The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (27 page)

Grassroots intellectual (ideological) activity was probably even more intense than public cultural manifestations. On May 8, 1941, Sierakowiak recorded his intention to meet on that same day with three other high school members of the [communist] “all youth unit of lecturers” to “discuss Lenin’s famous work,
State and Revolution
, and then…lecture on it to all other active youth units in the ghetto.”
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On May 10, “Comrade Ziula Krengiel lectured on the significance of the first of May holiday…. In the afternoon,” Sierakowiak added, “we had a meeting with girls, during which our most active members (Niutek, Jerzyk and I) had a difficult time explaining the concept of surplus value.”
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Among the young Lodz ghetto Marxists, intellectual instruction went along with organized action and action itself was induced by misery: “A student from the same grade as ours died from hunger and exhaustion yesterday,” Sierakowiak recorded on May 13. “He is the third victim of the class.”
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Sierakowiak led the action against his school’s authorities to get additional food. He won, in principle at least.
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On the sixteenth he was examined by the school doctor: “She was terrified at how thin I am. She immediately gave me a referral for X-rays. Perhaps I will now be able to get a double portion of soup in school. In fact, five such soups would be even better, but the two will do me some good, too. In any case, one soup is nothing.”
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It was among the politically organized “youth movements” that ideological and general educational activities naturally were the most widespread and systematic. From the beginning of the occupation to the end of 1941, these activities were hardly interfered with; they were of no interest to the Germans. And thus, in the larger ghettos, the youth movements created a distinct subculture: The anti-Zionist Bund youth movement Zukunft (Future), the Zionist-Revisionist Betar, and the Center-Left and mainly left-wing “pioneering” Zionist youth, each created a world of its own.
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Organized Jewish youth had been left to its own devices following the hasty departure of the envoys from Eretz Israel and of much of the senior political or communal leadership, at the beginning of the war. Whereas Bundist youth stayed in close contact with a senior leadership that remained in occupied Poland (or, for a while, in the Soviet Union), the Zionist youth movements gradually lost touch with party headquarters in Palestine, despite their own entreaties that they keep in contact and receive help. The ideological fervor of this Zionist youth did not falter—it was possibly even heightened by the surrounding circumstances; the response from Eretz Israel, however, soon dwindled to increasingly unrealistic and perfunctory advice and instructions, and often, as we already saw from Zivia Lubetkin’s letter, it lapsed into silence.
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Such indifference created a growing rift and soon turned into a desperate sense of independence among the local youth leaders, the oldest of whom were in their early twenties at most.
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While the ongoing and intense debates that divided movements sharing, for example, the same Zionist-socialist outlook (like Hashomer Hatzair, Gordonia, or Dror) appear incomprehensible from hindsight, the considerable effort invested in these ideological-cultural activities and the publication of a large number of underground newspapers and periodicals (also geared toward the general Jewish population)—either in Polish, Yiddish, or Hebrew—became a form of resistance and, possibly, a psychologically necessary preparation for the armed resistance of later days.
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The council remained at the center of ghetto life. By mid-1941, the Warsaw
Judenrat
, for example, had become a tentacular bureaucracy employing some 6,000 people in a whole array of departments (almost thirty at some point); its achievements were real given the dearth of means, and yet, as already mentioned, it encountered intense hostility among most of the Jewish population, a hostility that grew as time went by. “The Community Council is an abomination in the eyes of the Warsaw community,” the acerbic Kaplan noted on April 23, 1941. “When the Council is so much as mentioned, everyone’s blood begins to boil. If it were not for fear of the Authorities there would be bloodshed…. According to rumor, the President is a decent man. But the people around him are the dregs of humanity. There are two or three exceptions who have no influence…. All the rest are the scum of the [Jewish] public…. They are known as scoundrels and corrupt persons, who did not avoid ugly dealings even in the period before the war…. Everything is done in the name of the President. But in truth, everything is done without his knowledge and even without his consent, and perhaps also against his decisions and wishes.”
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A ghetto joke noted by Shimon Huberband expressed the gist of the populace’s attitude: “A contemporary Jewish prayer—O Lord, help me become a chairman or a vice-chairman, so that I can allocate funds to myself.”
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Above and beyond the anger triggered by widespread corruption, popular resentment focused particularly on forced-labor conscription, taxation, and the brutality of the Jewish police.

While Jewish workers were increasingly employed by ghetto workshops, “labor battalions,” set up by the councils, were daily marched to work. Moreover, let us remember, in Upper Silesia tens of thousands of local Jews were toiling in the special labor camps of “Organization Schmelt,” and Jewish slave laborers were ruthlessly driven by the SS in the eastern part of the General Government, mainly in Globocnik’s Lublin district. There the laborers were kept digging antitank trenches and constructing a defense line for no clear military purpose. The OKH had agreed to the enterprise, but its implementation was left entirely in the hands of Himmler’s henchmen.
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The forced laborers in eastern Poland, like the others, had at first been snatched off the streets of the Jewish quarters or ghettos, then subjected to compulsory draft by Frank’s decree of October 26, 1939, and, as we saw, later recruited by the councils. Many would be shipped off to the Lublin labor camps for periods that could stretch for weeks or even months. According to the report of a medical commission that visited the Belzec work camp in the Lublin district in September 1940, “The barracks are totally unfit to hold so many people. They are dark, filthy and overrun with lice. About thirty percent of the workers have no shoes, pants, or shirts. All of them sleep on the ground, without straw. The roofs leak everywhere, and the windows have no panes. Space is terribly lacking: for example, within a space of five by six meters, some seventy-five people sleep on the ground on top of each other…. Soap is lacking, and even water is hard to get. The sick lie and sleep together with the healthy. At night, it is forbidden to leave the barracks so that all needs have to be fulfilled on the spot. Thus, it is no wonder that sickness spreads. Yet it is extremely difficult to be excused from work, even for a day. Everybody, including the sick, has to report for work.”
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Czerniaków was well aware of the situation in the labor camps. The Lublin district was the worst, but conditions in the Warsaw area were not much better. On May 10, 1941, after receiving a report from two council members who had just been allowed a short visit, he noted: “The camp huts have spoiled straw to sleep on and the wind is blowing through the walls. The workers are shivering at night. There are no showers and restrooms. The workers’ boots were ruined in wet sand and clay. There are no drugs or bandages. Treatment of the workers by the
Lagerschutz
[camp guards] in many localities is bad. Meissner [the commander of the camp guards in the area in which the visit took place—the Kampinos barracks] did issue orders forbidding the beatings of the workers.” And yet, the ghetto poor kept volunteering, in the hope of receiving some money and some food. In the same entry, Czerniaków added: “Wages are not paid…. Everything depends on nutrition.” Barely a fraction of the promised food was distributed.
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Money would protect you from the labor camps. “If you have not appeared before the [mustering] commission yet,” Wasser noted on April 28, 1941, “you can go to one of the doctors, pay down 150 zl. [zlotys] on the fee, and he will find some medical reason for requesting your release…. And for an additional 200 zl., a work card is miraculously whisked into your home without toil or trouble. And if, God forbid, you have already undergone the medical examination and—o, woe!—been found ‘
tauglich
’ [capable], the procedure costs around 500 zl. for a certificate of being immune, inviolable.”
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As for taxes, particularly in Warsaw, they were blatantly unjust. The council had opted for indirect taxation of the ghetto’s most basic commodities and services, instead of direct taxation of the wealthy inhabitants; it meant that the poorest segments of the population (the immense majority) were carrying most of the tax burden. The wealthy inhabitants, the big smugglers, the profiteers of various ilks, practically avoided all direct levies on their assets.
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Possibly the most common target of popular anger was the Jewish police, the Jewish uniformed “order service,” which in principle was under the orders of the council and of the Germans. In Warsaw, the ghetto police was some 2,000 men strong and headed by a convert, a former lieutenant colonel in the Polish police, Józef Szerynski.

The policemen were mainly young men from the “better” class, from the “intelligentsia” at times. They had the necessary connections to get the coveted jobs, and once in uniform, they did not hesitate to enforce the most unpopular orders issued by the councils (tax collection, escorting men to forced labor, guarding the inner fence of the ghetto, confiscations of property and the like) or by the Germans, often brutally so. Although, the policemen argued at the time—and after the war—that things would have been much worse if their jobs had been solely implemented by Germans or Poles, there is no doubt that “considerable segments of the ghetto police were morally and materially corrupt, that they enriched themselves on account of the oppressed and persecuted inmates when carrying out their assignments.”
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Nothing of this stigma is apparent in the memoir that Calel Perechodnik, a Jewish policeman from Ottwock, near Warsaw, wrote in 1944, shortly before his death on the “Aryan” side of the city. More precisely, nothing is apparent as long as the memoir deals with the predeportation period (before the summer of 1942). “In February 1941,” Perechodnik recorded, “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.”
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The Ottwock Jewish policeman had little to report about his daily activities: “And what did I do during this time? Truthfully speaking, nothing. I didn’t go out to seize people because I found it unbecoming. I was afraid of what people would say. In any case, I did not have the ‘sporting instinct’ for that…I collected the bread quota at the Jewish bakery and…distributed it at the command post or for the functionaries of the Ghetto Polizei.”
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Too tame to be entirely trustworthy? Probably.

For the Germans, Jewish policemen were as contemptible as any other Jews. Mary Berg, a Jewish girl who lived in the ghetto with her American mother (and was allowed to emigrate in 1941), noted on January 4, 1941: “Yesterday, I myself saw a Nazi gendarme ‘exercise’ a Jewish policeman near the passage from the little to the big ghetto on Chlodna street. The young man finally lost his breath but the Nazi still forced him to fall and rise until he collapsed in a pool of blood.”
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The Germans also bypassed the Warsaw council and the Jewish police, and supported their own Jewish agents, variously involved with the Gestapo. Such, for example, were the “Thirteen” (the name derived from the address of their headquarters on 13 Leszno Street), a group of some three hundred shady characters, under the command of one Abraham Ganzweich, whose official job was to fight price hiking and other forms of corruption. Ganzweich was an informer, and so were the owners of the horse-drawn tram service, Kohn and Heller. Although Ganzweich did attempt to achieve some legitimacy in the community by supporting “social work” and “cultural activities,”
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he was considered with much suspicion by Czerniaków and many others.
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Most informers, big or small, did not report on political life in the ghetto; they denounced the inhabitants who had hidden some jewelry or cash and usually received a “compensation” from the Germans for their services.
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The threat of disease and starvation never disappeared. Two reports on the food and health situation in the Warsaw ghetto, one German and the other Jewish, were written at approximately the same time, in September 1941. The German report, signed by Commissar Auerswald, covered the first eight months of the year and tallied almost exactly with the figures established by the ghetto statisticians.
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The monthly number of deaths grew approximately sixfold from January (898) to August 1941 (5,560). In both reports stabilization was noted in August and September.

The Jewish statisticians meant essentially to compare the mortality of children under fifteen with that of adults. According to the results collected from January to September 1941, while the death of children grew at a slower rate at first, it overtook that of the general population in the last four months. According to the ghetto statisticians’ interpretation, at the outset parents were still able to protect their children from starvation; soon, however, the worsening overall food situation made any such efforts impossible.
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The dramatic deterioration of the children’s situation at the beginning of the summer of 1941 found an immediate expression in the diarists’ entries. “A special class of beggars,” Ringelblum recorded on July 11, 1941, “consists of those who beg after nine o’clock at night. You stand at your window, and suddenly see new faces, beggars you haven’t seen all day. They walk out right in the middle of the street, begging for bread. Most of them are children. In the surrounding silence of night, the cries of hungry beggar children are terribly insistent and, however hard your heart, eventually you have to throw a piece of bread down to them—or else leave the house. Those beggars are completely unconcerned about curfews and you can hear their voices late at night at eleven or even at twelve. They are afraid of nothing and of no one…. It is a common thing for beggar children like these to die on the sidewalk at night. I was told about such a horrible scene…where a six-year-old beggar boy lay gasping all night, too weak to roll over to the piece of bread that had been thrown down to him from the balcony.”
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