Resistance (11 page)

As head of the Judenrat, Czerniakow possessed considerable responsibility and power. Faced with a hopeless Sisyphean effort, Czerniakow reached a point of unending despair and helplessness, which led him to prefer death to participation in what he considered criminal acts.

By the time the ghetto was in full gear, the Judenrat was a caricature of the pre-war community. In the past, community activities centered on religious matters, including limited involvement in social aid and education. The Judenrat, however, had to deal with such matters as work, housing, food, justice, health, cleanliness, and public hygiene, and matters even more alien to the Jews in the Diaspora, such as the police and jails.

At the time of the ghetto, the Judenrat was also a caricature of an autonomous state cut off from the rest of the world (the Nazis sometimes cynically claimed that they had granted the Jews independence). The Jew as an individual or within an organization was not permitted to act or appeal to German authorities. Only the Judenrat, or, more correctly, the head of the Judenrat, could receive both the civilian orders of the German authorities and the complaints and fears of the Jewish public. And thus Czerniakow was caught between the hammer and the anvil.

The composition of the Judenrat in Warsaw was unusual. Some of its members served until the ghetto was destroyed, while others managed to escape, or they died, or were, murdered. The first Judenrat consisted of well-known public figures, political activists, and leaders, including Professor Meir Balaban, Apolinary Hartglas, Moshe Koerner, Abraham Weiss, Shmuel Zygelbojm, and Yitzhak-Meir Levin, a historian and leader of a wide political spectrum. All left Poland with the last of the emigrants in 1940, except for the scholar Balaban, who died in the ghetto.

Czerniakow harshly described those functionaries who "escaped and escape," despite the claim by those who fled Poland that their pre-war anti-Nazi activities endangered their lives and that they could better assist Jews from outside the country. After some well-known political figures had left, few people of stature remained within the Judenrat.

Over time, the personnel and organization of the Judenrat increased. Before the war, the community employed some 530 individuals, while the Judenrat, together with all its departments, consisted of more than 2,000 employees, not including its various subsidiaries, which employed hundreds more. The police force, recruited with the establishment of the ghetto, numbered some 2,000 men at its most active stage.

The new employees were inexperienced in the areas they were responsible for, as very few Jews had worked in the administration of either the government or the municipality, and they understood very little of the activities of the Judenrat. In diaries and memoirs, a great many comments relate to the enfeebling corruption and bureaucracy within the Judenrat. The criticism drove the heads of the Judenrat to call for supervision by public committees. The committees, however, did not last long and changed very little. The corruption was the result of scarcity and the great gap between people's wages and their minimal daily expenses. The oppressors and their methods also contributed to the erosion of values and to the breakdown of accepted moral norms. Czerniakow was aware that he was surrounded by "malicious people," but accepted the necessity of functioning within the prevailing reality.

Throughout the occupation, Germans required virtual slave labor by Jews in the ghetto. Even before official decrees were issued, the German soldiers in trucks hunted down Jews on the street to work in barracks, load trucks, clear piles of debris, clean the streets, and so forth. They snatched people with no regard for age, sex, or physical condition. Men, who were the preferred objects of these snatchings, rarely left their homes. The appearance of a German soldier terrorized the ghetto. Men immediately fled from the streets.

Workers were given only the most primitive working tools. Instead of cleaning rags, they were forced to use their clothing. Even worse than the work was the brutality of young soldiers who had sadistic leanings or who were inflamed by anti-Jewish propaganda. To the accompaniment of raucous laughter, they cut off the long beards of the most Orthodox of Jews, or taunted workers with a barrage of continuous shouting and blows. At times, they confiscated the workers' identity cards in order to make them report again and again. A Bund activist in the Warsaw ghetto, Bernard Goldstein, described the hard labor imposed on the aged who lacked the strength to perform the work. He told of the killings that he witnessed.

He recalled a typical incident that he had observed. A group of men had to dig out metal bars from beneath the ruins of a ghetto building, load them on wagons, and then harness themselves to the wagons to drag them to an assembly point. An elderly German supervisor from Vienna showed some signs of sympathy, and even offered a piece of bread. But unexpectedly the German's manner changed completely:

 

He suddenly started to shout wildly: Work! Work! and started to beat us with the butt of his rifle. This occurred when he spied an officer approaching us. "This is the way I have to behave," he explained to me afterwards when the officer had gone and thus excused his setting aside his Viennese passivity for Prussian brutality ... Towards evening, after work, we were aligned in rows of 4—5, leading us away from the citadel [the military fortress in Warsaw which had once been a Russian jail]. While we dragged ourselves along the canal to the gate, the rows of German soliders standing on either side began to attack us with whips and sticks and rifles. We began to run and they ran after us, beating us mercilessly and shouting: "dirty Jews," "rotten Jews," and similar expressions. We were exhausted and covered with blood after a day's "work."

 

Nothing more vividly illustrates the impossible position of the Jewish Council than the solution it proposed to the kidnapping of Jewish laborers from the streets. After such snatching brought daily life and public activity to a virtual standstill, the Judenrat proposed a compromise. It would agree to supply a daily quota of workers on the condition that the roundups on the street cease. A more orderly process of forced labor, it believed, would better serve the ghetto. To fulfill its quota, the Judenrat established a work unit, complete with a group of organizers and supervisors which became the nucleus of the ghetto police. While the snatching did not cease, it was reduced. Systematic exploitation of Jewish labor in organized work details had replaced a chaotic and disruptive process. The Germans had their laborers whom the Judenrat would provide in an orderly process without requiring the expenditure of German personnel.

Every Jew had to have a work permit issued by the Judenrat which stated the days and hours the person had worked. The hours of mandatory work grew to eight days per month as the army, the railway services, and the municipal authorities increased their demand for labor. Jews who still had money could send surrogate workers, and, as Ringelblum says in his diary, the "profession of substitutes" was invented. For a day's labor, a substitute earned enough to buy a loaf of bread on the open market. Subsequently, the Judenrat organized a permanent work force of refugees and the poor to fulfill the communal obligation of supplying slave labor to the Germans. From that time onward, the community was concerned with raising sufficient money to pay the minimal wages of these workers. Its initial attempt to alleviate chaos on the streets soon propelled the Judenrat into the ongoing business of supplying the Nazis with forced labor.

In December 1939, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, who as supreme commander of the SS and the police was the officer responsible for security and Jewish labor within the General Government, issued orders regarding forced labor by the Jews. Krüger's order stated that "all the Jews of the General Government between the age of 14 and 60 are obliged to work ... the duration of this obligation would be two years but this period will be extended if it was found that they have not achieved their intended educational goals."

In August 1940 the shipment of Jews to labor camps began. Among the first to go were those who had volunteered, hoping that conditions would be more endurable than in the ghetto. But these hopes were soon shattered. The recruits were sent to the Lublin area to drain swamps, pave roads, and build military fortifications. That year, an article appeared in an underground paper of the youth movement under the heading "The Work Camp," and it reported the following:

 

I travel to the camp. Parted from my family and friends, and here I am at No. 10 Kawenczynska Street, the assembly point. I feel and heard there is no way back from here. No one will escape from this place. For the time being, the mood is good. As is the way with youth, they sing some songs, fool around, as if they were not being sent to a forced-labor camp. But the mood disappears the minute they begin to line us up and the SS personnel turn up...

The camp in Lublin is situated right in the town itself, on a former sports ground, on which some wooden huts have been constructed. We just arrived when some officers asked angrily: Who's sick? Suddenly there were tens of sick men. We looked on to see what was going to happen. They were lined up in a row, and the first in line was given a metal bar, which was attached to an electric wire. After a few moments, the man was writhing with pain. Then he began to shout that he was healthy. This was done to everyone who claimed to be sick. Afterwards we were taken to a hut where wooden bunks were arranged in tiers of three levels ... and finally we arrived at Cieszanow, our camp. There I stayed for the rest of the time.

There are some thousands here in the camp; the work would not have been so hard if it were not for the daily appearance of the SS, the "blackberries" [black-uniformed units], the devils, as we were wont to call them. The most difficult part was on the way to work. One had to walk in a single line, without talking. Sometimes we would receive a blow from the butt of a rifle, even if we did not utter a sound. The terror and fear is dreadful. Even while we are working, we are likely to get beaten.

The work consisted of digging trenches and preparing the ramparts alongside them. For the slightest defect, one would be beaten. Someone who did not hold the shovel properly or someone who lifted his head while working, would get from 25 to 50 blows. The brutality is tremendous—to the point of getting shot to death. There were many such cases. On returning from work, it is the same as on the way to work. One is forced to sing, to run, to drop to the ground, and again clouts and blows. We worked not very far from the border and sometimes some youngsters would try to cross the borderline. Whoever managed to cross the border had little chance in any case, for the Soviet soldiers beyond the border returned him ... Most of the time we had to sleep on the damp ground. Many took ill. There was insufficient food.

I spent two months in this atmosphere of terror, fear and torture. I returned a sick man, convinced that if I actually managed to return from the forced-labor camp, I would be able to withstand the hard times of Nazi subjection.

 

The Jews were not permitted to return to their former jobs, and all branches of the economy were barred to them. Small-scale artisans who had to provide their families with food and shelter showed an astonishing ability to adjust to the circumstances, as well as a surprising imagination. One account describes how this class of simple artisans secretly returned to skilled work:

 

The production of wooden sandals was begun and workers in the wood-branch found work in this fashion. Cutters of old rubber would attach a layer to the soles and thus repaired shoes. Farmers smuggled leather into town for boots and the manufacture of shoes was in the hands of the Jews.

Tailors turned clothes inside out and repaired old clothes, cleaning and adjusting used clothing for men and women. The "market" in the streets, courtyards, stairwells, and similar spots, was flooded with this kind of apparel. Gradually the hat-makers began working on hats—also a Jewish skill.

 

In the bakeries they were making bread from smuggled wheat, and in the underground mills, barley was ground by the most primitive methods. Swine hair was unobtainable, so they used fine wooden strands to create toothbrushes and clothes brushes. To replace electricity and gas, skilled artisans devised carbide lamps, which could only work for a few hours. Illegally, they started to manufacture soap and candles, which had been sorely lacking since the beginning of the occupation. Chemists contrived saccharine out of the remnants of vegetables. Syrups were used to make preserves and a honey substitute.

This inventiveness and use of substitute materials, however, could only supply work for a handful of artisans. The first winter of the war was very difficult due to the absence of food and the raw weather. At the beginning of the siege, welfare organizations renewed their activities. Ringelblum pointed out that the majority of social welfare workers stayed on the job.

At first, social welfare for the needy of Warsaw was carried out by an institution set up at the beginning of the war called the SKSS (
Stoleczny Komitet Samopomocy Spolecznej),
which administered the finances allocated by the Polish government for this purpose. The SKSS combined various public and philanthropic welfare institutions. The Jews also set up a coordinating committee for welfare, assisted by funding from SKSS. Help was given to those who had lost their property or whose houses had been burned down. Soup kitchens were established. The Germans were quick, however, to forbid any collaboration between the Poles and the Jews with regard to welfare.

In one way or another, the Jewish committee remained intact, encompassing such institutions as CENTOS, for children; TOZ, for medical care; and other welfare organizations that had been initiated and financed independently. Fortunately, as the Jewish welfare system faced overwhelming challenges, assistance came from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was permitted to work in Poland until the United States entered the war in December 1941. Self-help quickly incorporated a wide network of public activities. Organizational names changed occasionally. The title given to the entire structure was ZSS—the Jewish Public Self-Help—which apparently did not please the Germans because of the inclusion of the letters
SS.
It was changed to JHK (Jüdischer Hilfskomitee), or the Jewish Committee for Help. In Warsaw, however, the terms
Joint
and
Self-Help
were used from force of habit.