Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (22 page)

A fortnight after this, one of Poland’s most famous couriers, Jan ‘Karski’, made arrangements to see the inside of the Ghetto with his own eyes. He entered through a tunnel that started in a cellar on the Aryan side:

Later that year, the courier reached Washington. He was taken by the Polish Ambassador to tell his tale to a group of American Jewish leaders, including Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court. ‘I did not say that this young man is lying’, Justice Frankfurter protested; ‘I said I am unable to believe him.’
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The last sight of Warsaw for perhaps 310,000 Jews was glimpsed in the infamous
Umschlagplatz
, from which the trains left for Treblinka. Its commandant was a senior Jewish policeman called Szmerling, a ‘criminal giant’, ‘a monster with a spiked beard and the face of a bandit.’ His German superiors called him ‘the Jewish Torturer’. His customers nicknamed him ‘Balbo’, apparently because he looked like one of Mussolini’s marshals.
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Located at the north-eastern end of the Ghetto, at the junction of Zamenhoff and Low Streets, the
Umschlagplatz
was carefully designed to mask its activities. The approaches to the specially built railway siding,
where the trains waited, consisted of a labyrinthine series of pathways and open spaces, all hidden by high brick walls. The daily consignments of several thousand deportees – men, women, and children – were driven up Zamenhoff Street by the baton-wielding policemen and by heavily armed SS guards. Delay or dissent invited an instant bullet. Shuffling towards a barricade that blocked the street, the deportees were ordered to turn into a gateway on the right and then to double back along a walled trapway that led to another barricade. There they passed the observation post of the Commandant of the
Umschlagplatz
before spilling into an open square some 80m long by 30m wide (260 by 90 feet). They could see nothing but the sky, the walls, and a former hospital building that contained offices. They watched as the SS picked out a selection of strong young adults destined for slave labour in concentration camps; and they were then pushed through yet another gateway into the former hospital forecourt, where they spent the night in the open. Already hungry, cold, exhausted, and confused, they were ordered in the morning to move back through the square and through a different opening, where at last they saw the cattle trucks into which they were crammed for their last journey. Their destination, Treblinka, had no facilities except for death.

The role played by Ghetto dwellers in the mechanics of their own destruction is not always emphasized. Yet it is well understood by anyone who has been forced to live under the pressures of a totalitarian system. The life-choices which were available under Nazi rule, and still less in the Ghetto, were not those which apply in a free world. Jewish elders collaborated with the SS because, among other things, they wanted to limit their people’s suffering. Jewish policemen agreed to assist the SS in the killing of Jews because they (wrongly) thought they could increase their own chances of survival.
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All one can say is that all human beings are endowed with ‘human nature’, which is not, alas, spotlessly pure, and that commentators living in freedom in another age should not rush to pass judgement. Every person, and every community, has its breaking point. People will bear deprivation and humiliation with a mixture of fatalism, resignation, and fortitude. But they cannot do so indefinitely. If the maltreatment is unrelenting, the time comes when the maltreated will react violently, regardless of the consequences. In the Warsaw Ghetto, this point was reached in April 1943 when the Ghetto Rising erupted.

One should not imagine, however, that the heroism of the Ghetto should be solely attributed to those who eventually chose to fight. In this respect, there were numerous examples of heroic sacrifice by men and
women who saw their prime duty in the service of others. The nurses battling impossibly painful scenes in the children’s hospitals would be high on anyone’s list. So, too, would be the team of medical researchers who chose for their project the mental and physical changes in their own bodies on the road to death from starvation. But many would want to honour the noble figure of Dr Yanush K., the most popular children’s writer in Poland, who chose to live and die for his charges at an orphanage transferred to the Ghetto. He led his boys and girls to the
Umschlagplatz
by the hand, singing a song, and telling them that they would all enjoy ‘the picnic’. There is nothing more heart-rending than to imagine Yanush K.’s kids reciting the lines of Julian T.’s ‘Lokomotywa’ as they listened in the dark to the rhythm of the railway track on their last journey to Treblinka: ‘
Tak to to, tak to to, tak to to, tak to to . . .
’
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Much breath has been expended condemning the alleged indifference of the Gentile population to this appalling agony. The accusers may have a point. But they are unwise to press it too harshly. For as Jewish eyewitnesses have related from their own observations, exactly the same attitudes can be found among the more affluent residents of the Ghetto:

The question remains of how much could have been known to the world beyond the Ghetto walls. The answer must be ‘a great deal’, but in limited circles. The Polish Underground certainly knew what was going on, and tried to organize assistance. Some Varsovians would have met or harboured escapees from the Ghetto, and would have heard their harrowing accounts in person. Many others would not have heard, or did not want to hear, or did not know what to make of the rumours. Active sympathy was scarce; and passive antipathy was rife.
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The real difficulty lay in publicizing the facts. The German press and radio said nothing. The German-controlled media were muzzled. Underground news-sheets did not reach the outside world. The Nazis made every effort to suppress information. Yet trams packed with Varsovians trundled every couple of
minutes along Cool Street, under the bridge that connected the two parts of the Ghetto. Their occupants could see the towering walls with their own eyes, and knew that their fellow citizens were being horribly maltreated. But for two years at least they had few sure means of learning about the true scale or nature of the disaster. Nonetheless, after the Ghetto Rising, when everyone could hear the sickening silence of the ruins, no one could doubt that the Nazis had been intent on total extermination.

In London, the ordeal of the Warsaw Ghetto was known, but did not push the Powers into action. The Allied Governments were preoccupied with the War. One of the Jewish representatives in the National Council of the exiled Government committed suicide in protest. A Polish soldier-poet, then in Italy, wrote a poem in his memory. He saw a bright future:

By focusing on the Ghetto, some commentators have implied that conditions ‘on the Aryan Side’ – as the Nazis put it – were rather plush. This is hardly the right way to describe them. The truth is the Nazi Terror raged in all parts of Warsaw, but with different degrees of intensity at different times and at different locations. The special loathing for Poles, which inspired Nazi conduct to Warsaw, cannot be repeated too often. It was well expressed by Goebbels on the day of the
Führer’
s visit:

The
Führer
has no intention of assimilating the Poles. They are to be forced into their truncated state and left entirely to their own devices. If Henry the Lion had conquered the East . . . the result would certainly have been a stronger slavicised race of German mongrels. Better the present situation: now we know the laws of racial heredity and can handle things accordingly. The
Führer
takes a very positive view . . . We dare not lose our nerve or peace of mind.
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Throughout the city, the climate of fear was fostered through a mass of petty administrative measures, through a German monopoly of housing, employment, rations, and prices, and through a daily show of murderous violence. The forced Germanization of public life, and a fraught ‘war of symbols’, piled humiliation onto a dispossessed citizenry. German became
the official language overnight in a largely non-German-speaking city. All institutions and many streets and buildings were given German names. Strict apartheid was enforced. The best wagons and compartments on all trams and trains were reserved for Germans. The sign
NUR FÜR DEUTSCHE
(Germans Only) appeared in parks and gardens, in apartment blocks, on benches and public toilets, in cafes, restaurants, and hotels. All national monuments were removed. The Chopin Monument was sent for scrap. The Copernicus Statue was adorned with a tablet announcing him as a famous German astronomer. Plans were drawn up to replace the Sigismund Column with something more appropriate.

Nazi policy towards the Catholic clergy of the General Government remained ambiguous. There were no mass purges like those in the Warthegau. Nine out of ten parish priests in Warsaw were allowed to keep their positions. It was said that the Nazis wanted the help of the Catholic Church in its onslaught on ‘Bolshevism’. On the other hand, they did not hesitate in liquidating troublesome clerics. On 17 February 1941, for example, five Franciscan friars were taken from a priory near Warsaw, and sent to Auschwitz. One of them was Father Maximilian Kolbe, who had been known before the war for contributing to dubious journals with anti-Semitic overtones. He obviously professed the wrong brand of anti-Semitism.

Public executions, either by hanging or by firing squad, became a daily occurrence. As the condemned were driven to their fate an SS man toured the streets on a lorry and announced the event through a megaphone. The victims were guilty of something or nothing. The least hint of resistance provoked massive reprisals. In December 1939, for example, two German NCOs had been murdered by common criminals, and 120 inhabitants of the Vaver district were dragged out of their homes and shot in response. Nazi policy created bands of homeless and street orphans: they were hunted down and shot. The Nazis systematically took hostages from suspect districts or families. If anyone in the district or family offended, the hostages were killed. In autumn 1943, Governor Frank decreed that the Gestapo could shoot anyone on mere suspicion. The next year, as a gesture of conciliation, public executions were replaced by secret executions in the Ghetto ruins.

From 1942 onwards, Warsaw was subjected to a special form of random terror – the fearsome ‘roundups’. Whenever the SS needed a sizeable group of people – as hostages, reprisal fodder, candidates for
forced labour, or whatever – they sealed off a church or hijacked a tramcar, and marched off their catch at gunpoint.

The ‘Peacock’ Jail on Pavia Street (the Paviak), and its sister prison, the adjoining ‘Serbia’ for women, were constructions of Tsarist vintage. From 1939, they were located in the heart of the Ghetto. These were the dens into which the Gestapo usually dragged their intended victims for interrogation, torture, and disposal. They continued to provide the same service after the Ghetto was destroyed around them. In five years, they accounted for 100,000 disposals, either shot or sent to the camps.

True to the aim of reducing the Poles to a nation of helots, the Nazis introduced a system of compulsory labour. The
Arbeitsamt
(‘Labour Office’) was a hated instrument of coercion, which in theory could fix the employment of every adult. In practice, it produced chaos. Its practices were barbaric, being more suited to the KZ-workgangs, which it also oversaw, than to civilian workers. Its labour relations were non-existent; and it signally failed to make sensible use of the vast pool of unemployed workers which Nazi confiscations had created. Both inside and outside the Ghetto, its priorities were for various branches of skilled and unskilled ‘war work’. The best workers were drafted to Germany. In other words, good work was rewarded with deportation. Slacking and sabotage were rife. Resentment ran deep.

For many reasons, therefore, Nazi rule in Warsaw did not give rise to an efficient workforce of contented slaves. On the contrary, through its own inconsistencies, it encouraged the growth of a rebellious, pauperized, semi-employed underclass. The discrepancies, between work norms and rations, and between wages and prices, were extreme. In 1941, non-German residents were entitled to 400 grams of flour, barley, or pasta per month compared with 2,000 grams (fourteen and seventy ounces) for Germans, and 1 egg compared with 12. A quarter of the population was destitute, kept alive by soup kitchens provided largely by the Church. Employment brought few dividends. The average Warsaw worker earned 120–300 crowns per month. Yet the average cost of feeding a family of four was 1,568 crowns.
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The black market flourished. Tuberculosis, rickets, and scarlet fever multiplied. The mortality rate soared. Frank approved a six-fold increase of grain deliveries to Germany. ‘The new demand will be fulfilled exclusively at the expense of the foreign population’, he stated. ‘It must be done cold-bloodedly and without pity.’
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In Nazi eyes, the Polish population of occupied Poland was ‘foreign’.