see what would happen. Bertha Sokolskaya decided to investigate the situation. “I went to the Judenrat where the [Nazis] . . . were bossing the whole show. Smart, elegant Barasz was trying to ingratiate himself, but . . . they were no longer speaking to him, they were just ordering him about and kicking him.”6
A handful of young resistance fighters prepared to do battle, Hayke Grossman among them. While they were fighting a short, suicidal battle from makeshift bunkers, Ephraim Barasz was on a train headed for the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp.
Chaim Rumkowski’s determination to industrialize the Lodz ghetto only postponed its destruction. By mid-1944, the other ghettos were destroyed, the German army was fighting for survival, and the Allies had landed a massive invasion force on the beaches of Normandy. The war, everyone said, would soon be over. Rumkowski kept the remnants of his ghetto busy, perhaps hoping that the Nazis would be so preoccupied with the war that they would “forget” about the Jews of Lodz.
In May 1944, the Nazis asked for three thousand volunteers to clear away debris in the bombed-out city of Munich. A week later, they asked for another three thousand workers to clean up the rubble of yet another German city. Finally, on June 16, they wanted a third group for the same type of work. This last notice said that children who were old enough to work could accompany their parents to the job site.
The Jews of Lodz had learned to be suspicious of all such offers from the Nazis, but these calls for volunteers sounded legitimate. They were specific, they did not make elaborate promises, and they did not try to make the work sound especially easy. All three notices carried the signature of Chaim Rumkowski, Eldest of the Jews of Lodz.
Even at this late date, the Nazis had figured out a new approach to deception. The first two groups of volunteers actually did go to the stated locations and clean up rubble. The third went to the death camp at Chelmno.
The Germans continued the same deception, probably in the interests of speed and “efficiency.” On June 23, a new round of deportations began. At the station, the Gestapo commandant assured the Jews that they would be working in the Reich and apologized that the wartime scarcity of equipment made it necessary for them to travel in freight cars. The Nazis even made a great show of transporting people’s baggage to the station. Each person was allowed to take hand-luggage along, and “check” larger pieces that would be loaded into the baggage car. It was all very proper and dignified.
Transport after transport followed, always with the same comforting speech. By August, sixty-seven thousand Jews had been deported from the Lodz ghetto to the extermination center at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The crematory ovens burned round the clock, sending plumes of ashes and smoke into the summer sky. Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski and his bride Regina were among the last group taken to the gas chambers.
After the war, on September 18, 1946, searchers going through the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto dug up a group of tin boxes and milk cans that had obviously been buried with some care. Inside, they discovered the first of Emmanuel Ringelblum’s Oneg Shabbat histories. Another group of manuscripts was discovered four years later. These papers became known as the Oneg Shabbat Archives.
Ringelblum himself did not survive the war. After the ghetto uprising he found his way to a hideout on the Aryan side. He was captured by the Nazis on March 7, 1944, and executed along with his wife and son. Only his work remains.
The history of the ghettos is ultimately the story of human beings trapped in an inhuman situation. Like human beings everywhere, the Jews of the ghettos were brave and cowardly, generous and stingy, wise and foolish, and not always as noble as they would have liked to have been.
Some, like Calel Perechodnik, were trapped or tricked into betraying everything they loved. They carried an unbearable burden of guilt. Perechodnik never got the chance to find out if he could deal with that guilt; he died of typhus in a hideout on the Aryan side of Warsaw. The last entry in his journal was dated October 9, 1943.
Everyone who lived through those terrible times was in one way or another scarred by the experience. Surviving and building a rewarding life in spite of those scars was in itself an act of courage and an affirmation of life.
Both Abba Kovner of Vilna and Hayke Grossman of Bialystok survived the war and eventually served in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament). Several surviving ghetto fighters married partners who had shared those terrible days and settled in Israel. Zivia Lubetkin and Itzak Zuckerman of Warsaw lived on a kibbutz (collective farm) where they founded the Ghetto Fighters Museum. Avraham Tory and Pnina Sheinzon of Kovno also married and settled in Israel, where they made the remainder of little Shulamit’s childhood a happy and normal one. Feigele Peltel, who as Vladka had been an underground agent on the Aryan side of Warsaw, married fellow resistance fighter Benjamin Meed and settled in the United States. Alicia Jurman also went to the United States, where she built a successful career as a writer and teacher.
In a sense, the lives of these survivors are a memorial to the millions of people who perished. Emmanuel Ringelblum was thinking of the slaughtered millions when he praised the “courage of the common Jew” who could not save his own life, but faced his death with quiet dignity and a stubborn refusal to be dehumanized by his murderers.
This copy of a German photograph of women prisoners was taken during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, Poland in 1943.