Resistance (8 page)

 

The street consisted mainly of residential houses. There were very few shops—merely enough to supply the simplest needs: groceries, shoemakers and tailors, a laundry, coal storage, a tiny stationery store for writing materials, where one could get anything from a shoelace to glue. Here you have the entire business of the street. Our street was partly street and partly lane. A street—for on either side there were blocks of houses of three, four, or even seven stories, and in each house there lived no less than forty to fifty families. A lane—for no tram passed through. It was lit by gaslight, not electricity. It was paved with cobblestones, and every passing wagon would make horrendous rumbling sounds and echoes that made one's heart stand still. It was a narrow street. A strip of grey sky would hang loosely overhead: sunlight barely managed to slip between the walls of the tall buildings. Only towards evening would the rays of the setting sun gild the slanting tin roofs and the flickering lights relieve the dark gloom.

In the winter, the street would get even narrower, owing to the piles of frozen, dirty snow heaped up along the sides of the road. But on a summer's morn, it would sometimes be scented from the produce on a villager's wagon, smelling of fruit and field-flowers.

Our street, the haunt of thousands of Jews, one of hundreds of the Jewish streets of Warsaw which would become heaps of bones and mounds of ruins. Our house on Nowolipki Street, No. 15, was one of the thousands of gray and anonymous Jewish houses in Warsaw. Its windows look out from distances of time and place. Nevertheless, there appears to be something singling it out, erasing its gray anonymity and dimness. There are undoubtedly many among Warsaw's inhabitants who remember this house because of the newspaper
Unser Express
(Our Express), which had its offices here for a short time.

For decades, many thousands streamed through the building on their way to the clinic of the welfare organization known as Achiezer (Brothers Aid). From this house, links were established with the old settlers in Palestine: for some years it was the center for Rabbi Meir Bal Haness' funds. Collectors for religious institutions, functionaries and just ordinary needy Jews could be seen coming and going. Hundreds of pupils studied in Estherson, the Litvak's Heder Metukan [at the Orthodox school, children learned the Torah almost exclusively from a very tender age, while at the Heder Metukan, a certain number of other subjects, such as arithmetic, the language of the country, and general knowledge, were taught], until he turned his school into a hotel.

Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of immigrants leaving for Palestine and emigrants to America spent their last days and nights in this "hotel."

But it was not the institutions which gave our courtyard its character. Our house was essentially a residence for tens of Jewish families living there permanently. The house was old and had been standing for some sixty or seventy years, with the typical format of Warsaw houses and a courtyard closed in on all four sides called "a box." There was a staircase at each corner, apart from the wider and more elegant entrances to the street ... Almost all the apartments consisted of two rooms and a kitchen, a small hallway in which the toilet was hidden behind a screen of planks, and where a laundry basket and all sorts of junk could be found as well. Apartments of this kind were considered respectable and well arranged. At the heart of the Jewish quarter, not only all the residents but all the institutions and all the services were designed for the Jews and were essentially Jewish in character. The Jews had the feeling of being at home among themselves, in their own element. They were free to behave and do as they pleased. The Yiddish language dominated the streets. The motley crowd created a colorful and harmonious existence within the teeming din and clamor. In the eyes of the Poles from the more well-to-do and elegant streets but a few minutes away, the Jewish quarter seemed a strange and alien world, while from the point of view of many Jews, the specifically Polish streets were an area of discomfort and at times the scene of attacks, offensive name-calling on the part of hooligans, and even physical assault, particularly in the '30s.

 

The upheavals of World War I—military operations, mass movements of populations, and the change of rulers—paralyzed the economic life of Warsaw. The Poles displayed untiring and persistent enthusiasm in their struggle for restored political independence, but national freedom in itself did not solve the existential problems of a people. Poland between the wars suffered from the weakness of the Russian markets, which formerly constituted a consumer of Polish industrial production, and Poland was weakened by recessions and the great economic crisis of the interwar period.

 

I
N INTERWAR POLAND,
there was a marked tendency to oust Jews from positions of standing in the economy, most especially in Warsaw. It would be an overstatement to attribute to the Poles in general, and to all the nation's political bodies, the inclination to rid the economy of Jews and to view Poland's future through the prism of antisemitism, but anti-Jewish slogans were prevalent. There were many who saw in the elimination of the Jews from economic positions—and, from the late 1930s onward, the ousting of Jews altogether—the panacea for all of Poland's ills. This was the dominant opinion within the Endecja, with its large contingent of the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, and the intelligentsia. It was also the doctrine that permeated the ranks of many young students and political activists who, in the 1930s, abandoned the Endecja and founded a radical-nationalist branch, which, despite its self-avowed Catholic orientation, enthusiastically appropriated many elements of fascist ideology and adopted the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis as its model.

The Jews were a distinctly urban element throughout Polish cities. Apart from a small minority of Germans, some of whom had obscured or rejected their former identity, the Jews were in many aspects the most distinct of Poland's minorities. A situation so rife with tensions and shortages naturally provided fertile ground for accusations against the Jews. The Jews, it was claimed, were responsible for the backwardness of the Polish cities, and Poland's poorly managed industry and commerce were a direct outcome of the excessive number of middlemen and their scramble for speculative profits.

Many Jews, or rather most Jews, were active in the world of commerce and trade and in certain skills and crafts that employed methods well behind those of the Western nations. However, instead of addressing the causes for the poor state of its cities and the backwardness of its commerce, and energetically introducing basic reforms and improvements in both the rural and urban sectors, Polish authorities frequently preferred to attribute the responsibility for this sorry state of affairs to the Jews, who were portrayed as the obstacle to eagerly awaited changes.

According to statistics, the Jews owned 73 percent of private businesses in Warsaw at the end of World War I, while in 1928 this percentage dropped to 54 percent, and it continued to decline until World War II. This regression is underlined even further on examining the categories of businesses in Jewish hands. It appears that the figure 39.5 percent, which represents the Jewish commerce in Warsaw in 1928, decreased to 23 percent in 1933. The fact that the Jews were mainly engaged in petty commerce and peddling did not lessen the antagonism. On the contrary, the small shopkeeper was seen by the consumer as an independent entrepreneur supplying all branches of production and responsible for the increasing gap between wages and prices, as well as for the problems of the unemployed who bought merchandise on credit and could not repay their debts in time.

The image of the rich Jew manipulating the strings of commerce was very common among lower-class Poles. In his book
The Republic of Many Nations,
a Polish scholar, Jerzy Tomaszewski, documented that apex of Poland's economy between the wars. There were ninety-two specific individuals in the ranks of the financial oligarchy who determined economic policy. Judging by the sound of their names and by other indications, at most fourteen of them were Jews—some had either assimilated or converted. As is traditional with antisemitic stereotyping, it is sufficient for only a small number of Jews or even one Jewish individual to be involved with an area of commerce in order to prove Jewish domination.

Jews were also the first to break down the barrier set up by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics after the Revolution, and the Jewish Merchants Association organized a share-holding company whose expertise was in establishing commercial connections with the East. The nucleus of the Merchants Association, a powerful and prestigious body founded in 1906, was situated in Warsaw, and from there it spread to a network of branches throughout the country where it was organized according to specific trades. According to the Jewish historian Meir Balaban, this organization boasted some six thousand members in Warsaw in 1928. The association would arrange annual conventions, and, according to one of its members, these were "important events in the Jewish political calendar in Poland."

Businessmen from Warsaw were the dominant figures in the Merchants Association. By 1935 Abraham Gepner headed the organization. He was a man of enormous vitality, who had started life as a delivery boy in a commercial company and had reached a position of prominence in the metal trade as a merchant and manufacturer. In the 1930s, Gepner became known as a highly principled public figure and a philanthropist who was particularly sensitive to the fate of orphan children. During wartime and the ghetto, Gepner, then a man of almost seventy, was a member of the Judenrat and was responsible for supplies—that is, for the very sensitive and socially explosive area of distributing food to hungry people. In this unrewarding role, his good name was never questioned. In addition, he secretly supported the underground movement and the Jewish Fighting Organization. In his last days, Gepner wrote that he did not regret remaining in the ghetto with his brothers and sisters, and "if I could wipe away but one tear—I was well rewarded."

Within the ranks of the various types of manufacture, Jews excelled as developers, both within the framework of the Polish state and internationally. When the large companies left the arena of private enterprise and became share-holding companies, a number of Jews were appointed as their directors.

In general, the Jews preferred to work independently—that is, not to be wage earners but to maintain their own business or shop, no matter how small. Only under the heavy pressure of taxation, which affected the lower middle classes, and especially after the havoc inflicted by the severe depression, did the Jews who had been small businessmen experience the painful process of proletarianization. There were many artisans among the Jews of Poland, but the number of Jews working in agriculture in a country that was basically agrarian was markedly low. This reflected government restrictions against Jews' owning land, imposed time and again throughout Jewish history. In 1918 the Jews composed 37 percent of the artisans, and this percentage rose considerably during the years of Poland's independence. Jews were concentrated in certain branches of work, especially those demanding a degree of expertise, such as the manufacture of clothing, shoes, wood, hats, leather goods, haberdashery, and furs, among others.

In 1926 a government survey revealed that 55 percent of all workshop employees were Jews. In 1927 wide reforms were introduced with regard to workshop conditions and standards, and the workers were obliged to undergo an examination by the authorities which would entitle them to a license (patent), giving them the right to engage in their craft if they succeeded in passing. Many Jews failed, and quite a few complained that this was not due to faulty products but because the examinees were asked to prove their mastery of the Polish language. As a result, many Jewish workshops were forced to operate without an official license, and this had an effect on the prices they could demand. Work had to be done at the workers' homes. In the poorer Jewish sections, in Mila, Smocza, Krochmalna, and others, there were many tailors, shoemakers, dressmakers, and all sorts of temporary workers, who worked as independent artisans or undertook temporary job lots from contractors. Temporary artisans and workers, known as
chalupnicy,
lived in one small room and used the workshop for eating, sleeping, and daily family life. Children did their homework or played games in a tiny area of this one room, which was often gloomy.

In the course of time, these severe regulations were somewhat eased. The artisans were organized into a professional union called the Central Association of Jewish Artisans, and had some eight thousand members in Warsaw alone and more than five hundred branches throughout the country. The union attended to many aspects of the professional sector and protected the artisans' rights on the official and legal levels. The contradictory views that led to a split of this many-sided union were not only political, but were sometimes caused by a conflict of personalities and the ambition to dominate the union, according to Joseph Marcus, author of a book on the social and political history of Polish Jews between the wars. Until 1929, the union was headed by Adam Czerniakow, an engineer who was close to the assimilationists, but like other members with similar views, Czerniakow moved toward serving the Jews in other capacities and defended them against the discriminating policies of the authorities. Czerniakow was chairman of the Judenrat in the Warsaw ghetto from the beginning of the Nazi occupation, from October 1939 until he committed suicide at the start of the deportation of the Jews to Treblinka on July 22, 1942.

The larger Jewish unions also had a banking system and a welfare fund. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint) had a large share in initiating and channeling funds into the maintenance of the financial and welfare network. According to Joseph Marcus, in the aftermath of the stock market crash, there was a decline in the Joint's involvement in and aid to these banking institutions. This only exacerbated the dire conditions of Polish Jews. Consequently, there was also a weakening of the effectiveness of the Jewish economic unions at the rime when they were needed most. In response, independent mutual aid from local Jewish sources increased at this critical juncture.