The war came early for some Warsaw Jews. In August 1939 Halina Gorcewicz (see her memoir Why, Oh God, Why?) saw her Jewish father, a Polish army medical officer, beaten up by anti-Semites near Pawia Street. At the same time Jews, some in traditional dress, were volunteering to help dig trenches to defend the city.
Germany invaded Poland on 1st September. The Poles fought back bravely (though not irrationally - contrary to popular belief Polish cavalry never charged tanks), but by 5th September a partial evacuation of Warsaw had to be ordered. The Polish military information services also called on all young men to depart for the east. Young men and religious and political leaders (such as the Zionist Menachem Begin) left Warsaw in large numbers. This, and later escapes from occupied Poland (for example by Shmuel Zygielbojm), meant that the Warsaw Jews would face the Holocaust with population containing a disproportionate number of women, children and the elderly, led by relatively inexperienced politicians. It also meant that links between Jewish parties such as the Socialist Bund and gentile parties such as the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna or PPS) were weakened (in the case of Bund-PPS relations this was made worse by the fact that the PPS had voluntarily disbanded itself before the occupation).
The defence of Warsaw led to considerable destruction and loss of life. A heavy bombardment of the Jewish districts on 23rd September, Yom Kippur, was believed to be a specifically racist act.
Warsaw capitulated on 27th September. The campaign had in fact been decided 10 days before, when Soviet troops had invaded Poland from the east.
Poland was now divided into three. Northern and western Poland became the Warthegau, part of the German Reich. Eastern Poland went to the USSR. Central and southern Poland, including Warsaw, came under the Generalgouvernement, a German colonial administration under Hans Frank, a Nazi lawyer.
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| Generalgouvernement stamps. Those on the top row are overprinted onto pre-war Polish stamps. Those on the bottom two rows show historic buildings. They are strikingly attractive for stamps issued by one of the most nightmarish administrations in history |
On 21st September 1939 the Germans ordered the appointment of a Judenrat (Jewish council). This was intended to be an instrument of German control, but the 24 men who became the leaders of Warsaw's Jewish community were clearly not aware of this. The first head of the Warsaw Judenrat was Adam Czerniaków, an engineer.
A census conducted by the Judenrat found that there were a minimum of 359,827 Jews in Warsaw on the 28th October 1939.
On 23rd November the Nazis decreed that all Jews should wear a white armband bearing a blue Star of David. Various restrictions were announced in the months that followed. Jews could not change their place of residence and were not allowed to travel by rail, enter restaurants or use public parks (though Jews in traditional dress had already been barred from some parks, such as the Saxon Gardens, before the war).
Jews had to doff their hats to passing Germans. Those who did not were beaten, but those who did could be beaten for saluting someone they had not been introduced to. Mordechaj Anielewicz, a Zionist youth organisation activist, solved this problem by not wearing a hat, and hatlessness and a certain mode of dress became the identifying mark of members of certain youth groups.
Jewish businesses were taken over, depriving many people of their livelihood, and wage-earners lost their jobs. Savings were confiscated. The Germans kidnapped Jews to do slave labour, forcing the Judenrat to rationalise slave labour by creating a labour battalion to work for the occupiers. The Judenrat appointed stewards to organise the labourers, and these stewards would later metamorphose into the ghetto's Jewish Police. The Germans meanwhile encouraged Polish anti-Semites. At Passover, 1940, over 1,000 Polish gentile youths took part in a pogrom that lasted for four days.
Although these measures marked out, impoverished and humiliated Jews (and sometimes injured and killed them), organised German violence early in the occupation was largely targeted at the Polish gentile intelligentsia. Warsaw's Jews felt relatively secure. They hoped that each anti-Semitic decree would be the last.
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Jewish Aid Organisations Poverty and starvation quickly became major problems in Jewish Warsaw, even before the establishment of the ghetto. The city contained many Jewish refugees from other locations (in April 1941 about 130,000, 33% of the ghetto population) and Nazi decrees meant that most of the Jewish population had no source of income. Aid organisations made great efforts to alleviate suffering, but the situation quickly became untenable. The Judenrat's involvement with the aid organisations prevented it becoming as unpopular as similar bodies in other cities. Both the aid organisations and the Judenrat were hampered by the fact that very few Jews had administrative experience, as the pre-war Polish state had barred almost all from the civil service. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, popularly called the 'Joint' - Established in 1914, it operated officially until the USA entered the war in December 1941, and without US support thereafter. The 'Joint' was very useful in the early stages of the occupation, but later failed to live up to expectations, reducing its aid to Warsaw's Jews by 40% in 1941. Through the efforts of Emanuel Ringelblum and others the 'Joint' did however play a part in supporting the underground. It still exists and supports 5,000 Poles (both Jews and gentiles who saved Jews), as well as developing educational programmes. CENTOS - Association for the Care of Jewish Orphans Jewish Social Self-Help Organisation (ZSS, later ZTOS or ZHK because the Germans objected to the letters SS in the original initials), popularly called Self-Help - Emanuel Ringelblum played a part in this organisation. Self-Help was all the more effective (in so far as any body could be) because it worked in continuity with traditional Jewish communal activities. Landsmannschaft - A term for self-help groups comprising refugees from the same town or locality. In practice many refugees were never really accepted into Jewish Warsaw, and many died early in the history of the ghetto. NRO - General Council of Welfare, a Polish umbrella organisation in Kraków. Self-Help was represented on the NRO. Unlike the 'Joint' the NRO gave a disproportionate amount of help to Warsaw's Jews, realising that the ghetto was a major humanitarian disaster. SKSS - An organisation set up for the needy of Warsaw at the start of the war. It administered funds allocated by the Polish government. Warsaw's Jews received funds from SKSS until the Germans banned collaboration between Polish gentile institutions and Jewish ones. TOZ - Connected with medical care Zegota - Council for the Aid of Jews, established in Warsaw by Polish gentiles in late 1942. It received funding from the Polish government-in-exile in London. Zegota provided aid to the 15,000-20,000 Jews in hiding on the 'Aryan' side. |
Jewish Warsaw prior to 1939 * The Warsaw Ghetto * The Great Deportation
The Jewish Fighting Organisation * The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising * After the Ghetto Uprising