BY MID-MAY 1943, the rebellion of the Warsaw ghetto had come to an end. The last groups of Jews had been murdered or sent to death camps. Perhaps a few thousand were hiding underground. The people were gone; so too their homes, apartments, workshops, factories, public and welfare institutions, synagogues, makeshift houses of prayer, hospitals, and old-age homes—all had been systematically erased from the face of the earth, vanished forever.
On the fifteenth of May 1943, SS General Jürgen Stroop, whose forces had destroyed the Warsaw ghetto, triumphantly reported that the guards on duty the night before had encountered only six or seven Jews in the ghetto area. Only a handful of Jews remained within the ruins of the ghetto. Stroop also noted that he had blown up the great synagogue of Warsaw, located outside the ghetto area. This imposing structure, the work of the architect Leandro Marconi in 1878, was the pride of many Jews. To the Nazis, its destruction symbolized the final victory of German power and spirit. The Jews of Warsaw had been destroyed. The material remains of Jewish life would also be eradicated.
General Stroop began his report of May 15 with an enthusiastic description of the victorious military campaign. Heavy artillery had been employed; thousands of casualties had been inflicted on the enemy. In the words of his summary: "The Jewish quarter in Warsaw is no longer."
Indeed, Jewish life in Warsaw had ended. For nearly four years, Jews had fought for their lives, their children, and their homes. The non-Jewish world ignored their struggle or simply became resigned to the situation. Only a few, a very precious few, risked their lives by coming to aid the Jews.
The final chapter of the Jewish community in Warsaw had begun only four years earlier, on September 1,1939.
In the summer of 1939, Germany presented Poland with an ultimatum demanding changes in the boundaries between the two countries; German inducements were tangible, its threats veiled. Poland stood firm. Along with the rest of the world, Polish leaders had followed the Reich's trail of broken agreements, dictates, and territorial expansion. Poland knew from the sad experience of Czechoslovakia and Austria that initially restrained German demands soon would be followed by ever-growing claims and threats to destroy the enemy and all European democracies. The Polish affair would end with the German occupation of its enfeebled neighbor. An attack could be expected; the only question was when.
Warsaw took some modest steps to prepare for war. Volunteers dug trenches around the approaches to the capital. Members of the Polish intelligentsia, who had never held a shovel, stood shoulder to shoulder with caftan-clad Jews, and they worked feverishly to protect the capital city. On August 19, 1939, Warsaw mayor Stefan Starzynski told residents, "Yesterday, more than zo,ooo men dug trenches. Therefore, there are now a dozen kilometers of trenches already in a proper condition."
The Polish political crisis occurred just as Europe was abandoning its policy of appeasement, which was particularly strong in Great Britain. Public opinion was shifting against the Nazis. The abrogation of the Munich Agreement shortly after it was signed in March 1939 and the subjugation of Czechoslovakia, perhaps the most stable and successful democracy created by the Versailles treaty, convinced many that Hitler would not be satisfied by redressing the inequities resulting from World War I or gathering all Germans into one state. The German leader was intent on conquests and war.
The British policy of appeasement and the country's desperate attempts at negotiation had convinced Hitler that Great Britain and France would be reluctant to defend Poland despite their treaty obligations. Unwilling to display any weakness, Hitler resolved to attack Poland, correctly assuming that Poland would remain isolated during a short campaign. The last step that isolated Poland and ensured Hitler's fast victory was the Nazi-Soviet pact signed on August 23. Hitler and Stalin, who were until then outspoken ideological and political rivals, united in the plot to give the Nazis a free hand in their invasion and to divide conquered Poland between themselves.
The first of September was a sunny summer Friday. Polish children were about to begin their new school year, but instead they were awakened by the sound of bombing. Zila Rosenberg, a Jewish girl who later became a member of the resistance in Vilna, remembered her terror: "I am lying in an open field, trying to shrink, to turn into a tiny invisible dot. Low-flying heavy German bombers are passing overhead. My heart is beating like a thousand hammers: oh, God, don't let them harm me."
No official declaration of war by the Nazis preceded the attack. Rather, German prison inmates were dressed in Polish military uniforms and armed with rifles, and they initiated what the Nazis claimed was a Polish attack on a radio station in the small German border town of Gliwice. The ruse was successful, and the bombing of Warsaw took its inhabitants by surprise. At about 7:00 A.M., hours after the bombing began, Polish radio broadcast the first warnings:
At 4:45 A.M., the German army, without declaring war, crossed the Polish borders from the north and the west... the first air-attack on Warsaw this morning caused damage in the airport area Okiecie and in residential quarters ... the newspapers printed during the night do not give any news as yet of the beginning of these acts of war.
On September 3, Britain and France declared war against Germany. Euphoria swept through Warsaw. The national anthems of Great Britain and France were broadcast endlessly. No one asked how the Allies would reach the Polish battlefields or where and when the western front would be set up. Excited crowds streamed toward the British embassy, then continued toward the presidential palace. A young Jew grasped a microphone:
Brothers, Poles, Jews. The enemy is beating and murdering us, burning and destroying our houses, our property, the effort of generations. I am a simple tinsmith, I don't understand politics. But it is clear to me that when we are attacked, we must defend ourselves. All of us—the rich and the poor, and even if we think there has been some injustice in the past, this must be set aside for the time being. Now we have to think of but one thing: if we all concentrate on a single purpose, we will be united—and we will win. But if we are not united, it will be bad. Long live our homeland and its allies and down with fascist Germany!
Still, despite the demonstrations and the war, the theaters and cinemas stayed open and were well attended.
On September 4, a newspaper reported, "The first transport of wounded reached Warsaw. Discouraging news is streaming in about the situation at the front, particularly about the advance of the German army in the southwestern sector. Escaping civilians turn up from Western Poland."
The Polish authorities ordered a partial evacuation of the capital. On September 5, President Ignacy Moscicki left town. On the same day, a railway station where refugees were concentrated was attacked from the air, resulting in many casualties. On the sixth, the prime minister, General Slawoj-Skladkowski, announced that "due to the danger facing the capital, the government was obliged to leave the city in the determined hope of returning after we have achieved victory." The chief commander of the armed forces, Marshal Rydz-Smigly, also fled. The situation deteriorated rapidly as the front was breached at critical points. The commander of the Polish forces abandoned the defense of the western districts.
With the attack against Poland, the Germans launched their "blitzkrieg" for the first time, which shocked Poland and surprised the world. The speed of the attack was unanticipated by Poland's high command. It wreaked havoc before the defense forces of the country were even activated. One commentator noted,
The pace of the Germans' advance during the first week of the war astonished us ... the chaos, the unbalanced and faulty organization ... From the very outset, there was a complete devitalization of the railways ... and in the confusion surrounding the movement of the railways, one could explain the phenomena which made me realize that we were entering an entirely new phase in life: that of leaving Warsaw.
Warsaw was threatened from the air and on the ground by the German tank corps, artillery, and infantry. The colonel responsible for the information services of the Polish general command broadcast a call for all young men of recruiting age to depart for the eastern regions, where the new front would be established. His ominous words yielded unanticipated results, for masses of inhabitants started on their exodus from the city. Adam Czerniakow, who later headed the Judenrat, the Jewish Council, in Warsaw, noted in his war diary on the seventh of September, "With knapsacks on their backs, they set out for the unknown."
Government authority had completely broken down. The administration, the political party structure, and various public functions were on the brink of collapse. Individuals took their fate into their own hands, crowding onto the bridges over the Vistula River. The roads leading eastward were thronged with an endless procession of people, who made an easy target for low-flying German aircraft, which machine-gunned the exposed migrants.
Many Jews took to the roads along with their Polish neighbors. Among the first to leave were political activists and prominent public and cultural figures in the Jewish sector. Jewish leaders felt uneasy, however, about leaving the city. Some claimed that they were likely to be on a German "wanted" list because they had published anti-Nazi articles or had taken part in activities against the Third Reich, such as advocating an economic boycott. Among those heading east were the heads of the Zionist movement, such as Moshe Kleinbaum (Sneh), who was later to play a decisive role in the organization of Jewish defense forces in Palestine; Menachem Begin, the central figure of the Zionist Betar movement, who headed the right-wing Irgun underground in Palestine and later became prime minister of Israel; and Zerah Wahrhaftig of the religious Zionist Mizrachi party. They were not alone. Long-standing leaders of the leftist non-Zionist Bund, Henryk Ehrlich and Victor Alter, Communist leaders, leaders of the Left Po'alei Zion, and the head of the Warsaw Jewish community, Maurycy Meisel, also fled.
The top echelon of Jewish leadership in political life, in both municipal and civil affairs, escaped the city together with the wave of refugees. Some of those who did not flee during the first days of September took advantage of other opportunities to slip out of Poland before the summer of 1940, including Apolinary Hartglas and Moshe Koerner of the General Zionists, Abraham Weiss of Mizrachi, Shmuel Zygelbojm of the Bund, and Yitzhak-Meir Levin and the Rabbi of Ger and his retinue from the heads of the ultra-Orthodox Agudath Israel. As a result, when Warsaw Jewry faced its greatest crisis, its most experienced leaders—political and religious—were elsewhere.
The leaders and many members of the Zionist youth movements declared that the movement's activities had ceased temporarily, and they too moved eastward. In all, it is estimated that some 300,000 Jews were in the wave of migrants streaming eastward from western and central Poland prior to January-February 1940. While no figures are known, it is likely that nearly zo percent of all those who left were Jews from Warsaw, although some returned or eventually lost their lives at the hands of the Germans. Many who departed were young men who had left their wives and children behind. Thus, from the beginning of the ghetto, the Jewish community was disproportionately composed of women, children, and the aged.
The flight of émigrés weakened the Jews remaining in Warsaw. Only a few top-level functionaries and public figures remained behind, generally for personal or family reasons. But there were also those who deliberately-stayed behind because they would not abandon their people in distress. This spirit induced the historian and public figure Emanuel Ringelblum to stay in Warsaw during the time of the ghetto. In his diary he noted, "The nights of the 6—7th September. Thousands and thousands of young people—more than a hundred?—phone me: 'Are you leaving?'" As the hour of their greatest crisis approached, Warsaw Jews would be led by seconchtier leaders. Ringelblum would not leave.
Unlike the Jews of Germany and the annexed countries, Polish Jews had no time to consider how to avoid the German snare closing around them. Jews of an older generation remembered the German troops who occupied Warsaw and parts of Poland during World War I—those soldiers had been polite and civil to the local population. Surely, they thought, the Germans could not undergo such an extreme and drastic change despite their professed ideology and territorial aggressiveness. Many Jews were convinced that the intended "solution of the Jewish problem" was the expulsion of Jews from Germany.
As the enemy approached the gates of Warsaw, two men who stood their ground earned the respect of the Warsawites, Mayor Stefan Starzynski and General Walerian Czuma, the man in charge of defending the capital. Their courage posed a stark contrast to a pathetically vague and fragmented government and the boastful arrogance of the establishment. Starzynski's voice and appeals had a calming effect and carried conviction.
The army decided to turn the city into a fighting fortress, surrounded as it was by retreating combat units lacking effective air defenses. Some thought that the city and its inhabitants could block the enemy's advance, demonstrating to the world the city's unwillingness to surrender and Poland's courageous spirit.
As the 16th Division of the German armored corps arrived at the gates of Warsaw on September 8, the 4th Armored Division attacked with air support. General Czuma announced that Warsaw was to be defended, and he called on its inhabitants "to go about their business as usual." According to Polish sources, the mission assigned to General Czuma was well beyond the power and means at his disposal. His forces consisted of several units in the city and what few troops could be realigned during their retreat.
The civilian population was asked to dig trenches and erect ramparts and barricades. Despite their enthusiasm and strong will, the many volunteers could not overcome the powerful arms and methods of the enemy. Defenses were improvised. The Poles were overwhelmed, yet still they refused to yield.
On the 12th of September at 10:00 A.M., Stefan Starzynski announced on the radio that General Czuma had been allowed to recruit an armed battalion of defenders of Warsaw made up of 600 men and expressed the hope that this unit would be raised within half an hour. Volunteers were asked to report at 11:00 A.M. before the Mostowski palace: "I need 600 dedicated, healthy, strong young men, who want to fight for Warsaw. The first unit must be ready at once. I call on 600 youths to come forward immediately; men who are determined and ready to die for their homeland and for Warsaw..." In a dozen minutes, there were some thousand at the gathering point—from young boys still in their teens to old men.
This hastily thrown together defensive body succeeded in arresting the advance of the invading Germans and even inflicted damage in direct combat. But the true obstacle to German domination was the city itself; its houses and citizens became the front, and they paid a heavy price for it. German forces surrounded Warsaw on all sides and continued to advance, subjecting the city to murderous air attacks and artillery bombardments.
The mayor and army commander appealed to the inhabitants to withstand the assault and prevent the city's occupation. It is unclear whether this stubborn defense of the city was part of a larger plan to provide a breathing spell for the Polish army which might change in the course of the war. For the first three weeks, the inhabitants of Warsaw displayed unbelievable endurance, discipline, and spirit of sacrifice, despite the intensifying attacks, wanton destruction, disturbing shortages, and the absence of any encouraging change. One commentator wrote:
In such conditions, with no information about the real course of events, the eternally deluded Warsaw lives the life of a besieged city. The extended trenches and barricades prepared for street fighting were an aspect that the enemy had not considered at all, for there was no need or desire to sacrifice thousands of victims when such battles were absolutely unnecessary from the German point of view. They had two effective means of achieving the desired results: bombing from the air and attacking positions with heavy artillery, and in addition, there was always the possibility of letting the city starve.
During the first two weeks of the siege, the bombardment did not deter Warsaw's inhabitants, but then the Germans supported their air attacks with unceasing bombardment from their artillery. Fires spread throughout the city. In many instances, there was no attempt to save victims trapped under collapsed buildings. There were only a few reinforced shelters. The cellars in which people gathered for shelter proved helpful against the noise and quaking incurred by the bombing. In the event of a direct hit from the air, however, they were fatal traps.
Hospitals were destroyed, and in one, most of the seven hundred patients could not be saved. The water supply gave out. Hunger spread through the city, causing severe suffering among the thousands of refugees who had found shelter in public buildings. During the night, when the air attacks stopped, long queues of people formed outside the bakeries to await the distribution of bread before dawn. The supply was generally insufficient.
Even graver was the water shortage. The first signs of sickness began to appear, threatening the population with serious epidemics. The morale of the inhabitants, which had been high at first as people helped their neighbors, turned into nervousness, intolerance, and grumbling. The atmosphere was rife with rumors about battles that were supposed to have broken out on the western front on the border between France and Germany, or about Soviet penetration into the eastern part of Poland.
The desperation of Warsaw's inhabitants is detailed in one account of September 17:
The third Sunday of the war was one of the most difficult days experienced by besieged Warsaw. From dawn onward, heavy artillery was shelling the city and in the course of a dozen hours, some $00 shells had fallen. Added to this, both during the morning and the afternoon, planes were bombing the town and dropping incendiary bombs. People fell in great numbers in the streets. Tens of houses were burning, collapsing or. turning into rubble. Thousands were caught under the debris of bombed churches during Sunday services.
On September 21, Colonel Waclaw Lipinski, head of the information sector of the high command, announced on the radio:
We are fighting. We are fighting in special circumstances but we have the will to fight and we shall continue despite the fact that the German general command claims that the war in Poland is at an end, although we are making a stand against the tremendous advantage enjoyed by the enemy in the air and in its armored division ... We must remember the words engraved on the hearts and spirits of every Pole: to be defeated in battle but not to surrender, is victory.
But after broadcasting these statements, the radio went off the air. The water supply, the electricity, gas, and telephone systems were out of commission.
The heavy bombing on Yom Kippur, September 23,1939, was deeply etched on the minds of the Jews of the city. On Friday, Yom Kippur eve, Adam Czerniakow wrote, "Today is Yom Kippur—the Day of Judgment. Throughout the night the sound of cannon-fire." The teacher Chaim Aaron Kaplan, who kept a detailed diary, described that Day of Atonement:
The forces of the enemy increased on Yom Kippur. We did not have a single hour of peace. The heavy artillery is showering fire and iron on our heads ... the enemy is offering us two "treats": during the day—shells flying over our heads and houses, which, even if these are six stories high, become heaps of ruins together with its inhabitants ... while at night, in the terrible darkness, the enemy drops his bombs.
Mary Berg, a young Jewish girl, not quite fifteen, told her diary:
On the 20th of September, the radios went silent and the water-pipes were destroyed. It seemed to me that here we were living on an island abandoned and cut off from the whole world. I shall never forget the 23rd of September, Yom Kippur of 1939, which the Germans intentionally set out to make a day of aggressive bombing of the Jewish quarter.
A Jewish youth of sixteen recalled:
Yesterday was Yom Kippur. At Kol Nidre in the evening, all the people assembled in the shelter were in tears. Until today, I haven't seen adults gathered together and crying from the depths of their hearts. Every year, with the advent of Yom Kippur, the Jewish women would usually be shedding tears, whether or not this was brought on by genuine emotions or merely out of habit. This time they were the tears of those who were struck by catastrophe. People's voices were choked and they held their heads in their hands. They did not take into consideration the fact that children were present, or perhaps the sight of the children was an even greater reason for their emotional reactions and tears. On the very day of Yom Kippur there was continuous bombing from morning to night and most of the bombs fell on the Jewish quarter. Perhaps this was a special token prepared by the Nazis for the Jews on this day.
Two days later, while Hitler was staying in the area at an advanced post of the Eighth Army command, Warsaw was subjected to a seemingly endless German attack, intended to break down the resistance and the spirit of the population. Unbeknownst to the citizens of besieged Warsaw, the entire Polish campaign had been resolved some two weeks earlier, and Warsaw's stand had only symbolic significance aimed at showing the world how Poland had fought for its freedom long after any chance of victory was gone. Although not the victors on the battlefield, the inhabitants of Warsaw had proved their courage and had been ready to sacrifice for their capital, their home.
However, when the city entered the first stages of total destruction, there were signs of hesitation, dissatisfaction, and disappointment. Planes appeared like vultures, bearing destruction and death. Whenever the whistling sound piercing the air was heard, and then the rumble of houses being destroyed, the response was trembling in the hearts and minds of thousands of people. With every whistling boom, one's mind measured the distance and one's heart skipped a beat. The sound of a hit, the impact of catastrophe, also brought with it a sense of reassurance to those who had not been the target. But this reassurance lasted only a fleeting moment, for it was soon followed by another whistle, signifying yet another bomb on its way to the earth.
On the twenty-seventh, the skies were no longer blackened by planes. The shelling had stopped. With fear and uncertainty, the inhabitants of the city crept out of the cellars and ditches to confront the sight of heaps of destroyed buildings blocking the streets, carcasses of horses, and the debris of war. Above all, there was a sort of cloud of down feathers hovering strangely about the city.
On the twenty-eighth, the people of Warsaw were informed that the city had surrendered. General Julius Rommel, commander of the German armed forces, announced on the twenty-ninth to "the citizens of the capital" that, as a result of the letter of surrender, enemy forces would enter the city on the following day at noon. The announcement ended with these words: "The fate of the war is changing. I rely on the population of Warsaw, which stood bravely in its defense and displayed its profound patriotism, to accept the entry of the German forces quietly, honorably, and calmly."
According to reliable estimates, some six thousand Polish soldiers died and sixteen thousand were wounded in the defense of Warsaw in September. Of the civilian population, there were ten thousand dead and fifty thousand wounded. An estimated 11—12 percent of the buildings of historic importance were destroyed, as well as all the hospitals and many houses.
A Jewish youth who strolled around the wounded streets of the city, with their mounds of ruins, was struck by the feeling that the days of his youth had come to an end and that the Warsaw he knew and loved was gone. The city, its people, and its life would never be the same again.