More Information About Warsaw

The students will visit several cities seeing remnants of the Ghetto of: Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin and Lodz. During their visit to Warsaw they learned about not only life in the ghetto but the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. Here is additional information about the Warsaw Ghetto, the uprising and Jewish resistance.

When I hear from the kids, I will send you their direct quotes, too.
Thanks
Barb

In September of 1939 Poland’s total population was about 33 million. Ten percent were Jews. Jews had lived and thrived in Poland for hundreds of years. Nazi Germany’s Blitzkrieg and the partition of Poland brought two million Jews under German rule. For Hitler, this “Jewish Problem” was one of enormous proportions. According to Nazi racial ideology, Poles were much inferior to Germans. Eastern European Jewry—Polish Jews among them—ranked even lower. Nazis referred to the Jews as sub-humans. Polish Jews therefore were given even less respect than the German Jews had received. Although the development of the Nuremberg Laws in Germany was a gradual process, allowing some German Jews the opportunity to leave; in Poland it was quite different. Things happened almost overnight.

The Nazis established their first ghetto on October 8, 1939. It stood in the Lodz district of Occupied Poland. A year later 500,000 Jews in Warsaw, Poland, struggled to survive in constantly deteriorating ghetto conditions. Severe hunger, overcrowding, disease and despair caused the Warsaw ghetto and other ghettos like it in cities such as Lodz and Lublin (Poland) Lvov and Minsk (Soviet Union), Kovno and Vilna (Lithuania) and Riga (Latvia) to become places of horrible suffering and death.

The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the ghettos organized by the Nazis in Poland. A tiny section of the city, an area of 3.5 square miles, imprisoned half a million Jews. It covered almost 2 percent of the city’s area but contained 30 percent of its population. With the fall of Poland the Nazis forced Jews to wear identifying armbands, confiscated their properties, and forced them into hard labor. They concentrated Warsaw’s Jews in the northern part of the city, the most heavily Jewish populated district. Each building in the ghetto housed an average of 400 people; rooms held an average of six to seven people. Many took refuge in courtyards, under stairways, or in cellars of bombed out houses.

The walls of the Warsaw Ghetto were sealed on November 16, 1940; and from that time until the final liquidation, the traffic to and from the ghetto was tightly regulated. The barbed wire and wooden fences originally erected gave way to an 11 foot high brick wall topped with broken glass. At first the ghetto had 22 gates and openings in the wall. By April 1941 only 13 remained, all of which were guarded by police: German, Polish and Jewish. Today all that remains is one small portion of the wall and a few old tenements which your children viewed.

The Nazis provided only minimal food supplies, rationing them in exchange for the output of forced labor and products that were produced by the ghetto craftsmen. The food allocations equaled 200 calories per person. The Nazis permitted no fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, fish or milk. Safe drinking water was scarce. Food allocations were distributed through the Judenrat, the Jewish council appointed by the Nazis. The Council was responsible for housing assignments, meeting roundup quotas, and other “choiceless choices” that were forced upon the Jews by the Nazis. Some people were part of this Council because they thought it would save themselves and their families; others thought they could be kinder to the Jewish residents than the Nazis. Either way, they often were despised by the residents of the ghetto and in the end they met their deaths as well.

During the winter, when sewage pipes froze, human excrement was dumped in the streets. Many ghetto residents died on a daily basis. Old people and children simply lied down in the streets and died. About 500,000 residents of Warsaw lost their lives during the Nazi occupation.

Jewish children were a particular affront to the Nazis as they were the “future of the Jewish race.” Furthermore they were useless because few of them could work. Therefore they usually were the first among the victims of Nazi pogroms. Children of the ghetto were particularly vulnerable to the harsh treatment of the Nazis. Without proper food, shelter and clothing, childhood death rates were extremely high. In addition with schools closed and parents dieing, the traditional family structures were shattered, and children of the ghettos were deprived of education and their innocence. Many of the children of the ghettos became the “smugglers”. Because of their small size, they were able to squeeze through cracks and holes in the walls, meet up with the underground through the sewer system, and bring back food, weapons, and other items needed to survive within the ghetto walls. There is an actual sewer or manhole in the middle of the Warsaw Cemetery where many of these children of the Warsaw Ghetto ended up escaping to in order to meet up with the underground and receive goods to smuggle back into the ghetto.

During 1942 and 1943, the Nazis “liquidated” the ghettos by deporting and murdering their inhabitants. Those in Warsaw were sent mostly to Treblinka. Round ups became a daily occurrence in the ghettos.

The tragic history of the Warsaw Jewish community can be heard in the word, Umschlagplatz (transfer point). During the deportations that began in July 1942; an average of 7,000 Jews per day were forcibly marched to the Umschlagplatz, a way station to the Treblinka extermination camp. German police, the SS and their Latvian and Ukrainian helpers would search the streets of Warsaw, rounding up Jews to send to this way station. Jews of Warsaw knew that it was imperative to their survival to avoid this holding place of death. (See the film The Pianist)

Today there is a small memorial to the Umschlagplatz. Your children went there and saw what basically looks like a box car structure made of marble, with the first names of ghetto residents inscribed on it. In the middle of this structure is a small opening with a tree in eye view. Students are asked to reflect on this memorial. Some will find their own names inscribed on the wall; others will find their Hebrew Names. The horrible circumstances of the ghetto, coupled with the appalling conditions on the trains, caused many of those who began the journey of death to die here at this point and even before they reached their final destination. And of course, those who survived the trains or the conditions of the ghetto or the brutality of the Nazi guards were ultimately murdered in the gas chambers of Treblinka.

One cannot leave the city of Warsaw without remembering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the summer of 1942 the Nazis removed 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. Most went to Treblinka. Approximately 700 to 750 Jewish men and women armed themselves as best they could. They were determined to resist the roundups and the Nazis who were intent on destroying the nearly 60,000 Jews who remained in the ghetto in the early spring of 1943. On April 19, the eve of Passover, the Germans entered the ghetto to liquidate it for good. They met up with the first “urban uprising” in German-occupied Europe. It lasted from April 19 to May 16, 1943. Although the poorly armed Jewish fighters were outnumbered 3 to 1 by Nazis who had tanks and cannons, it was not until May 8 that the Germans destroyed the Jewish Fighting Organization’s headquarters bunker at 18 Mila Street, where Mordecai Anielewicz, the organization’s commander, died.

Although on May 16 General Stroop declared victory over the Warsaw Ghetto, and although only 16 Germans were killed and 85 were wounded, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising remains highly important as another example of heroic Jewish resistance against ENORMOUS ODDS. Furthermore it prompted Poles to revolt and others in other places to do the same.

The Rapoport Memorial of the Warsaw Ghetto can be seen both in Warsaw and at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. It stands as tall as the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto did in the year 1948 -- piled 16 feet high covering hundreds of acres. When your children come home, ask them what they remember about this memorial and what was different about the memorial as seen in Poland versus the one at Yad Vashem in Israel. Both are a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising