Ulica Chlodna 20
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Most of the 20,000 relatively rich families in the ghetto lived in comparatively spacious apartments in Chlodna Street. This house, 20 Chlodna, faces south onto the street.
This was the home of Adam Czerniaków, the head of the Judenrat until July 1942. Czerniaków was one of those forced to move when the ghetto was set up. Modern maps indicate that this building was just outside the ghetto, so it seems likely that this was his pre-war home. The gentile doctor Professor Raszeja was killed in the house to the west (now destroyed and replaced by the small tower block in the photograph - this building was definitely in the ghetto) on 22nd July 1942 after he entered the ghetto to give medical aid to a Jewish boy.
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| 20 Chlodna Street gives a good impression of the sort of architecture Warsaw lost in 1939, 1943 and 1944 |
Adam Czerniaków was born in 1880 into an assimilated family in Warsaw . He graduated in chemistry from the Warsaw Polytechnic and studied engineering in Germany. When he returned he became a teacher at a technical school and one of the organisers of the Central Union of Jewish Craftsmen. He was a councillor in the Kehilla (the Jewish Community authority) from 1937, and was nominated its head by Stefan Starzynski, the Mayor of Warsaw, at the outbreak of war.
After the start of the occupation Czerniaków was elected chairman of the Judenrat, successor to the Kehilla. Unlike Chaim Rumkowski, who ran the Lódz Ghetto like a personal empire, Czerniaków did not use coercion against his population unless the Nazis forced him to. This meant that he was not ready to confiscate the property of the richer element in the ghetto to help the poor, who formed the vast majority. He even imposed a regressive tax on bread.
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| Czerniaków's (post-war) grave in the Okopowa Street cemetery |
Like many of the older politicians and civic leaders in the ghetto, Czerniaków did not foresee the mass extermination of Warsaw's Jews until it was too late. In the days before the Great Deportation he went from Nazi official to Nazi official, and was assured by all of them that rumours of a deportation were false. Then on 22nd July 1942 the Germans told him they needed a minimum of 6,000 people a day, and threatened to kill his wife if he did not comply. Czerniaków refused to sign a Judenrat decree, but the transportation went ahead (and was largely carried out by the Jewish Police). The next day the Judenrat was asked to provide 9,000. Czerniaków, a book lover and amateur poet who had once written "I was born at Zimna [Cold] Street, I want to die at Chlodna [Cool] Street," wrote a suicide note to his wife and poisoned himself in the Judenrat offices.
Many people, including Emanuel Ringelblum, have been very critical of Czerniaków. Others have praised him and some feel that his suicide redeemed his failings. Like Rumkowski at Lódz, he remains a controversial figure.
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"The SS wants me to kill children with my own hands. There is no other way out and I must die." Adam Czerniaków, in his suicide note to his wife, 23rd July 1942 |
Czerniaków's diary survives in the Jewish Historical Institute.
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| The entrance to 20 Chlodna Street |