The Warsaw Ghetto is sealed

On 15 November 1940 the final deadline expired for moving into the “Jewish residential district” of Warsaw, designated six weeks earlier by Governor Ludwig Fischer’s decree on the creation of the ghetto. At midnight on 15–16 November German gendarmes took up positions at the ends of the streets, and the openings that had not been bricked up became guarded gates. Around 400,000 people, roughly 30 per cent of the city’s inhabitants, found themselves behind a wall in an area of about 307 hectares, in fewer than 1,500 buildings. This is why some sources date the sealing of the ghetto to 15 November and others to 16 November: both refer to the same night. From then on, the ghetto could be left only with a pass or in a labour column. A life began in which survival depended on ration cards, smuggling and mutual aid.

The night of 15–16 November

Until the very last moment, Jewish Warsaw did not know whether the designated district would be open or closed. Optimists recalled that in the autumn of 1939 the Germans had already withdrawn a similar order, and they expected that this time, too, the aim was merely to extort a ransom. Others looked to Łódź, where the ghetto, sealed in the spring of 1940, had been starving for months. On 8 November the historian Emanuel Ringelblum noted a growing fear of a closed ghetto, since a rumour was going round the city that the Polish police had been ordered to leave the district, and that everyone was stockpiling as much as they could. The chairman of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniaków, himself moved into the ghetto on 11 November.

When people set off for work at dawn on Saturday 16 November, they found guard posts at the crossroads. “The Sabbath day on which the ghetto was created was terrible,” Ringelblum wrote. “At every street crossing stood guard posts of German, Polish and Jewish policemen, checking who had the right to pass.” People in the street said that the Jews had been “walled in alive” and compared the ghetto to the Middle Ages. The German authorities, meanwhile, insisted on the term “Jewish residential district” (Jüdischer Wohnbezirk) rather than “ghetto”. SA-Standartenführer Waldemar Schön, head of the Resettlement Department in Fischer’s office, who directed the relocations, justified sealing the district by the need to protect the city from a typhus epidemic, to eliminate Jewish “influence” and to combat illegal trade. He boasted that the whole operation had been carried out in six weeks without bloodshed.

The wall and the gates

The wall, under construction since April 1940 at the Jewish community’s expense, was about three metres high and topped with barbed wire or broken glass. For the most part it ran not down the middle of streets but along property lines, so that the boundary streets remained on the “Aryan” side. In many places the wall simply consisted of the rear walls of tenement buildings, whose windows facing the city were bricked up. In November 1940 there were 22 gates on the ghetto boundary, known as wachy (guard posts). They were manned jointly by German gendarmes and Order Police, by the Polish Police of the General Government, known as the “Blue Police”, and by the Jewish Order Service, set up by the Judenrat on German orders. Gendarmes and Polish policemen patrolled along the walls, and carts carrying smuggled goods were hunted by members of the Sonderdienst, an auxiliary formation made up of local ethnic Germans whom the ghetto’s inhabitants called junacy.

The gates soon became places of humiliation. According to accounts collected in the ghetto, the gendarmes at the crossing from Żelazna Street to Chłodna Street ordered passing Jews to bow, to do gymnastics with bricks in their hands, to crawl in the mud and to climb the walls; on one occasion they forced an elderly woman and a grey-bearded man to dance to the music of a courtyard band and photographed the scene. Over time the Germans reduced the number of gates: by April 1941 there were only 14.

“Aryan” trams still ran through the ghetto, without stopping. From 26 November three tram lines reserved exclusively for Jews, marked with yellow signs, operated inside the district. According to a study by the Jewish Historical Institute, until 26 November Poles could still cross the ghetto boundary fairly freely. After that, movement in both directions was subject to a system of passes.

The first days

The sealing of the ghetto coincided with a round-up that Warsaw long remembered. As early as 16 November the German police began seizing Jews who had remained on the “Aryan side” of the city and taking them behind the wall; within a few days more than 11,000 people were detained in this way. Some 3,770 Jewish shops outside the ghetto boundary were seized and emptied. Thousands of families, evicted in October from their flats in other districts, had nowhere to go; just before the deadline one resident noted that 10,000 people still had no accommodation. Refugees and deportees from the provinces were sent to “points”, communal shelters set up in synagogues, schools and warehouses, where mass dying soon began.

The most immediately felt effect of the sealing was a leap in prices. Food in the ghetto at once grew dearer, while the prices of clothing and household goods, which people had to sell off to buy bread, collapsed. Children’s testimonies later collected in the ghetto repeat the same sentence: until the district was closed, life at home was somehow bearable; then came high prices and hunger. Hunger struck the poorest first: refugees, old people living alone, and the large families of craftsmen who had lost their livelihoods along with their former workshops on the other side of the wall.

Yet the ghetto did not cease to be a city. It had Judenrat offices, hospitals, a post office and soup kitchens, and soon theatres and an orchestra as well. On 25 November the first concert of a Jewish symphony orchestra took place in the hall of the Great Judaic Library on Tłomackie Street. Ringelblum even recorded an appeal to show “the good sides of the ghetto”, such as mutual aid and a lively social life, but his overall verdict was bitter: the ghetto was harder to bear than in the Middle Ages, “because we had already risen so high, and now we have fallen so terribly low”.

Ration cards, the Transferstelle and hunger

The ghetto’s official supply was designed from the start to starve it. Rationing was introduced in Warsaw at the turn of 1939 and 1940, and from February 1940 Jews received separate, yellow ration cards that could be used only in Jewish shops. In September 1940 the weekly bread ration for Jews was cut to 750 grams, half that for Poles. Once the ghetto was sealed, everything that was to enter it legally passed through German offices. From 1 December 1940 the exchange of goods between the closed district and the rest of the city was controlled by a special clearing office, the Transferstelle: food, raw materials and fuel were let into the ghetto only against payment, and the products of Jewish workshops were taken out under its supervision. From January 1941 the Judenrat distributed the ration cards inside the walls.

Estimates of the value of the official rations vary with the source and the period, but all are extremely low. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Germans set the rations for Jews at about 180 calories a day. Polish historians estimate the average ration for an adult inhabitant of the ghetto in 1940–1942 at 200–500 calories, at times fewer than 200, while Poles on the “Aryan side” received several hundred calories more on their cards, and Germans several times as much. At the turn of 1940 and 1941 Schön almost entirely halted deliveries to the ghetto, which historians describe as an artificially induced famine. In the spring of 1941 he was removed from ghetto affairs, and its administration passed to Commissioner Heinz Auerswald.

Cold came on top of hunger. The winter of 1940/1941 was harsh, and fuel was as scarce in the ghetto as food. Those evicted from other districts had left behind furniture, stocks of coal and winter clothing, and in the overcrowded flats – where, according to German reports, there were on average six, seven or more people to a room – people burned whatever they could. Hunger, cold and overcrowding created the conditions in which typhus spread – the very disease the Germans had earlier cited as the reason for fencing off the district.

Smuggling

People survived the first months chiefly thanks to smuggling. Ringelblum counted five routes by which it went: over the walls, through the gates, by underground tunnels, through the sewers, and through boundary houses that faced the ghetto on one side and an “Aryan” street on the other. Large consignments passed through the gates thanks to bribes for the guards, and goods were also thrown from trams passing through the ghetto. By some estimates smuggling supplied most of the food the ghetto ate; according to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, average actual consumption in 1941 was around 1,125 calories a day – several times the official ration, but still far too little.

Children played a particular role. They squeezed through holes and drainage openings in the wall, bought or begged for food on the other side and came back with sacks hidden under their clothes, often several times a day. In many families they became the only breadwinners. Smuggling was dangerous: guards beat, robbed and shot smugglers, children among them, while the walls were raised and further openings bricked up. Alongside the smugglers who risked their lives for their families there emerged a class of professional smugglers and middlemen who grew rich on the trade. The ghetto quickly split into a small wealthy stratum that could afford cafés and restaurants and a vast mass of people on the brink of starvation.

Ringelblum and Oneg Shabbat

In those same weeks an undertaking was born to which much of what is known about the ghetto is owed. Ringelblum, a historian and social activist, had been collecting testimonies and documents in occupied Warsaw since the autumn of 1939, and from the spring of 1940 he drew in more and more writers, teachers, economists and activists. The formal beginning of the ghetto’s underground archive is considered to be a meeting in his flat at 18 Leszno Street on Friday 22 November 1940, a week after the district was sealed. Because the group usually met on Saturdays, it took the code name Oneg Shabbat, “Joy of the Sabbath”.

The archive operated under cover of Jewish Social Self-Help (PL), an organisation the Germans tolerated and in which Ringelblum ran a network of house committees that organised feeding and neighbourly help in the tenements. It was entirely independent of the Judenrat. Everything was collected: decrees and posters, ration cards and tram tickets, diaries, poems, questionnaires, refugees’ accounts from the provinces, and studies of hunger, smuggling, the Jewish police and Polish–Jewish relations. Hidden in 1942 and 1943 in metal boxes and milk churns, two of the archive’s three parts were found in the ruins of the ghetto in 1946 and 1950. Much of what is known about the first days of the closed district comes from these very documents.

Poles and the sealed ghetto

The wall divided more than people. It cut across streets and tram routes and severed Jews from relatives, friends and former neighbours on the other side. Polish attitudes towards the sealed ghetto varied. Most of the city’s inhabitants, themselves living in fear and poverty under the terror of occupation, met it with indifference, which Ringelblum recorded bitterly. There were also those who profited from their neighbours’ misfortune, taking over Jewish flats and property or blackmailing Jews in hiding. At the same time, smuggling would have been impossible without the hundreds of Poles who sold, passed and smuggled food across the wall. Some did it for profit, some out of solidarity, and many for both reasons at once. Ringelblum later wrote that “across the walls and the barbed wire Poles and Jews joined hands” to thwart the plan to starve the 400,000 people shut in the ghetto.

Organised help came later. The Polish underground condemned the persecution of Jews, but only in December 1942, after the great deportation, was the Council to Aid Jews, “Żegota”, founded on the initiative of the Government Delegation for Poland and activists such as Zofia Kossak; it is regarded as the only institution in occupied Europe for aiding Jews that was funded by a government-in-exile. One of its members, Irena Sendler, in 1940 an employee of the municipal social welfare service with a pass to the ghetto as a sanitary inspector, helped to smuggle many Jewish children out of it and hide them.

Place in the war

The sealing of the Warsaw Ghetto was part of a German policy which, in Hans Frank’s General Government, had since the autumn of 1939 systematically separated Jews from the rest of the population: through armbands with the Star of David, forced labour, expropriation and prohibitions. Warsaw, where the largest Jewish community in Europe was walled off, became the model for other cities; in March 1941 the ghetto in Kraków was sealed, and then others in further towns of the General Government. In April 1941 about 450,000 people lived in the Warsaw Ghetto, into which Jews from the surrounding small towns were being moved.

The ghetto was meant to be a prison in which people would die of hunger and disease, and to a large extent that is what it became. In the summer of 1941 several thousand people a month were dying there, and between the autumn of 1940 and July 1942 between 83,000 and 92,000 people died of hunger and disease, depending on the calculation. On 15 October 1941 Frank introduced the death penalty for leaving the ghetto without permission and for sheltering Jews; the first executions for “unauthorised departure from the Jewish district” were carried out in Warsaw in November 1941. From 22 July 1942 the Germans deported some 250,000–265,000 people from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp and murdered them there – by some calculations as many as 300,000. The wall that in November 1940 was supposedly meant to protect against epidemic turned out to be the first stage on the road to the Holocaust. In April 1943 those who remained took up the fight behind it in the Ghetto Uprising.