Resistance (16 page)

Smuggling was not a one-way proposition. Jews sold or traded their property, possessions, and clothing for food, and a steady stream of Jewish money, household goods, pianos, and other possessions poured into the Polish side. The Poles involved in the smuggling did so at risk to their own lives. Objectively speaking, their aid in a vital task should be praised.

As with smuggling, there were various manufacturing enterprises in the ghetto which emerged in response to the situation. The only legal commodities to enter the ghetto came through the
Transferstelle,
the German office responsible for the movement of goods and raw materials into and out from the ghetto. The
Transferstelle'
s compound, located on the Aryan side of the ghetto border, led to a sidetrack of the railway. This same compound would later be used as the point of departure for the death transports during the annihilation of the ghetto and the mass expulsion of July 1942. The name was then changed to the infamous
Umschlagplatz,
or "reloading or transport place."

In addition to the official economy focused in the
Transferstelle,
goods entered and left the ghetto illegally, including articles manufactured in secret—the "hidden commerce of the ghetto"—which employed skilled artisans and workers for illegal export. According to estimates in an economic study prepared for the underground archives in the ghetto, income from legally manufactured goods increased from more than 300,000 zloty in June 1941 to 1.2 million zloty in November of the same year, a growth of more than 400 percent in five months. During that period, the illegal production of the ghetto netted some 10 million zloty, an amount approximately three and a half times greater than that of the legal production.

One of the main customers for illegally produced goods, and also the supplier of the raw materials needed for this production, was the German army, which was in urgent need of brushes, beds, metalware, clothing, and other items. The army deliberately circumvented the civilian administration of the General Government to avoid the high duties normally paid to the transferring office. Moreover, the army, anxious for the prompt delivery of desperately needed material, was willing to buy directly from Jewish manufacturers, even when it meant paying higher prices, in order to avoid German manufacturers and the middlemen who were inclined to pocket some of the profits.

German businessmen who owned enterprises in the ghetto tried to get the ghetto Jews to work without pay. The Jews refused to work in these enterprises, and as a result, the German-owned factories produced poor-quality products. Therefore, the Wehrmacht preferred to work directly with Jewish manufacturers, whom they knew to be experienced, and willingly paid for that experience. Polish businessmen who had taken over for Jews in various national manufacturing markets also had difficulty obtaining manufactured goods, especially those produced by skilled and professional Jewish artisans. Polish merchants tried to acquire smuggled goods. Since Jews were the weaker partner in such deals, goods were more than occasionally extracted by exploitation or dishonest means. Nevertheless, Jewish manufacturers could keep their heads above water. The mere fact of their existence was proof that they did not forgo their share of the profit.

The Judenrat was under pressure to increase the German manufacturers' share of income from ghetto enterprises, and so an effort was made to attract Jewish workers to the German enterprises by providing them with larger rations of food. Jews refused to submit to slave labor, however, and the Judenrat refrained from forcing them to do so. According to official data, toward the end of its existence, there were some 70,000 workers in the ghetto. In the last months before the expulsion, when frightening rumors abounded, many applied for work at German enterprises because these were considered more secure in view of the dangers hovering over the ghetto.

Mutual help in the ghetto changed in the period from mid-1941 to mid-1942. In "The Social Welfare in Warsaw during the War," written in June 1942, Emanuel Ringelblum explained the changes and the difficulties. While acknowledging the positive contributions made by the Joint, including the assistance rendered to Jews by its various departments, he examined the negative aspects of their work. The Joint was inclined to give too much importance to the people "who form public opinion—the press, and leaders of political parties," rather than the public that depended on it. Ringelblum viewed this as a form of protectionism that affected and harmed its activities. Ringelblum also pointed to another weakness. In the first weeks of the war, when the Joint had enormous financial sums at its disposal, it generously helped many. The Jews of Warsaw assumed as a result that the impoverished and the refugees could depend on bounteous funds from the Joint. In the spring of 1940, with the Joint's funds declining rapidly, it took some time before the Jews realized that they themselves would have to shoulder the responsibility for the distress plaguing their community. By that spring, Ringelblum says, "it became clear that in this war, the Jews of the United States would not lend a hand as generously as they did in the first world war, but people continued to believe that American millions would still cover the aid expenses."

Why didn't American help arrive when Jews were being driven mad and dying from hunger? Ringelblum did not answer this question, stating only that the Jews of Warsaw eventually realized that they could not depend on others. He saw the apex of achievement and dedication of the people of the Joint in its proper place, in the self-contribution of the Jews of Warsaw who lent the Joint millions on the assumption that it would be returned after the war, despite a Nazi prohibition against such transactions. Managers of the Joint in Warsaw knew from the very outset that they were endangering their lives, and although they knew what awaited them if the matter was discovered they did not hesitate. It would remain forever one of the greatest open secrets of the ghetto—it was possible even in such a demoralized and corrupt social climate to keep this secret open to the Jews and closed to the Germans and the Poles, despite the presence of dozens of agents. All Warsaw Jews knew about these matters. The Germans did not.

Ringelblum did not differentiate between those matters concerning Jewish property and money, in which the Germans intervened as a matter of course, and other issues that interested them less, such as cultural or even underground political activities. For substantial sums donated by Jews of means to help the hungry was something that made the Germans anxious, and thus Ringelblum's amazement at the fact that they succeeded in hiding such a forbidden matter from the Germans.

Ringelblum recalls the scourge caused by German agents among the Jews of the ghetto. We do not know how many there were or who was behind them, but their existence was known to many since they operated as a network openly attached to the SD, the intelligence and surveillance organization of the SS. The head of this network was an interesting figure named Abraham Gancwajch, a native of Czestochowa. A Zionist in his youth, he had lived in various European countries, where his activities are a mystery. At the outbreak of the war, he was living in Lodz. He appeared in Warsaw at the beginning of 1940, where he attracted attention by preaching that one had to get used to the German regime and accept it. Gancwajch clearly believed that the Germans would win the war. Beginning in early 1941, Gancwajch acquired a reputation as someone willing to use connections among the German authorities to seek the release of prisoners or assistance for others in trouble. Among a helpless population, such rumors offered promise. In certain instances he did make use of his connections, but in most cases his efforts were fruitless.

Moreover, he was usually paid for his efforts. In time, he became a manager and rent-collector for the Germans, and soon he had agents in special uniforms, a counterforce to the Judenrat police, who acted under the peculiar and nonspecific guise of "the war against speculation and excessive prices." Like the Mafia, they forced ghetto businessmen to pay a form of protection against betrayal to the authorities. Later, Gancwajch set up a "first aid station," which had little to do with the sick or the injured but most probably ran ambulances to transport confiscated goods and materials.

Endowed with great rhetorical gifts, he made frequent use of them. Fluent in Hebrew, he introduced himself as a benefactor who would see to everything. He held receptions in his home and surrounded himself with both the naive and the less naive. At his peak in the ghetto, he strove to undermine the position of Czerniakow and the Judenrat in an effort to take over the management of the ghetto himself. Czerniakow speaks of him with ridicule and abhorrence, and he was one of the few men whom Czerniakow despised. His attempts to take over the ghetto eventually led to his downfall. Gancwajch was defeated in a quarrel between the German authorities.

On the bloody night of April 18, 1942, Gancwajch and his close assistant, Sternfeld, were sought by the Germans. He succeeded in evading them. There were unsubstantiated rumors that he was informing on Jews in hiding on the Polish side of town. Hillel Seidman, a senior official of the Judenrat and author of the book
The Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto,
claimed to have read reports in which Gancwajch would supply Germans with information about ghetto activities. According to Seidman, these reports did not contain ghetto secrets or reveal operations of the underground, nor were they written with malice.

The American scholar Christopher R. Browning, who researched in the archives of Yad Vashem, cited a collection of reports written by a German agent in the ghetto. We know that Ganwajch himself was not the informer who wrote those notes, but they may have been prepared by someone close to him. An examination of the material, which covers the period between March and May 1942, generally confirms Seidman's observations. The documents contain details of the mood and conditions in the ghetto, and report that rumors were rife about mass killing and the use of gas for this purpose. But the documents contain no information that would have been harmful to the ghetto and do not mention the political underground and its activities.

Why didn't the Jews revolt? How are we to understand the fact that masses of Warsaw Jews had reached the point of extreme starvation and weakness, yet they did not attack those well-fed Jews who publicly flaunted their affluence? The process of decline was gradual among the starving Jews. When it began, they were still hopeful, but when decline set in they were reduced to utter impotence. As long as people retained some hope and had the minimum requirements for living, they were not eager to revolt, while those close to death from hunger did not have the strength or will to organize or demonstrate violently.

Paradoxically, conditions improved in the ghetto in the last months before the mass expulsion. There was talk of a relative state of stabilization, a decline in the typhus epidemic, a reduction in the rate of death, an increase in the number of employers, and a minute increase in food rations. The weakest had died. Only the stronger and more vigorous remained alive. In January 1942 the death rate reached a figure of 5,123, or 1.5 percent of the population; by May the number had dropped to 3,363. In his March 1942 report, District Governor Fischer wrote of a decline in the incidence of typhus. In May he stressed the increasing number of Jewish workers and their greater role in various essential enterprises.

Clearly, the decision to deport and annihilate the Jews did not originate with the local German authorities and was not the result of a worsening situation in the ghetto. The directive to kill the Warsaw Jews came from higher sources. The deportation was preceded by a reign of absolute terror: killings of groups of people for crossing the ghetto borders, increasing rumors of "actions" and death camps, information about expulsions from many other ghettos, which had disappeared without a trace—and finally, on July 22, the terrible tragedy of the Jews of Warsaw.

T
HE LAUNCH OF
Operation Barbarossa, the German assault on the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, was a watershed in the progress of the war. Germany's long-standing aspiration to dominate Eastern Europe was merged with its ideological and racial goals. In a briefing to his officers, Hitler described the war as the decisive confrontation between two completely opposing world-views, with mass annihilation necessary to prevent the recurrence of these ideologies. In an address to the troops Himmler was graphic:

 

Here in this struggle stands National Socialism: an ideology based on the value of our Germanic, Nordic blood. Here stands a world as we have conceived it: beautiful, decent, socially equal ... a happy beautiful world full of culture. That is what our Germany is like.

On the other side stands a population of 180 million, a mixture of races whose very names are unpronounceable, and whose physique is such that one can shoot them down without pity and compassion ... These people have been welded by the Jews into one religion, one ideology that is called Bolshevism.

When you, my men, fight over there in the East, you are carrying on the same struggle against the same subhumanity, the same inferior races that at one time appeared under the name Huns, another time ... under the name Magyars, another time under the name Tartars, and still another time under the name Genghis Khan and the Mongols.

 

Andreas Hillgruber, a scholar of German political history, identified four motives for Hitler's assault on the Soviets. The first was to exterminate "Jewish Bolshevik leadership," including its presumed source, the millions of Eastern European Jews. Hitler himself identified the three other motives in a speech to senior officers: to acquire land for German settlers, to impose German dominion over the Slavs, and to take over the rich sources of raw materials necessary to wage war against the Anglo-Saxon forces.

Indeed, from the very outset, the German occupying forces received instructions couched in ideological language. The murderous methods adopted were applied to entire sectors of humanity who were identified as the enemy. "Commissars Orders" were issued to wipe out the political commissars of the Red Army. Germany invaded the Soviet Union in group force. Its military might consisted of 121 divisions (including seventeen armored and twelve motorized divisions and three thousand planes). The army was accompanied by
Einsatzgruppen,
mobile killing units A, B, C, and D, which were deployed from the north to the south.