Smuggling

Official food supplies to the ghetto were so scarce that survival would have been impossible had it not been for widespread smuggling. Adam Czerniaków estimated that 80% of food consumed inside the ghetto was smuggled in. It was brought in over, under or through the ghetto wall, via the cemetery, and on one occasion even through a pipeline (carrying milk).

Although conditions outside the ghetto were bad (food in 'Aryan' Warsaw was 10 times more expensive than it had been before the war) food could be obtained, while inside the ghetto nearly 250,000 of the population were starving.

According to Israel Gutman (Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, [Houghton Mifflin, 1984]) "there were three types of smuggling. The first was well-organized wholesale smuggling, requiring co-operation between the Jews and the Poles, and an organization that employed hundreds in a disciplined ... hierarchical structure ... A second form of smuggling was carried out by ... workers, who would leave the ghetto each morning in convoys to work in various places for Germans ... They would snatch small amounts of food for their families or for selling to neighbors ... The third form of smuggling was done individually, mainly by women and small children forced into smuggling by hunger ... They managed to get through the gates or over the wall surreptitiously and begged on the Polish streets or tried some petty trading for a bit of food."

Persons engaged in all three forms of smuggling could be shot if caught, but for most of the period the Germans do not appear to have cracked down on smuggling as much as they could have. Perhaps they feared a rebellion, or a massive public health disaster for the 'Aryan' side if much of the population of the ghetto died in a very short time. Nonetheless, to quote Mojzesz Passenstein of the clandestine Oneg Shabbes archive, "The lives of the smugglers were filled with danger. Not a day passed when one of them was not cut down by machine-gun fire from the [German] gendarmes, but the smuggling did not stop ... it continued with the same intensity .. which placed the smugglers at the front line of the ghetto's struggle against Hitlerism." From mid-1941 at least the German authorities had no compunction about killing children, who were shot down in considerable numbers (though according to Abraham Lewin some German gendarmes turned away deliberately so as not to see them), and in the first half of July 1942, shortly before the Great Deportation, there was a vicious crackdown on smuggling, beginning with what was called 'the Night of Slaughter' (1st July 1942). Some smugglers fought in 'wildcat' combat groups in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Pre-war Polish coins. Unlike the Lódz ghetto, the Warsaw ghetto did not issue its own token currency

The large-scale smuggling enterprises made money for both Jewish and gentile participants. The Polish gentiles who supplied the ghetto were not motivated by compassion, but they helped keep many people alive, and in her diary Rachel Auerbach accorded "a place of honour to Jewish and Polish smugglers alike". The children on the other hand frequently awoke feelings of pity among gentile Varsovians. Even known anti-Semites would give children a crust of bread, although admittedly in a number of cases this was simply to make the child go away. Such children frequently kept their parents alive, and made a deep impression on those who saw them. Henryka Lazowert wrote a poem about them, and after the war the lawyer Leon Berenson suggested that Poland should erect a monument to honour the child smugglers of the Warsaw ghetto.

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