Resistance (4 page)

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.

J
EWISH LIFE
and the place of Jews in Polish society was rather different from what it was in Western Europe. From the French Revolution onward, Jews throughout Western Europe pressed for equal rights as individuals and confined expressions of their Jewishness to the religious sphere. In contrast, most Jews in independent Poland between the wars insisted on their recognition as a people, with the rights of a national minority. The Jews wanted to be recognized as a community—part of and apart from other elements in Polish society.

In the Western European countries, Jews were a small percentage of the overall population, but one in ten persons in Poland was Jewish, and in many cities, towns, and hamlets, Jews constituted a large percentage of the total population. In some cities, Jews constituted a majority of the population. Unlike other minority nationalities within Poland, Jews were dispersed throughout the various parts of the Polish state. Thus, they were not in the same position as the Ukrainian minority, which was concentrated in a specific territory and could demand a form of territorial autonomy, such as governmental recognition of their language as the official language of a region, or independent judicial and educational systems.

Polish nationalism was intensely Roman Catholic and far more immune to the pressures of secularization than the more Western countries. As a result, the gap between state and society was deep, and Jews were far more inner-directed than their Western European counterparts. Though the sojourn of Jews in Poland was lengthy—the presence of Jews can be traced to the year 963—it was almost always uneasy. Jews had arrived in Poland at the invitation of Polish princes to perform economically complementary functions that could not be undertaken by the majority population. The economic utility of the Jews led the ruling class to be more inclined toward tolerance and pluralism; thus, Poland attracted Jews suffering from discrimination in Germany in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Among the general population in the economically backward Polish society, the masses did not experience prosperity, or even economic security. Their resentment against the Jews was intense. The Roman Catholic Church, itself a late arrival to Poland, often pursued a policy of discrimination and hate toward the Jews. It perpetuated negative Jewish images present in Christianity; of Jews as outsiders, betrayers, and perpetrators of deicide.

After World War I, Poland attained independence after 136 years of partition and occupation. The restoration of the Polish state, which had been the objective of a prolonged and obstinate struggle by the Polish people for the right to national self-determination, was a direct result of the disarray (be it due to military defeat or revolutionary turmoil) among Poland's enemies and occupiers: Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia. This led to the political-territorial decisions made at the Versailles peace conference.

The political and territorial order resulting from World War I seemed to play into the hands of those seeking national minority status. Under the minority treaties that were authorized and imposed on Romania and a string of new or renewed states—including Poland—the new states were obliged to give minorities rights protected by law and supervised by the League of Nations. The decision to undertake these treaties and define their contents was largely due to the insistence of American representatives at Versailles (including the American Jewish groups) and other European countries. Actually, the minority treaties granted rights to the Jews solely as a religious group, but many Jews mistakenly interpreted these treaties as offering them the rights of a national minority.

In Poland, the "minorities treaty" seemed to guarantee constitutionally the rights of Jews as one of Poland's minority groups. On paper, the treaty assured equal rights for religious and national minorities as a fundamental provision of the new constitution. Jews and other minorities were given political and civil rights. As a matter of right, they were entitled to equal justice under law. Even their linguistic and cultural heritages were preserved, including Jewish school systems. Discrimination in hiring and professional employment was outlawed.

When the Polish government, which was made up of right-wing and centrist parties, tried to adopt an electoral system that would affect the proportional representation of the minority in Parliament, the Jews responded by setting up a united front to contest the elections—a "minorities bloc." In the end, the bloc's list gained a substantial victory, winning zz percent of all the votes to the first Polish Sejm in 1922. The Jewish faction alone had elected 35 representatives out of 444 members of the Sejm, some 8 percent. In the Sejm, warring political factions of the right, the center, and the left neutralized each other's power. None had the power to put together a government on its own or to tip the scales in its favor on decisive questions. Consequently, the influence of the minorities bloc was enhanced. However briefly, it enjoyed disproportionate influence.

Members of the Jewish faction in the Polish parliament differed in their assessment of the politics of the minorities bloc. Some believed that the bloc was a permanent parliamentary body that should be active in the general Polish political scene while serving to protect essential minority matters. Other representatives, particularly those from eastern Galicia, believed that the bloc was a marriage of convenience, speculative and tactical at best. One could not presume that disproportionate Jewish representation would continue. They were dubious of the long-term prospects for cooperation with the Ukrainians, who were noted for their deep-rooted animosity toward the Jews. Thus, they urged that Jews become less involved in the internal power struggle over the various political trends in Poland.

Over time, it became clear that the solidarity of the minorities was questionable. After Hitler's rise to power, it seems that the German minorities in various countries were not inclined to oppose anti-Jewish legislation in Nazi Germany. So, the Jews were constrained to leave the organization of European minorities when they were abandoned by other minority groups and by the general public.

During 1924 and 1925, prominent members of the government put out feelers that resulted in practical discussions with Jewish representatives to the Sejm. They sought an accommodation along the lines of traditional Jewish politics. Jewish representatives would be obliged to adopt the government's line on basic matters and support the power interests of Poland, a concept that could be interpreted as supporting the regime's conduct toward the Slav minority on Poland's eastern border. In exchange, the government promised concessions and relief in a variety of essentially Jewish areas, such as economics, employment, civilian rights, education, and religion. This political agreement, known as UGODA, was instigated by one of the heads of the nationalist movement Endecja and the brother of then prime minister Stanislav Grabski and was supported by the majority of the Jewish representatives in the Polish parliament.