The walls and ashes of the Warsaw Ghetto: how Polish Jews were exterminated
On October 16, 1940, Warsaw Jews were herded into a ghetto. The Nazis established more than 1,100 such closed detention facilities for people of the "lower race" in the occupied territories, but Warsaw remained the largest. More than half a million people have passed through it. Izvestia recalls one of the most tragic pages in the history of twentieth-century Europe.
The German boot
The basis of Nazi ideology is wild ideas about the racial superiority of "Aryans." Another integral part of Hitler's doctrine was the hatred of Jews, whom the Nazis not only considered "subhuman", but also intended to remove from Europe and exterminate. From these pseudoscientific theoretical constructions, the inhuman, bloody Nazi "order" was born, which led Europe to numerous victims, and Germany to disintegration and catastrophe.
During Adolf Hitler's visit, Marshalkowska Street is blocked by soldiers of the armed forces, a Jewish labor convoy from the Warsaw Ghetto crosses the street, 1939
The term "ghetto" is of medieval origin. At the beginning of the 16th century, the Venetian authorities ordered local Jews to live in a specially designated quarter. The Nazis adopted this idea when they decided to "exclude Jews from German society by erecting cordoned-off areas." They considered it a temporary measure before the destruction of those whom they considered worthy only of death.
In the fall of 1939, the Germans occupied Poland. 3 million Polish Jews were under their rule. Immediately, the Germans passed the first anti-Semitic decree obliging Jews to wear a white armband with a blue star of David. Jews were forbidden to take public transport and take their children to regular schools, to trade, to work in most businesses, to visit theaters and restaurants.
Prisoners of Warsaw
The first, a relatively small ghetto, was organized in the town of Piotrków Trybunalski. In the autumn of 1940, the Germans decided to create the Warsaw ghetto. The order was signed on October 16 by Governor-General Hans Frank.
The Germans have put forward a number of hypocritical explanations for why Polish Jews should be gathered in a ghetto. They argued that Jews were carriers of infectious diseases and their isolation would help protect the non-Jewish population from epidemics. Even more cynical is the argument that the ghetto is being created to protect Jews from aggressive Poles — "wild Slavs."
A sign forbidding Germans from entering houses in the Warsaw ghetto due to the danger of an epidemic
Poles were evicted from the area. The occupiers drove the entire "non—Aryan" population of Warsaw — not only Jews - and several thousand Jewish families from the province into the territory of 307 hectares. Only half a million people. Entry into the ghetto without the permission of the German administration was prohibited on pain of being shot without trial. Of course, leaving the ghetto was also severely punished — except in special cases, under the supervision of gendarmes or German soldiers. They were prisoners, although the semblance of a semi-free existence remained.
At first, the Germans avoided direct conversations about the need to exterminate Jews. At first, the ghetto was declared an ordinary residential area with few specifics. But soon the ghetto was surrounded by a high wall with barbed wire. Moreover, they forced the prisoners themselves to build this wall.
Jewish masons build walls around the Warsaw ghetto, 1941
They were excluded from life, expelled from society, locked up in four walls. They had no hope of a prosperous life under Nazi rule. In the sprawling Third Reich, Jews became not even second-class citizens, but third-class citizens. The Germans kept the ghetto residents in an information blockade. They could not find out about the course of the war, or how the Germans were solving the "Jewish question."
There were 146 thousand people per square kilometer of the ghetto. 8-10 people were accommodated in each room. The Germans were counting on a high death rate in this town. One of the leaders of the occupation general Government wrote in a confidential document: "Of course, the creation of the ghetto is only a temporary measure. The ultimate goal is to burn this plague—ridden place to the ground."
And the death machine started working. In the first year and a half of the ghetto's existence, about 80,000 people died prematurely from infectious diseases. There was not enough fuel, the sewage system was not working...
Everyday life behind barbed wire
The Germans formed judenrats (self-governing bodies) and Jewish police departments in the ghetto. Some prisoners were forced to harass, detain, and control others. The conditions in the ghetto resembled a concentration camp. However, there was no constant pressure from the overseers and the residents did not spend the night in barracks, but still in rooms. But the police caught more or less healthy people on the streets of the ghetto in order to send them to concentration camps for hard work.
Since 1941, an Anti-fascist Center operated in the ghetto, which was dominated by people of communist beliefs who believed in supporting the Soviet Union. Alas, they didn't know much about our people's struggle against the Nazis. By the end of 1942, a Jewish militant organization had emerged underground, which was preparing to provide armed resistance to the Germans and their accomplices. They mined weapons, manufactured Molotov cocktails, observing deep secrecy. It took a while, but they succeeded.
The Jewish police of the Warsaw Ghetto, 1941
Ghetto residents were cheap labor for Germans (and for some Polish entrepreneurs). They were used for unskilled work, they worked for twelve hours, without days off and holidays. Mistakes and lack of effort were punished with beatings. And they earned five times less than the Poles received for similar work. Still, those who had official jobs considered themselves lucky. There were no more than a third of the adult population in the ghetto. The rest had to work illegally.
Sewing workshops were set up in the basements, mittens and jackets were supplied to the Warsaw market from under the floors. They made brushes and combs, shoe horns and soles. All this was given away for a song, smuggled, in secret ways. If the gendarmes tracked down such transactions, their participants were severely punished.
Photocopy from the book containing the report of the German commander in charge of cleaning the ghetto in Warsaw
There were also real ascetics in the ghetto who, in the most difficult conditions, did not lose themselves and supported others. A symphony orchestra operated in the ghetto, a newspaper was published, prisoners composed poetry and painted paintings. The scientists continued their research and gave lectures to everyone.
Poverty reigned in the ghetto, half of the inhabitants were starving. Potato peelings were a luxury for them. But there was also its own elite — owners of underground workshops, merchants. They opened cafes, ate fruits and ham, and drank wine. Even gambling houses were set up for them in the ghetto. However, they all had the same fate, outlined by the architects of the "final solution" in Berlin.
"The Warsaw ghetto no longer exists"
On July 22, 1942, Jews began to be deported from the Warsaw ghetto to death camps, mainly to Treblinka. At first, volunteers were sent there. They were tricked into collecting them, promising three kilograms of bread and a kilogram of jam each. The poorest ghetto residents responded to this call, and almost all died in Treblinka. By that time, the Einsatzgruppen had already begun the mass extermination of the Jewish population in the occupied territories. When the flow of volunteers dried up, the Germans began to forcibly send prisoners to concentration camps by the thousands. They were treated like disenfranchised slaves. In December 1942, underground activists from the ghetto put up posters in the streets urging ghetto residents not to believe SS criminals and to defend their lives and honor. Increasingly, Warsaw Jews tried to resist the SS and the police.
Residents of the Warsaw ghetto are deported to the Treblinka death camp, 1942
On February 16, 1943, Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler signed a secret order to destroy the Warsaw ghetto. On April 19, 1943, an uprising broke out in the Warsaw ghetto, which would receive the eloquent name —the rebellion of the doomed." It was time to use the grenades and pistols they had hidden in their hiding places. Units of the Wehrmacht and SS entered the ghetto, but retreated under fire from desperate rebels.
One of the participants in the uprising, Joseph Raker, managed to leave a testimony about those days: "The Jewish ghetto is dying in battle, in flames, to the sound of gunfire, but without screams — Jews do not scream in terror. They accept death as a deliverer." And so it was. The people of Warsaw did not support the uprising, although many historians believe that the underground could have created big problems for the German administration in those weeks. The Germans couldn't even cope with the ghetto for a long time.
A residential area burns during the suppression of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto
The Germans sent groups of arsonists into the ghetto and dropped bombs on the fenced area. On the night of May 14, Warsaw was bombed by Soviet planes. This raid caused the delight of the rebels. But the very next day, the Nazis burned the ghetto to the ground. Almost all the participants in the uprising died. The leader of the uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz, committed suicide.
Gruppenfuhrer Jürgen Strop, commander of the SS troops who suppressed the uprising, compiled a 125-page report with many photographs entitled "The Warsaw Ghetto no longer exists." He was triumphant. Stroop personally blew up the synagogue, which operated on the territory of the ghetto, shouting: "Heil Hitler!" He considered himself the winner. This fanatic hardly realized that very soon the Red Army, the liberating army, would enter Warsaw.
The author is the deputy editor—in-chief of the magazine "Historian"
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
