Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
Nor did protests from the Wehrmacht cease. In February 1940, General Johannes Blaskowitz, commander of the Ober-Ost military region, wrote a courageous memorandum to his superiors saying that the “slaughter” of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles was bad not only from the propaganda point of view, but that “in view of the huge population neither the concept of a Polish State nor the Jews” could be eliminated in this manner. The public violence against the Jews, he felt, would soon change Polish hostility toward them into pity, and cause both groups to “combine against Germany.” But, he added, “the worst damage which will accrue to the German nation … is the brutalization and moral debasement which, in a very short time, will spread like a plague among valuable German manpower.… People … with warped characters will very soon come together so that, as is now the case in Poland, they can give full expression to their animal and pathological instincts.” Other officers wrote that the honor of the whole German nation had been besmirched and that the units that had committed atrocities should be replaced by “sound, honorable” ones.
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The protesters were too late. The people with “warped characters” were now in full control. But even they did not like chaotic situations, and once again, due to objections by Governor Frank, who refused to accept such disorganized and unlimited dumping of Jews in his bailiwick, and to fears on the part of economic czar Göring that the unrest caused by the deportations would affect Polish industrial production, the deportation of
Jews from the annexed areas to the East was temporarily halted in favor of continued confinement in ghettos.
The formation of the ghettos was uneven and often chaotic. Sizes ranged from small sections of minor towns to the vast enclaves in Lodz (200,000 plus) and Warsaw (450,000). Lublin was not closed off until April 1941, and others, including the “model” transit camp–ghetto at Theresienstadt, in the former Czechoslovakia, continued to be set up until 1942. But by the summer of 1941 some two million Jews were jammed into these proto-prisons and tens of thousands more would later be similarly confined in Lvov, Bialystok, Vilna, Kovno, and many other locations after the Ukraine and the Baltic states were taken from the USSR.
In the beginning, both the Nazis and the Jews regarded the ghettos as temporary, but for very different reasons. For the Germans they were holding pens from which the waiting millions, whose numbers would meanwhile conveniently be diminished by lack of sustenance, could eventually be transported east of the Urals, or even to Madagascar. To the Jews, they seemed to be refuges in which, if they were cooperative and productive, they could appease the Nazis and survive. In this way of thinking, they, like the rest of the world, completely misunderstood the inflexibility of the ideologues at the top of the Nazi racial agencies. That they did so was not totally naive, for within the Nazi regime and economy itself, as we have seen and will continue to see, there were many whose pragmatism modified, but never eliminated, the tenets of the fanatics.
From the beginning, the Nazi authorities, as they had done in Germany, vested administrative power in each ghetto in a Jewish-run council, or Judenrat. In Poland and the Eastern territories there would be no official, central Jewish organization. Thus each ghetto was isolated and had its own rules, which also varied according to the policies of the local Nazi authorities. The social structure of the large ghettos was as complex as those of any city. There were rich and poor families. There were businesses, banks, taxes, complex politics, and social welfare agencies. There were even foreign relations of a sort: under the auspices of organizations such as the Red Cross, the American Committee for Polish Relief, and the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in New York, which had long supported impoverished Polish Jews, both funds and food shipments continued to trickle through for a time. Survival parcels from relatives in Russia and elsewhere were also allowed to come into the Jewish enclaves.
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The JDC also sponsored the National Society for the Care of Orphans (CENTOS) in Poland, which by the summer of 1941 had 88 children’s
homes and “corners” in 143 locations helping some 12,000 children. In addition, CENTOS, in a tremendous effort that still reached only 30 percent of the needy, had set up 122 food kitchens catering to over 47,000 mainly poor and “refugee” children, that is, those whose families had come into the larger ghettos from small communities and were, therefore, at a disadvantage.
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For a time, things were not too bad. Parents tried to keep life as normal as possible, Schools, permitted by the German authorities in Lodz but forbidden in Warsaw and Theresienstadt, and often operated by political organizations such as the Bundists and the Zionists, flourished, secretly when necessary, in all the ghettos. Most famous among them was the combined school and orphanage run in Warsaw by pediatrician and teacher Janusz Korczak, who, refusing all proposals to save himself and let the children go to their fates alone, marched along with his pupils to the deportation train, holding two of them in his arms.
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There were also youth clubs, choruses, and even makeshift summer camps, sometimes set up in cemeteries. In Warsaw, the Nazis at first even let Jewish children go swimming at a segregated beach on the Vistula River.
Educational and cultural programs were particularly strong at Theresienstadt, the ghetto to which the Nazis took foreign watchdog groups such as the International Red Cross.
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The camp was installed in an outwardly attractive former fortress town built in the reign of the Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II. The regular residents were gradually moved out, and by 1945 some 130,000 people, of whom approximately 12,000 were children, would pass through the camp. Established as a transit camp for Czech Jews, it was also used for upper-class German Jews who were war veterans or who still had assets and art collections that they might be induced to sign over “legally” to the Reich. Theresienstadt was fancy indeed compared to all the other camps, boasting a library of 130,000 books, an outdoor café, manicured gardens, and other apparent amenities. The Nazis even made a film about it, entitled
Theresienstadt: Hitler’s Gift to the Jews
, which was shown back home.
Early on, in a kibbutzlike arrangement, the Jewish council in Theresienstadt separated the children from their parents, whom they were allowed to see once a week, and lodged them in a number of dormitory-style group “homes.” Babies, some of whom were born in the camp, were housed in a special nursery where their mothers were allowed to come to feed them once a day. In the “homes” illegal schooling went on full tilt. If disturbed, the children were trained to pretend they were cleaning their rooms or doing one of the other light tasks expected of them. Here, an
extraordinary subculture flourished that produced plays, a children’s opera, and a literary magazine.
The magazine,
Vedem
, is much like any other school publication, full of childish landscapes and saucy caricatures, until you notice that the poems are all about prison and the interviews are with workers at the delousing station, the central mortuary, and the crematorium, a busy place where by April 1945 most of the 33,430 who died in the camp would be burned.
Trade and industry continued in a truncated fashion in all ghettos. Items manufactured for Polish firms could, for a time, still be sent out. Those who had lived within the walls before the ghettos were set up still had their possessions, and those coming in were allowed to bring things with them. Many would live off the sales of these items.
While supplies lasted, shopping in the Warsaw Ghetto was a popular pastime for the wives of Nazi officials, including the wife of Governor Frank, who ordered, of all things, picnic baskets and a Turkish coffee machine from the incarcerated Jews and who even took her three-year-old son, Niklas, along in her heavily escorted limousine as she shopped for lingerie and furs.
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Cottage industries and bartering were ubiquitous: whole families worked at remaking clothes or the required star armbands. The Judenrats actively solicited German contracts in order to keep their economies going, and more work was provided by the creation of a special Jewish police force, labor gangs requisitioned by the Nazis, and eventually, in some ghettos, large workshops and factories connected to war industries.
The semblance of normalcy did not last. The ghettos were, after all, prisons, in which control of vital elements such as fuel, food, and water remained with the Germans. None of these were provided in quantities adequate to maintain life for long. Rations for Jews were set at 15 percent of those for Germans, and existence could be sustained only by resort to the illegal black market, bribery, and smuggling, all of which flourished, though participation was punishable by death.
The JDC and other international organizations tried to help by sending in food. The Germans, not uncooperative, decreed that 17 percent of all incoming foreign aid be allocated to the Jews. As a special favor, 1,000 tons of food were allowed into the ghettos for Passover in 1940. By February 1941, six other shipments would come in via Switzerland. More could have been sent by the JDC, but influential leaders of the organization in New York objected to the project because it would violate the British blockade of German-held territory, which was based on the theory that sending food to any occupied country indirectly helped the Nazis. Unable
to conceive of the realities of the situation, the JDC objectors argued further that “feeding civilian populations in the war area was a responsibility of the German government, and any food shipments would free Germany from its obligation to provide food.”
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The American War Refugee Board, belatedly established in January 1944, also tried to improve food supplies to the few Jews still surviving by then in the ghettos by having them declared internees, which would have made them eligible for food packages. The International Red Cross, asked to approach the German government on this issue, refused, as it was unwilling to endanger its tenuous privileges in the Reich, noting in its refusal that in any case the proposal “had no prospect of success.” The British relaxed their blockade in August 1944, but by the time the resulting small-parcel program got organized, as the British must have been aware, it was far too late.
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In the ever-growing quest for food, ghetto children became vital to their family’s survival:
We can observe scores of Jewish children from the age of ten to 12 or 13 stealing over to the Aryan side to buy a few potatoes there.… These they hide in their little coats, with hems swollen so that the children look like balloons.… Emaciated three- or four-year-old children crawl through the culverts to fetch merchandise.… Imagine what a mother must go through when her child is in momentary danger of death.
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The dangers were real. The small smugglers had to get past the guards posted all around the ghetto barriers, and all sorts of subterfuges were used to get through the principal entrances. Getting caught was bad, but hunger was a powerful incentive. Thirteen-year-old Sabina Wylot had a close call:
Extreme poverty, shortages of everything, exhaustion, the indigent state of my family.… Daily sights of listless dying people, those who had died of hunger being gathered up from the streets. It was like this day after day. Corpses, corpses, corpses.… Father died of starvation.… Provisions were being stolen.… With collected, begged-for money I would pass under the wall … for flour, kasha, onions, and potatoes.… With little bundles and bags, I would return.… Mama became ill with typhus.… Taken to the hospital, she returned … the shadow of a person but still alive.… Going under rubble and walls to the Aryan side, I set out again.… This was the last time I saw my mother and sister. While returning with my purchases, I was caught, along with a few other children.… Military policemen ordered all the children to pour out their purchased possessions and stand against the wall.… I was
rescued, thanks to a blue-uniformed policeman who convinced the military police that I was not a Jewish girl.… He gave me a kick in the behind saying, “Get lost little girl.” … In a few moments shots were heard, and probably not a single child survived. This one cannot forget.
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Despite these heroic efforts there was never enough to eat. Soon starvation, starting with the poorest families, was pervasive in many ghettos. In the overcrowded lodgings, where six or seven people often lived in one room, disease also took hold. In the summer of 1941 there were outbreaks of typhus, which, along with tuberculosis and other diseases, would increase steadily during the following winter as fuel supplies dropped, pipes burst, and sanitation facilities, already limited, were further diminished. The number of orphans soared. In Warsaw people soon became inured to the sight of emaciated little beggars, often too weak to eat bread even when it was given to them, and to small, newspaper-covered bodies in the street.
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In most areas no “Aryan” doctors were allowed to enter the Jewish areas in order to treat them, and Jews were not allowed in Aryan hospitals. Nor were Jewish doctors and hospitals supplied with sufficient medicines or food. In one town, which had no Jewish doctors, the Aryan director of the hospital persuaded the Germans, always terrified of disease, to relent a little:
The Germans agreed that the hospital can give medical attention to Jews only one hour a day and only when no other patients were present … we still have no right to admit Jews into the hospital except in case of infectious diseases such as typhoid fever. So I was forced to release … a few Jews I was treating for other reasons.
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With hindsight we know that no sensible suggestions mattered to the Nazis: one way or another the Jews were to be removed completely from Nazi-controlled areas. Just how had not been quite defined by the late spring of 1941, but it soon would be.
While the ghettos were thus being consolidated and left to their inexorable decline, the rearrangement and suppression of the Polish gentiles, next on the Nazi elimination list, continued apace. By December 1940, Himmler had summarized his policies and guidelines in a rather elegantly printed booklet entitled
Der Menscheneinsatz
, a hard-to-translate word meaning roughly “population utilization.”
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The human realities of
the plan are made plain in a remarkable diary of the war years kept by a doctor in the small town of Szczebrzeszyn, in the General Gouvernement near Zamosc, who reported the arrival of over 5,000 Poles to his locality, mostly in trainloads of a thousand, between December 1939 and March 1941. The transports ran heavily to older men, women, and children. Many had been beaten and all were exhausted, filthy, and hungry. As had been the case with the nearly simultaneous Jewish transports, no warning of their arrival was usually given to town authorities, who had to care for the masses of people until they were redistributed to surrounding villages, a process that often took weeks: