The Great Deportation

"My outlook toward the Jews is based on the hope that they will cease to exist." Hans Frank, at a meeting of the Generalgouvernement administration, 16th December 1941

Many Warsaw Jews were heartened by the news of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the USSR on 22nd June 1941. They assumed (correctly, as it turned out) that this meant that Germany would eventually lose the war. Their initial hopes were however dashed by massive Soviet defeats, and their hopes for liberation by the Red Army did not make them popular with gentile Poles, who saw the Soviets as as great a threat to Poland as the Nazis.

What the Jews did not know was that Barbarossa would mark the beginning of a new and dreadful approach to what the Nazis considered to be their 'Jewish problem'. From the start German troops invading the USSR had orders to kill all Soviet political commissars, while behind them Einsatzgruppen - mobile murder units - had orders to kill Communists and other 'undesirables'. The majority of the people the Einsatzgruppen killed were Jews. They eventually killed 1,250,000 Jews, wiping out entire communities and rendering the occupied eastern lands Judenrein (free of Jews).

In December 1941 the first extermination camp, Chelmno, was set up in the Warthegau west of Lódz. By January 1942 Emanuel Ringelblum's underground archive knew of this, and the information was passed on to London by the Polish underground. Another death camp, Belzec, began murdering the Jews of Lublin, in the Generalgouvernement, in March 1942.

In preparation for the extermination of Warsaw's Jews the Nazis cracked down on the Jewish underground (18th April 1942), Jews caught hiding on the 'Aryan' side (June 1942) and smugglers (early July 1942). Frightening rumours abounded.

On 20th July 1942 German officials had told Czerniaków that rumours of a deportation were "Quatsch und Unsinn" ("patent nonsense"). On 22nd July he was told a minimum of 6,000 deportees a day were needed. Posters were put up by the Germans reading "The Judenrat has been informed of the following: All Jewish persons living in Warsaw ... will be resettled in the East." There followed a list of exemptions, largely those in work and their families. Many believed that this would only mean the expulsion of refugees, the elderly and the unproductive, and a desperate hunt for places in the German-owned workshops in the ghetto began. Large numbers of work permits were issued. The general expectation was that some 70,000 might be deported. Only the youth movements in the ghetto could see that the logical conclusion to the Nazi's Jewish policy would be genocide.

"Communal life ended and everyone was alone. At most, the family unit remained intact." Israel Gutman - Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Houghton Mifflin, 1994)

On the first day of the Great Deportation the Germans sent 6,250 people to their deaths. On 23rd July they asked for 9,000. Rather than play a part in this, Czerniaków took poison in the Judenrat offices. The Germans deported 7,300 people (they would only manage to deport over 9,000 on three days during the Deportation, 6th and 7th August and 8th September).

The early deportations were largely carried out by the Jewish Police, overseen by a few SS and some Ukrainian and Baltic States troops (known as Junaks). Initially they took refugees (including German Jews) and the starving, but soon their quotas began to be filled more randomly. The Junaks, and then the SS themselves, played a greater part after the first few days (eventually about 50 SS and 400 Ukrainians and Balts were involved), while the Jewish Police became firstly hostages, forced to find five deportees a day or be sent to Treblinka themselves, and then finally victims.

When, at an emergency meeting on 23rd July, members of the youth movements suggested taking an active stand, more respected figures argued that resistance would lead to "the utter destruction of the Warsaw ghetto." Meanwhile attempts to get help from the Polish Home Army were rejected without being passed on to higher authorities.

At the end of July and in early August people were rounded up and only those protected by work permits were released. Later in August permits were only partially honoured, as the process became more extreme and violent. Entire streets were surrounded by German troops while a Selektion took place, and people were no longer safe even in workshops, employers sometimes being asked to select those who would live and those who would die.

"'Father, will we meet mother and be together again?' 'Of course, my child. She is already awaiting us there.' 'And when will we be given bread, father?' 'Soon, it is already very, very near.'" Overheard conversation between a father and his small son as they voluntarily headed for the Umschlagplatz, August 1942

To tempt the starving to the Umschlagplatz the Germans on occasion offered three kilos of bread and a kilo of jam to voluntary deportees.

The Polish Home Army and the PPS had people in place near Treblinka and quickly knew its function. The Bund sent a man to investigate, while several youth movement members managed to escape from death transports and return to Warsaw. By mid-August the Jews of Warsaw knew Treblinka was a death camp. Abraham Lewin knew this as early as 11th August, though he still expressed some doubts that everyone was being killed there as late as the 29th.

By early on 6th September the Nazis had managed to deport or kill at least 230,000 people. On the night of the 6th a massive Selektion began in the densely populated working-class district around Mila Street. On 8th September a huge effort deported 13,596 Jews in a single day. By now only 35,000 Jews, those issued with numbers proving their value as workers, were to be allowed to survive. The children of those with numbers were not protected. SS men bayoneted them if their parents tried to save them. On 12th September the last transport, with the exception of one on 21st September, carried away 4,806 people. The Great Deportation was over.

"This is without doubt the greatest crime ever committed in the whole of history." Abraham Lewin, 28th August 1942

According to German figures 253,741 people had been sent to their deaths at Treblinka and 11,580 had been sent to forced labour camps. Judenrat statistics state that 6,687 Jews were shot in the streets and buildings of the ghetto during the Aktion, though the figure is now thought to be over 10,000. Some 8,000 Jews had fled to hide on the 'Aryan' side. In 52 days the Nazis had destroyed a population as large as a medium-sized city's.

Of the people deported some genuinely believed that they were being resettled, perhaps taken in by postcards supposedly sent by former deportees. Others were so desperate for food they may not have cared. Some may have heard of what happened at Treblinka but doubted that all deportees were killed. Israel Gutman draws an interesting parallel with people who "subconsciously refuse to believe the worst" about cancer or marital infidelity. Some willingly went to what they knew was death out of despair, or exhaustion, or (no doubt) anger with life, and some went to their deaths as a protest or because they could not abandon someone else (Janusz Korczak did both these last two). Many were no doubt misled by the 'competitive' nature of the selection progress, which suggested that survival was possible if one tried to protect oneself at the cost of one's neighbours.

Apart from the 35,000 Jews with work permits at least another 20,000 Jews also remained in hiding within the ghetto area. This had shrunk considerably, with its southern wall now running along the north side of Leszno Street. The Small Ghetto and the southern part of the Large Ghetto were resettled by gentile Poles. Instead of being a cross between a huge prison and a city under siege the Warsaw Ghetto was now essentially a large labour camp. The Jews with work permits were concentrated in four areas of the ghetto. These were the General Ghetto, north of Gesia (now Anielewicza) Street (within this enclave lived employees of the rump Judenrat, the surviving Jewish Police, some workers and many of the Jews in hiding - in all over 50% of the remaining population), the Large Workshops (just north of Leszno Street, with 20,000 Jews living in nearby housing), the Brushmakers' Shops (on the eastern border of the ghetto, with 4,000 Jews living nearby) and the Little Többens (a long way south, near Waliców Street in the former Small Ghetto, with 2,000 Jews living nearby). All movement between these areas was now prohibited.