VII. The Ghetto

This Chapter And You...

The Warsaw Ghetto! Mila 18! Korczak! Anielewicz!

You have heard about these places and people. What do you really know about them? On the March of the Living you will walk through the streets of "New Warsaw." Under the ground on which you walk is the Warsaw Ghetto, razed to the ground by the Nazis. You will stand on top of the bunker from which the battle plans for the revolt were formulated. What was life like in that bunker during that incredible month?

You will walk through the old Cracow Ghetto. Here you will see six synagogues still standing. Here you will see an actual part of the ghetto wall. On many of the buildings you will see the place where mezzuzot once adorned the doorway. Here you will almost feel what life may have been like then.

The dehumanization process that took place in the ghettos is difficult for us to understand . It was all part of the Second War against the Jews - the psychological war.

When the Nazis entered a region the first goal was to "relocate" Jews from the countryside to the larger cities. The Jews were to be placed in large cities and settlements at points located along railroad lines, "so as to facilitate subsequent measures" (Heydrich).

While this "interim stage of the ghettoization" was instituted our people sought to form a Jewish life and viable community, and did not give in to the Nazi campaign of destruction despite severe living conditions in the ghetto.

In this chapter you will come face to face with life in the ghetto. Read with your mind open. Try to project yourself into the readings. When you walk the streets of Warsaw and Cracow, you will only hear the normal noise of a city. But fifty years ago the sounds and sites were radically different. Each building has a thousand stories. Each square shouts out in Yiddish about the life that was obliterated. Each street whispers to us of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish souls that walked there before you. Each step you take will lead you to a better understanding of life in the ghetto.

Objectives

1. You will be able to explain the role played by the ghetto in the scheme of Hitler's Final Solution.

2. You will be able to describe life and death in the ghetto.

3. You will begin to understand the attempt at maintaining some semblance of Jewish community even under the hardest conditions.

4. You will become familiar with some of the key locations which we will visit during the March.

"We are returning to the Middle Ages."

Emanuel Ringelbaum diary, November 8, 1940, Warsaw, Poland

"In contrast to the ghettos of the Middle Ages, the ghettos during the Nazi period were not intended as a permanent framework, but simply as a stage in preparation for a future general solution to the Jewish problem..lead to the breakdown of their physical, mental, and social structure, destroying the resistance.."

The Ghettos by Yisrail Gutman

If there is no bread, there is no Torah

Source: Hitler's War Against the Jews

One of the earliest prayers still in use today is the Birkat Hamazon, the blessing said after eating. The Jews have long recognized that food is basic to life and even in times of plenty they have not taken sustenance for granted. The Bible commands that one bless God after partaking of a meal, for it is through God's infinite goodness that creation sustains us (Deuteronomy 9:10). The ancient rabbis pointed out that where poverty and famine exist, there is no time for people to study -- all their time is taken up in finding enough to eat. "If there is no flour, there is no Torah" (Avot 3:21) became a basic Jewish dictum. It was one of the great miracles of the Holocaust that Jews deprived of sustenance were able to find strength in one another.

Reading #1

The March can take you to Poland, to Warsaw and Cracow and Lublin. But it cannot take you into a ghetto. For that you must use your imagination again. Elie Wiesel helps you to understand with this insightful excerpt from his book.

Night (Excerpts from) - Elie Wiesel

Two ghettos were set up in Sighet. A large one, in the center of the town, occupied four streets, and another smaller one extended over several small side streets in the outlying district. The street where we lived, Serpent Street, was inside the first ghetto. We still lived, therefore, in our own house. But as it was at the corner, the windows facing the outside street had to be blocked up. We gave up some of our rooms to relatives who had been driven out of their flats.

Little by little life returned to normal. The barbed wire which fenced us in did not cause us any real fear. We even thought ourselves rather well off; we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic...We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department-a whole government machinery.

Everyone marveled at it. We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares. Our fear and anguish were at an end. We were living among Jews, among brothers...

Of course, there were still some unpleasant moments. Every day the Germans came to fetch men to stoke coal on the military trains. There were not many volunteers for work of this kind. But apart from that the atmosphere was peaceful and reassuring.

The general opinion was that we were going to remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Then everything would be as before. It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto - it was illusion.

On the Saturday before Pentecost (Shavuot), in the spring sunshine, people strolled, carefree and unheeding, through the swarming streets. They chatted happily. The children played games on the pavements. With some of my schoolmates, I sat in the Ezra Malik gardens, studying a treatise on the Talmud.

Night fell. There were twenty people gathered in our back yard. My father was telling them anecdotes and expounding his own views of the situation. He was a good story teller.

Suddenly, the gate opened and Stern - a former tradesman who had become a policeman--came in and took my father aside. Despite the gathering dusk, I saw my father turn pale.

"What's the matter?" we all asked him.

"I don't know. I've been summoned to an extraordinary meeting of the council. Something must have happened."

The good story he had been in the middle of telling us was to remain unfinished.

"I'm going there," he went on. "I shall be back as soon as I can. I'll tell you all about it. Wait for me."

We were prepared to wait for some hours. The back yard became like the hall outside an operating room. We were only waiting for the door to open - to see the opening of the firmament itself. Other neighbors, having heard rumors, had come to join us. People looked at their watches. The time passed very slowly. What could such a meeting mean?

"I've got a premonition of evil," said my mother. "This afternoon I noticed some new faces in the ghetto-two German officers, from the Gestapo, I believe. Since we've been here, not a single officer has ever shown himself..."

It was nearly midnight. No one had wanted to go to bed. A few people had paid a flying visit to their homes to see that everything was all right. Others had returned home, but they left instructions that they were to be told as soon as my father came back.

At last the door opened and he appeared. He was pale. At once he was surrounded.

"What happened? Tell us what happened! Say something!"

How avid we were at that moment for one word of confidence, one sentence to say that there were no grounds for fear, that the meeting could not have been more commonplace, more routine, that it had only been a question of social welfare, of sanitary arrangements! But one glance at my father's haggard face was enough.

"I have terrible news," he said at last. "Deportation."

The ghetto was to be completely wiped out. We were to leave street by street, starting the following day.

We wanted to know everything, all the details. The news had stunned everyone, yet we wanted to drain the bitter draft to the dregs.

"Where are we being taken?"

This was a secret. A secret from all except one; the President of the Jewish Council. But he would not say; he could not say. The Gestapo had threatened to shoot him if he talked.

"There are rumors going around," said my father in a broken voice, "that we're going somewhere in Hungary, to work in the brick factories. Apparently, the reason is that the front is too close here..."

And, after a moment's silence, he added:

"Each person will be allowed to take only his own personal belongings. A bag on our backs, some food, a few clothes. Nothing else."

Again a heavy silence.

"Go and wake the neighbors up," said my father. "So that they can get ready."

The shadows beside me awoke as from a long sleep. They fled silently, in all directions.

Activity #1

1. If you had to move into the ghetto and could only bring what you could carry in your hands, WHAT WOULD YOU BRING? Please list.

This question may be more personal if you lived in South Florida and had to evacuate your home because of a hurricane, or if you lived in the Midwest and had to rush out of your home because of a flood.

Reading #2

You may have heard about the food on the March? No comment. In this article you will read about food in the Ghetto. Care for a comment then?

As the Nazis moved into each city - from : "The Holocaust, Can It Happen To Me?..."

Orders to move into the ghettos were given by large signs which were posted throughout the town and through loud speakers blaring announcements that the death penalty would be dealt to anyone who disobeyed. Movement into the ghettos was also facilitated by the victims' belief that this was the final measure of persecution against them and that the war would soon end. Unaware of the Nazis' plans to completely destroy them, they resigned themselves to the move. Furthermore, many of the Jews hoped that living together in mutual cooperation and self-rule would make it a little easier to withstand the Nazi brutality they had so often been exposed to as individuals. The assumption was (and the Nazis encouraged this belief) that if they carried out the Nazis' orders and were beneficial to the Nazis by being productive, they would be left alone. However, it was not long before it was discovered that these were false hopes.

Ghetto Features and Conditions

In most cases, ghettos were established in the poorest sections of the cities in Poland. Before the war, these areas had frequently been crowded Jewish neighborhoods. When the ghetto was established, the non-Jews had to leave (although many went to better apartments vacated by Jews who had been forced to abandon them) and Jews from other neighborhoods were ordered to move there. In order to concentrate Jews scattered throughout the countryside, those who lived in the rural areas were brought to the cities and also moved into the ghettos.

Conditions in almost all of the ghettos in Poland were inhuman. There was rationing of food to starvation levels. For example, in Warsaw, the largest of the ghettos in Poland, food allocation amounted to 183 calories per day; the Poles received 934, foreigners 1,790 and the Germans 2,310. The average ration per person each month was four pounds of bread. The bread dough was mixed with sand, sawdust and chestnuts. Periodically jam, made from beets and saccharine, was distributed. The Germans also were quite willing to bring in potatoes and "brukiew" (a large squash) -- provided it had frozen and turned rotten. Hunger was never ending. One survivor who was 13 years old when she was in the Warsaw Ghetto, related her memory of the evening her mother put before her a sort of brown meat which looked like liver. Half-starved she could not believe her good fortune. The liver was exceptional, without any veins or coarseness. The young girl asked, "How were you so lucky to get the meat?" Her mother confessed that the "liver" was actually blood that had been taken from a dead horse and boiled until it had jelled. The young girl was nauseous but held herself back from vomiting.

Questions:

1. Would you have eaten the "liver"?

Activity #2

In November 1941, the monthly ration consisted of:2 1/2> oz. fat; 3.3 lbs. of bread; 4.4 lbs. of potatoes. People grew onions in the cracks between cobblestones. Turnips became a luxury item.

1. Go to your kitchen, measure 50 grams of bread; this is your food for the day.

Reading #3

The survivors we bring with us on the March of the Living give us real eyewitness accounts. How much more so when the survivor is a non-Jew? Jan Karski, who died last year, gives us a chilling insight into the Ghetto in Warsaw.

Testimony of Jan Karski, University Professor, U.S.A., former courier of the Polish government, in exile. from: Shoah - An Oral History of the Holocaust by Claude Lanzmann

In the middle of 1942, I was thinking to take up again my position as a courier between the Polish (National) underground and the Polish government in exile in London. The Jewish leaders in Warsaw learned about it. A meeting was arranged...A few days later we established contact. By that time the Jewish ghetto did not exist anymore. Out of 400,000 Jews some 300,000 were already deported from the ghetto... So now comes the description of it, yes? Well... naked bodies on the street. I ask him: Why are they here?"

The corpses you mean?"

Corpses," he says, "Well they have a problem. If a Jew dies and the family wants a burial, they have to pay tax on it. So they just throw them in the street. They cannot afford it..."

Did it look like a completely strange world?"

It was not a world. There was no humanity. Streets full, full. Apparently all of them lived in the street, exchanging what was most important, everybody offering something to sell - three onions, two onions, some cookies. Selling. Begging each other. Crying and hungry... It wasn't humanity. It was some... some hell!"

In a corner, some children were playing something with some rags - throwing the rags to one another. He says, "they are playing, you see. Life goes on. Life goes on." So then I said: "they are simulating playing. They don't play."

Question:

Is there one word you can find to describe life in the ghetto?

Reading #4

What a job it is to "run" the March of the Living. Can you imagine being asked to "run" the Jewish community in a ghetto? Under those conditions, what could you or anyone do? This article gives you some idea about the difficulties they faced.

The Jewish Council Judenrat - The Holocaust: Can It Happen To Me? Florida International University

The Jewish community was, of course, the extended Jewish family. In the ghettos most Jews felt a strong sense of Jewish identity, of belonging, of sharing the Jewish fate. The proverb "What will befall one Jew, will befall all Jews," assumed new relevance.

Administration of the Ghetto

In the ghettos in Poland, the German authorities appointed a council of Jewish leaders to carry out their orders. These councils were called the "Judenrat." Although their powers were extremely limited, these councils, under strict German supervision, were faced with the impossible task of trying to organize ghetto life under ceaseless pressure and threats. Certain Jewish activities, such as religious services, were either closely monitored or forbidden outright. All political activity was prohibited, the main task of the Judenrat was to carry out the orders of their German overseers. In addition, they had to develop and provide health and welfare services and a police system. In the chaotic mass of frightened impoverished, starving residents, the task of meeting basic human needs was impossible and developing a police system from within their own ranks -- something completely foreign to the Jewish community -- was filled with problems and corruption. From the Nazi point of view, these councils served the darker purpose of having to collect and provide ransom money on demand, goods and services, and most important of all, people for deportations. The Nazis savagely exerted their power over the Judenrat and Jewish police. For example, in the Warsaw Ghetto when deportations were stepped up towards the end of the ghetto's existence, Jewish police were ordered to deliver seven people per day. If they didn't, their own families were taken.

The Nazis shrewdly recognized the potential of using Jewish leaders to coerce the population into their scheme of "resettlement." Initially, this deception was encouraged by the inducement of food which brought out many of the ghetto residents. However, if the Jewish leaders could convince their people that they were going to better living conditions, the task of evacuating the ghetto residents to the concentration camps would be substantially easier. Until the councils recognized the true fate of the deportations, some of them complied with the Nazi orders.

Members of the Judenrat were not accorded equal status and usually one person carried the weight of responsibility for the Judenrat's decisions. This individual was charged with the moral dilemma of giving into the Nazi demands now (with the hope or expectation of saving the rest) or resisting these demands completely (with the expectation of severe reprisals). Particularly noteworthy was the reaction of the head of the Warsaw ghetto Judenrat, Adam Czerniakow. He interceded with the German authorities in every way possible to alleviate the suffering of the people in the ghetto. Three days later, following the Nazis demand that Czerniakow cooperate with them in rounding up Jews destined for the deportations, he committed suicide. His diary, most of which was recovered, tells of the anguish and the hopelessness of his situation as increasingly stringent orders were issued and he was forced to stand by and see his people die. Although exempted from the deportations (at least until the ghetto was liquidated -- a fact unknown to the council members) he chose death rather than to turn against his people.

The story of the Jewish councils has generated considerable controversy. Many of them have been condemned for willingly complying with Nazi demands. Yet there were extreme differences among the councils. Some appear to have been corrupted by their status, using their position to escape their own impending death or to reap benefits not accorded to those in their care; others acted in ways that can only be called heroic.

Questions:

1. What types of bureaucratic decisions had to be made in order for the Holocaust to take place, to orchestrate the opening and eventual liquidation of the ghettos?

2. How did the ghettos unleash the psychological war against the Jews?

3. List the important facts leading up to the deportations.

Include: a. the physical description

b. the self government (Judenrat)

c. the feelings of hope and despair

4. What does it mean to have to move through the streets with all that you care about in your hands?

5. The Warsaw Ghetto had over 1,000 self help committees including a committee for each building in the ghetto. Is that a reflection of Jewish life and community? In what way?

6. How did the Judenrat soften the blows of the Nazi's for the Jewish community. Did it help or hurt those in the Ghetto?

Reading #5

Remember we talked about names and tattooed arms? So many of the 6 million Jews died without leaving their names. They died as numbers. We don't know enough about the Jews who died. Here is someone with a name, and a famous one at that. You will hear his name a lot. Read this so you will know why.

Janusz Korczak: Champion of the Children - by Bruno Bettelheim, Reform Judaism, Spring 1986.

An ancient Jewish myth tells that there must live on earth at any one time at least thirty - or according to another version, thirty-six - righteous people. Only the existence of these righteous ones justifies our continued survival in the eyes of the Lord: otherwise, God would turn his face from the earth and we all would perish.

One of these righteous men, Dr. Janusz Korczak, steadfastly rejected numerous offers to be saved from extermination in the Nazi death camps. He refused to desert the children to whose well-being he had devoted his life, so that even as they approached death they would be able to maintain their faith in human goodness. Korczak could easily have saved himself. He was repeatedly urged to do so by his many Polish admirers and friends, for he was a prominent figure in Polish cultural life by the time he died. Well-wishers offered to provide him with false identity papers; they arranged for his escape from the Warsaw Ghetto. Even the children whom he had rescued from neglect in the past implored him to save himself. But as the head and leading light for thirty years of the Jewish orphanage in Warsaw, Korczak was determined not to abandon the children who had put their trust in him. As he said to those who beseeched him to save himself: "One does not leave a sick child in the night."

On August 6, 1942, the Nazis ordered the 200 children who remained in the Jewish orphanage of the Warsaw Ghetto to a train station, there to be packed into railroad carriages. Korczak, like most other adults in the Ghetto, knew by then that the carriages were to take the children to their death in the gas chambers of Treblinka.

In a successful effort at assuaging the children's anxiety, Korczak told them that they were all going on an outing to the country. On the appointed day he had the oldest child lead them, carrying high the flag of hope, a gold four-leaf clover on a field of green - the emblem of the orphanage. As always, even in this terrible situation, Korczak had arranged things so that a child rather than an adult would be the leader of other children. He walked immediately behind this leader, holding the hands of the two smallest children. Behind them marched all the other children, four-by-four, in excellent order.

For many years preceding this, Dr. Janusz Korczak had been known all over Poland as "The Old Doctor," the name he used when delivering his state radio talks on children and their education. Through these he became a familiar name even to those who had not read his many novels - for one of which he had received Poland's highest literary prize -- nor seen his plays, nor read any of his numerous articles on children, nor learned about his work for orphans. Korczak not only fully understood the child's view, but deeply respected and appreciated it. What Korczak taught best was to quote the title of one of his most significant books, "How One Ought to Love a Child."

Janusz Korczak was born Henryk Goldszmit, the scion of two generations of educated Jews who had broken away from the Jewish tradition to assimilate into the Polish culture. Korczak's grandfather was a successful physician, his father was an equally successful lawyer. In all external respects, little Henryk's early life was spent in very comfortable circumstances, in the well-to-do upper middle class home of his parents. Yet he was familiar with emotional difficulties from an early age --his father held often grandiose and unrealistic notions of the world, and had a poorly developed ability to relate to reality.

Even when Henryk was an infant, his family lived in an atmosphere of psychological, cultural and social alienation which must have contributed to the father's basic mental instability. Nearly all Polish Jews of this period spoke and read Yiddish, their lives dominated by Jewish religious traditions and observances. By contrast, Henryk's parents were non-practicing Jews who spoke only Polish. So although he was well cared for as a child, Henryk knew practically from birth what it meant to be an outsider. He remained an outsider all his life.

When Henryk was eleven his father began to suffer from serious mental disturbances and eventually required hospitalization in a mental institution. He died there when Henryk was eighteen years old. With the decline of Henryk's father, the family encountered economic hardships. As a university student, Henryk began to support himself, his mother and his sister by writing. It was at this time he adopted the pseudonym Janusz Korczak. Fearing that his Jewish name would disqualify him from entry into a literary competition, he submitted his contribution under the Polish-sounding pseudonym taken from a Polish novel. Although he did not win the competition, he was henceforth known by his pen-name.

Although choosing to be a medical student, Korczak was by that time set to devote his life to the betterment of the lot of children. Typically, he once introduced himself to a fellow university student by saying that he was "the son of a madman and determined to become the Karl Marx of children." As Marx's life had been devoted to the revolution which would liberate the proletariat, so Korczak's would be consecrated to the liberation of children. When asked what such a liberation of children would imply, he answered that one of its most important features would be their right to govern themselves. Even at this early period he was convinced that children are able to do at least as well as their elders, if not better, in governing themselves.

Already as a university student, Korczak knew he would not marry; he did not wish to have children. When the student to whom he had revealed his life plans asked him why, if he was determined to devote his life to children, did he not want to have any of his own, Korczak answered that he would have not just a few, but hundreds of children for whom he would care. It seems probable that he was afraid he might have inherited his father's tendency to insanity and feared passing it on.

As a medical student specializing in pediatrics, Korczak worked in the slums of Warsaw, hoping that by combining medical treatment for children's physical ills with spiritual assistance, he would be able to effect fundamental changes in their living conditions. His first novel, Children of the Street, 1901, was written in anger at the degradation in which such children were forced to spend their lives. After receiving his medical degree in 1904, he began working and living in a children's hospital, while continuing to write on various subjects, some of them literary, others educational, medical, and socio-political.

In 1912 he decided to give up the practice of medicine and devote his life entirely to helping suffering children. He once explained the shift in his life's work thus; "A spoon of castor oil is no cure for poverty and parentlessness". He meant by this that not even the best medical treatment can undo the damage which utter deprivation causes in children. So in his early thirties, Korczak became director of the Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. From then until his death, he lived and worked at the orphanage, the only interruption being his service as a physician in the Russian army during World War I. But even while serving in the battle zone, Korczak's main concern was with the children. Instead of resting from his arduous labors as a front-line physician when he had a chance, he wrote what became probably his most important and influential book, How One Ought to Love a Child. After the end of World War I he became a co-director of a Catholic orphan's home, which he named "Our Home," thus serving simultaneously Jewish and Catholic children.

Many of Dr. Korczak's ideas are now commonplace, but they were radically new at the beginning of this century. Repeatedly, he stressed the importance of respecting children and their ideas, even when we cannot agree with them. He insisted that it is wrong to base educational measures on our notions about what the child will need to know in the future, because real education ought to be concerned with what the child is now - not what we wish him to be in the future.

What we do not realize today is the degree to which we owe many of our "modern" ideas about children to Dr. Korczak. Some of these ideas where shared by other contemporary educators including the American philosopher and educator John Dewey. But while educators like Dewey only conceptualized, Korczak set his ideas into daily practice, living with the children on their terms. Others like A.S. Neill of Summerhill fame, set into practice more than a decade later what Dr. Korczak pioneered. But even Neill who was probably the most radical reformer of children's lives after Korczak did not go as far as Korczak in insisting that children govern themselves. Korczak not only helped his children create a children's court, he submitted himself to its judgments.

Since Korczak truly knew children, he did not idealize them. As there are good and bad adults, so too Korczak knew there are all kinds of children. Working for them and living with them, he saw them for what they were, at all times deeply convinced of what they could become, given half a chance. His deepest belief was that the child, out of a natural tendency to establish an inner balance, tends toward self improvement when given the chance, freedom, and opportunity to do so. To give these chances to children was the center of all his efforts.

Maybe his philosophy is best expressed in the words with which he said goodbye to a group of orphans as they prepared to leave the orphanage and begin life as young adults:

"We say goodbye to you and wish you well on your long travel into a far-away country. Thus your trip has but one name and one destination: your life. We have thought long and hard how we should say goodbye to you, what advice to give you on your way. Unfortunately words are poor and weak vehicles to express ourselves. So we can give you nothing on your way."We give you no God, because Him you have to seek in your soul, in a solitary struggle. We give you no fatherland because that you have to find through the efforts of your own heart, through your own thoughts. We don't give you love for your fellow men, because there is no love without forgiveness, and to forgive is a laborious task, a hardship which only the person himself can decide to take upon himself.

"We give you only one thing; the desire for a better life which does not yet exist, but which will someday come into being - a life of truth and justice. Maybe the desire for it will guide you to God, to a real fatherland and to love. Farewell, don't forget it."

Korczak's most widely read book, King Matt the First, 1928, is the story of a boy who on the death of his father becomes king and immediately sets out to reform his kingdom for the benefit of children and adults alike. King Matt is none other than Korczak himself, recreated as a child, courageously doing battle against all the injustices of the world, most of all against those inflicted on children. Korczak appears in this story also in his adult form, as the old doctor who foresees the troubles into which King Matt will run. Most of all, this story renders a true picture of how, in the child, deep seriousness and native wisdom are at all times inextricably interwoven with the need for childish play, for deep friendship with adults and peers, for a life of the imagination, and for a life of freedom, dignity and responsibility.

His fervor for the freedom of children alienated Korczak from the Polish right, which viewed him as a radical reformer, and from the Polish left, which believed that freedom for children would come automatically as part of a socialist revolution. Educators feared and rejected him because he severely criticized their methods. Alienated from all these adult circles, he drew closer to the world of children who, like him, were alienated from the world of adults. Yet to undo that alienation was the goal for which he lived and worked.

From the time of the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Korczak knew the end was coming. His growing sense of desolation made him anxious to leave a final testament. The diary he wrote during the last months of his life in the ghetto, mainly during the months of May and August, 1942 represents, to quote his words, "not so much an attempt at a synthesis as a grave of attempts, experiments, errors. Perhaps it may prove of use to somebody, someone, in fifty years." These were truly prophetic words for soon it will be fifty years since The Old Doc wrote this, and now his works and deeds are becoming more widely known, understood and appreciated.

In July, 1942, less than a month before Korczak's end, his devoted followers and friends made another attempt to save him. His Aryan collaborator and friend, Igor Newerly, brought him false papers which would have permitted Korczak to leave the ghetto. While all Newerly's entreaties failed to shake Korczak's determination to remain with his children, to show his appreciation for Newerly's efforts, Korczak promised that he would send him the ghetto diary. As always, Korczak kept his word, and a few days after he and the children were taken to Treblinka, Newerly received the diary. He bricked it up in a safe house until after the war. Published as the Ghetto Diary, it was the only one of Korczak's many books available in English.

On the last pages of his diary, Korczak wrote: "I am angry with nobody, I don't wish anyone evil." Up to the last, he lived according to what the rabbinical fathers once wrote. When asked, "When everyone acts inhuman, what should a man do?" their answer was "He should act more human." This is what Korczak did to the very end.

The memorial at Treblinka to the 840,000 Jews who were murdered there consists of large rocks, marking the area in which they died. The rocks bear no inscriptions other than the name of the city or the country from which the victims came. One rock alone is inscribed with a man's name; it reads; "Janusz Korczak (Henry Goldszmit) and the Children." This, I feel is the way he would have wished to be remembered - as the most devoted friend of children.

Questions:

1. Was Janusz Korczak a "famous" man, or was he famous only because we don't know many other Holocaust victims by name? Explain.

2. What innovations did Korczak bring to the field of education?

3. Read Korczak's remarks to departing young adult orphans carefully. Had he survived the Holocaust, how might he have talked to his children?

4. Why do you think Korczak decided to go with his children to their ultimate death?

Reading #6

Mila 18 - the book. Yad Mordecai - the kibbutz. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. On the March you will confront his name often. In this article you will read about the background of this heroic figure.

Mordecai Anielewicz (1919 or 1920-1943), Encyclopedia Judaica

Mordecai Anielewicz, commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was born into a poor family living in a Warsaw slum quarter; he graduated from the Laor Jewish secondary school and joined the Zionist Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir movement, where he distinguished himself as an organizer and a youth leader.

On September 7, 1939, a week after the outbreak of the war, Anielewicz fled from Warsaw and, together with the senior members of his movement, made his way to eastern Poland, assuming that the Polish forces would establish their defense line there. On September 17, however, Eastern Poland was occupied by the Soviet army. Anielewicz reached the southern part of the Soviet-occupied area and tried to cross into Romania and establish a route for Jewish youth trying to get to Palestine. He was caught by the Soviets and put in jail; when he was released, he decided to return to Warsaw - by then under German occupation - and on the way he stopped at many towns and cities, visiting the Jewish communities. He stayed in Warsaw for a short while only and left for Vilna, which by then had been incorporated into Lithuania. It contained a large concentration of refugees from Warsaw, among them members of the youth movements and political parties. Anielewicz called on his fellow Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir members to send a team of instructors back to German-occupied Poland, where they would resume the movement's educational and political activities in the underground. He and his friend, Mira Fuchrer, set an example by being the first to volunteer for this assignment.

By January 1940, Anielewicz had become a full-time underground activist. As the leader of the Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir underground movement, he set up cells and youth groups, organized their activities, helped publish an underground newspaper, arranged meetings and seminars, and made frequent illegal trips outside Warsaw, visiting communities and his movement's chapters in the provincial ghettos. He also found time to study for himself, especially in Hebrew, and read much history, sociology, and economics. It was in this period that, in his attempts to comprehend the situation, he crystallized his views, giving them expression in lectures and in articles that he published in the underground press.

Under the impact of the first reports of the mass murder of Jews in the east, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Anielewicz revised his policy and concentrated on the creation of a self-defense organization in the ghetto. His first efforts to establish contacts with the Polish underground forces who were loyal to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London were unsuccessful. In March and April 1942 he joined others in the formation of the Antifascist-Bloc; the bloc, however, did not fulfill the expectations of its Zionist components, and after a wave of arrests in the bloc, it ceased to exist.

At the time of the mass deportation from Warsaw in the summer of 1942, Anielewicz was staying in Zaglebie (the southwestern part of Poland, which had been incorporated into Germany). There he worked at transforming the underground youth movements into an armed resistance movement. On his return to Warsaw after the mass deportation, he found that only 60,000 of Warsaw's 350,000 Jews were left in the ghetto, and that the small Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organization; ZOB) in the ghetto lacked arms and was in a dire situation, having suffered failures and lost members. Anielewicz embarked upon a determined drive to reorganize and reinvigorate the ZOB and achieved rapid results; following the mass deportation, there was far more support in the ghetto than previously for the idea of armed resistance and its practical organization. Most of the existing Jewish underground groups now joined the ZOB, and a public council, consisting of authorized representatives, was established in support of the ZOB (the Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or Jewish National Committee, and the Coordinating Committee, the latter also including the Bund). In November 1942 Anielewicz was appointed commander of the ZOB. By January 1943 several groups of fighters, consisting of members of the pioneering Zionist youth movements, had been consolidated, contact had been established with the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) command, and a small quantity of arms had been obtained from the Polish side of the city.

On January 18, 1943, the Germans launched the second mass deportation from the Warsaw ghetto. Caught unaware, the ZOB staff was unable to meet in order to decide on what action to take in response, but in one part of the ghetto the armed groups of ZOB fighters decided to act on their own. There were two foci of ZOB resistance, with Anielewicz commanding the major street battle. The fighters deliberately joined the columns of deportees and, at an agreed signal, attacked the German escorts at the corner of Zamenhofa and Niska streets, while the rest of the Jews fled from the scene. Most of the fighters belonging to the Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir group fell in that battle. Anielewicz was saved by his men, who came to his aid in the close-quarters fighting. The resistance action taken on January 18 was of great importance, because four days later the Germans halted the deportation, a step that the ghetto population interpreted as meaning that the Germans were drawing back in the face of armed resistance by the Jews. The following three months, from January to April 1943, were used by the ZOB for intensive preparations for the decisive test ahead, under the supervision of the organization's headquarters, led by Anielewicz.

On April 19, the eve of Passover, the final deportation of Warsaw Jews was launched, an event that served as the signal for the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In the first few clashes, the Jewish resistance fighters held the upper hand and the Germans suffered losses. The clashes and street fighting in the ghetto lasted for three days. The Germans introduced a large military force, against which the few hundred Jewish fighters, armed only with pistols, had no chance whatsoever; but the fighters did not surrender. Neither, for the most part, did the Jews who were in the bunkers; the appeals and promises they heard from the Germans did not lure them out of their hiding places, and the Germans had to burn down the ghetto, house by house, in order to destroy the bunkers. The fighting in the ghetto went on for four weeks, in the course of which the Germans and their helpers suffered constant losses. It was on May 16 that SS Brigadesfuhrer Jurgen Stroop, the commander of the German force, was able to report that the Grossaktion ("major operation") had been concluded and the ghetto conquered.

In the first days of the fighting, Anielewicz was in command, in the midst of the main fighting forces of the ghetto. When the street fighting was over, Anielewicz, together with his staff and a large force of fighters, retreated into the bunker at 18 Mila Street. This bunker fell on May 8, and the main body of the ZOB, including Anielewicz, was killed. In his last letter of April 23, 1943, to Yitzhak Zuckerman (a member of the ZOB staff who was then on assignment on the Polish side), Anielewicz wrote:

"What happened is beyond our wildest dreams. Twice the Germans fled from the ghetto. One of our companies held out for forty minutes and the other, for over six hours...I have no words to describe to you the conditions in which the Jews are living. Only a few chosen ones will hold out; all the rest will perish sooner or later. The die is cast. In the bunkers in which our comrades are hiding, no candle can be lit, for lack of air...The main thing is: My life's dream has come true; I have lived to see Jewish resistance in the ghetto in all its greatness and glory."

Kibbutz Yad Mordecai in Israel has been named after Mordecai Anielewicz, and is the site of a memorial in his honor. (See IX-8 and IX-17)

Questions:

1. What is Ha-Shomer Ha Tza'ir?

2. How did HaShomer Ha Tza'ir influence Anielewicz to become an activist?

3. What day did the Germans choose for their final attack on the ghetto (in April 1943)? Why?

4. Define: a. Mila 18; b. ZOB; c. Kibbutz Yad Mordecai

Reading #7

Have you started writing in your diary or daily journal? Why do we emphasize the importance of writing? In this article we learn about an extraordinary diary written during the time of the Warsaw Ghetto?

Emanuel Ringelblum (1900-1944), Encyclopedia Judaica

Historian and Jewish public figure; founder and director of the clandestine archive Oneg Shabbat. Ringelblum was born in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia, into a middle-class merchant family. In World War I the family suffered economic setbacks and moved to Nowy Sacz. In 1927 Ringelblum was awarded a doctorate by the University of Warsaw for his thesis on the history of the Jews of Warsaw in the Middle Ages. From an early age, Ringelblum was a member of Po'alei Zion Left and was active in public affairs. For several years he taught history in Jewish high schools. In 1930 he took on part-time employment with the Joint Distribution Committee and established close working relations and personal ties with Yitzhak Gitterman, one of its leaders in Poland, which he maintained in the war years as well. In November 1938 the Joint sent Ringelblum to the Zbaszyn camp, where six thousand Jews were gathered - Polish citizens who had been expelled from Germany at the end of October. The five weeks that Ringelblum spent there, as the person responsible for the fortunes of the refugees, left an indelible impression on him.

In his professional capacity Ringelblum belonged to the third generation of historians of the Jews of Poland, a generation educated and trained in independent Poland. In 1923 a number of these historians formed a group, with Ringelblum as one of its outstanding scholars and organizers, that eventually was associated with YIVO (Yiddisher Visenshaftlikher Institute; Institute for Jewish Research). Ringelblum was one of the editors of the publications issued by the group - Yunger Historiker (the Young Historian) (1926-1929) and Bleter far Geschichte (1934, 1938). In his research work Ringelblum concentrated on the history of the Jews of Warsaw, which he planned to bring up-to-date. Most of his writings are based on original archival material and cover a wide range of subjects; by 1939 he had published 126 scholarly articles.

During the war, Ringelblum was engaged in four spheres of activity in the Warsaw ghetto:

1) working in an institute for social self-aid among Warsaw Jews;

2) working in the political underground, with emphasis on its cultural affairs sector;

3) establishing and administering the clandestine Oneg Shabbat Archive; and

4) keeping an up-to-date chronicle of events, including articles on specific subjects, concerning the life of the Jews during the German occupation of Poland, especially Warsaw, covering the period from the beginning of the war to his own arrest on March 7, 1944.

Ringelblum was in charge of the "public sector" in the self-aid organization. He ran a network of soup kitchens for the desperately impoverished Jewish population and organized and promoted the growth of "House Committees" made up of volunteers with no previous experience of public activity. These committees eventually became a dynamic instrument for dealing with the growing distress.

Ringelblum and his associates made the soup kitchens - in which tens of thousands of soup portions were dispensed every day - into clubs, under the auspices of the political underground. Together with his friend Menahem Linder, Ringelblum founded in the Warsaw ghetto a society for the promotion of Yiddish culture which arranged lectures, observances of anniversaries of Jewish writers, and meetings with writers and scholars in the ghetto.

Ringelblum's outstanding achievement was the secret Oneg Shabbat Archive, which he launched in the first few months of the war. In the initial stage, Ringelblum and a small group of friends concentrated on collecting testimonies and reports on events by Jews who came to Warsaw from the provinces in order to solicit aid from the self-aid organization. Ringelblum was aware that there was no precedent for what was happening to the Jews under the occupation, and believed that "it was important that future historians have available to them accurate records of the events that were taking place." He attracted a large circle of friends and activists to the archive, and succeeded in gaining the support of writers and underground activists representing the various political shadings. As reported by Hirsch Wasser, the secretary of the underground archive (and the only surviving member of the team): "Every item, every article, be it long or short, had to pass through Dr. Ringelblum's hands...For weeks and months he spent the nights pouring over the manuscripts, adding his comments and instructions."

During the last stages of the ghetto's existence, Ringelblum and his associates collected every document and piece of evidence relating to the deportations and the murders and passed them on to the Polish underground, which in turn transmitted the information to London. This was how the Polish underground and London learned for the first time about the Chelmno Extermination camp and came in possession of a detailed report on the deportation of 300,000 Jews from Warsaw. The archive also put out in the ghetto a bulletin, Yediot (News), which enabled the underground to keep abreast of events. The ghetto archive - also known as the Ringelblum Archive is the most extensive documentary source that we have about Jews under the Nazi regime.

Ringelblum himself kept a running record of events and important items of information, at first on a daily basis (until July 1942) and then on a weekly and monthly basis. It was not a diary but rather a chronicle of events, augmented by the author's own appraisals and the historical associations that the events brought to his mind. Ringelblum's notes abound in abbreviations and allusions; he obviously regarded them as the raw material for a comprehensive work that he would write after the war. After the mass deportation, Ringelblum's method of writing underwent a change. He no longer put down information in the form of a digest, but instead dealt with the broad and pressing issues of the time, in an attempt to evaluate the events he was witnessing and fathom their meaning, and his writings convey his bitter resentment and fear. He also composed biographical notes on many of the outstanding Jewish personalities who had gone to their death in the deportations and the struggle, with details of their accomplishments and of their fate under the occupation and in the ghetto. He dealt extensively with the lives of Yitzhak Gitterman, Mordecai Anielewicz, Ignacy (Yitzhak) Schiper, Meir Balaban, and Janusz Korczak. Ringelblum continued writing up to the last months of his life, which he spent in hiding with Poles. It was in that period that he wrote his work on Jewish-Polish relations, an attempt to encompass a multifaceted subject without the help of written sources or reference materials.

The sum total of Ringelblum's writings represents the most extensive effort made by any person to transmit information on the events that were taking place and to cope with their significance. Ringelblum's works have been translated and published, in full or in part, in Yiddish, Polish, English, Italian, French, German, and Japanese. He was the model for the hero of John Hersey's The Wall.

After the great deportation, Ringelblum became an advocate of armed resistance, and the archive was put under the aegis of the civilian arm of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB). In March 1943 Ringelblum accepted the invitation that he had repeatedly received from the Polish side, and with his wife and thirteen-year-old son left the ghetto and went into hiding among the Poles. On the eve of Passover 1943 he entered the ghetto on his own and walked straight into the uprising. What happened to him during the deportation and the fighting is not known, but in July 1943 he was found in the Trawniki labor camp. Two members of the Warsaw underground - a Polish man and a Jewish woman - got him out of Trawniki and took him to Warsaw, in the guise of a railway worker. Together with his family and another thirty Jews, he hid in an underground refuge - and continued writing. A Jewish team that had set itself the task of rescuing Jews who were hiding among the Poles sought to enlist Ringelblum for their operation and to utilize his non-Jewish appearance. On March 7, 1944, however, before Ringelblum had decided whether to leave the hideaway, the place was discovered and all the Jews and Polish-protected persons who had taken refuge there were taken to Warsaw's Pawiak Prison. According to one report, Jewish prisoners who were working in the prison as skilled craftsmen proposed that Ringelblum join their group, but when he came to the conclusion that there was no chance for his family to be saved, he rejected the offer. A few days later, Ringelblum, his family, and the other Jews who had been with him in the hideout were shot to death among the ruins of the ghetto.

Questions:

1. Name some of the diaries and journals discovered in the Warsaw ghetto.

2. What is the importance of reading such a diary?

3. Have you ever written in a diary? How does it feel now to go back and read from it?

4. What was "Oneg Shabbat?"

Reading #8

Glimpses of Ghetto Life, (excerpted from ADL Video)

People started to talk about the ghetto. I had no idea what it meant. I have never even heard the word."...
Liliana, Age 13

Up to breathing, everything was forbidden. Everything was illegal."...
Ben Mead

Children of the ghetto - A cursed generation that played with corpses and death, that knew no laughter and no joy - children who were born into darkness and terror and fright; children who saw no sun."....
David Wdowinsky