POLAND: JEWISH WARSAW

June 27-28, 2019

The story of Warsaw's Jewish population is perhaps one of the saddest and most reason-defying stories of the Holocaust.  Before World War II there were over 400 synagogues in the city. Only one of those synagogues survived.  At the beginning of 1939, there were about 400,000 Jews living in Warsaw, and less than 10%, or about 35,000, of them survived. Of the survivors, many barely made it out of concentration camps like Auschwitz. 

The round-up of Warsaw's Jews began in November 1940 when several hundred thousand (or 30% of the city's population) were forced into a 1.3-square-mile area that became known as the Warsaw Ghetto. As you can imagine, conditions were terrible. An average of 9.2 persons were crowded into a single room. 

The ghetto was demolished by the Nazis after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of May 1943 (not to be confused with the Warsaw Uprising of 1944). Today, some of the area that used to be the ghetto has been replaced by the business district, and the wonderful Polish spirit of resilience is evident even there.

The curvy skyscraper on the left was designed by Daniel Libeskind (b. 1946), a Jewish Polish-American architect whose parents were both Holocaust survivors. He also designed the Ground Zero Tower in New York City and the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Our guide Pawel sees this 52-story mixed-use building as a symbol of a new, strong Warsaw rising from the ashes of the ghetto.

It is so much easier to talk about this skyscraper than to go back to the 1940s and the physical, moral, and emotional detritus of those days of horror. These Holocaust posts take the most psychological effort for me to write of any that I have done.

So here we go.

There are bits of the Jewish Ghetto scattered around a small area in Warsaw, and this is one reason we were grateful for Pawel's encyclopedic knowledge of the history of his city.

We started at a section of the ghetto wall that remains standing and on which a map of the ghetto is affixed.

The remnants of the Ghetto wall were going to be torn down in the 1970s. They were saved by a non-Jewish Pole named Mieczysław Jędruszczak, who was part of the Polish underground during the Nazi occupation and spent three years in a Soviet labor camp at the end of the war. After the war he became interested in the history of the Warsaw Ghetto and led a movement to preserve the ghetto wall fragments as a symbol of the martyrdom of the Jews. When local authorities began to demolish what was left of the wall, he placed plaques at various places on the wall to draw attention to its significance, which eventually led to its preservation. He was also involved in sending bricks from the wall to museums around the world, which created international support for his project.

Thanks to him, portions of the wall still stand today and are a place of remembrance.

This is a different section of the ghetto wall. (Note Libeskind's skyscraper in the background.)

There are two signs on it.

One translates: "In the period 15 Nov. 1940 - 20 Nov. 1941, this wall was the border of the ghetto." (I wonder if this is one of Jędruszczak's signs from the 1970s?)

The other sign looks like it was placed by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It notes that two actual bricks and a casting were taken from this wall and placed in the Holocaust Museum in Washington in 1989.

This light yellow building was Bersohn and Bauman Jewish Children's Hospital from 1878 to 1942. Janusz Korczak, who accompanied his group of orphans to Treblinka and whose biography The King of Children I reviewed in a previous post, worked in this hospital from 1905 to 1912.

Pawel told us the story of one woman who was a pediatrician in this hospital when it was part of the ghetto. Tuberculosis, typhus, and starvation were common, and although most of the children did not recover, they received excellent palliative care at the hospital. On the day the hospital was to be emptied and all the patients shot, Dr. Adina Blady-Szwajger dosed the children with morphine so that they would fall asleep and never face the trauma of death. Miraculously, she survived the war and spent much of her life in the United States before dying in 1993. (See her book about her experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto at the end of this post.)

About 100,000 Jews had already died in the ghetto before deportations to Treblinka began in the summer of 1942. Somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 Warsaw Ghetto Jews were gassed during a period of just eight weeks. Then the deportations stopped for several month, and by the end of the year, word got back to the ghetto that their friends and family members had not been "resettled," but rather had been murdered.

Those left in the ghetto were generally young and healthy and with no other family members still living with them. They knew they would eventually be killed like the others, and so intense preparations to resist further deportations began. They built secret bunkers and smuggled in guns and explosives. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on the eve of Passover--April 19th, 1943.

While somewhat successful at first, the half-starved Jews were no match for the German forces. Among other things, the Nazis set the Ghetto on fire. By May 16th, it was over. About 13,000 Jews had been killed during the fighting, and official reports claim that at the end the Nazis murdered the remaining 56,065 Ghetto residents on the spot or sent them to Treblinka and other death camps. The ghetto was no more.

This powerful Monument to the Ghetto Uprising was erected in 1948 within the ghetto borders at the spot where the first armed conflict of the uprising occurred. The wall is intended to evoke both the ghetto walls and the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem

One side shows the insurgents--men, women, and children--armed with guns and Molotov cocktails:

The words on the base, written in Polish and Hebrew, read: "Jewish people, fighters and martyrs."

The bas relief on the back links the Jews to their persecuted Old Testament forebears:

I love this photo of President Barack Obama's visit to the monument in 2011. It gives you an idea of the size and power of the figures.

Photo from here

Another sobering stop was the Umschlagplatz, or the shipping/transportation square. This was a holding area next to the railroad station where the ghetto Jews were assembled to be deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. On some days, upwards of 10,000 Jews were deported. The black stripe on the front wall refers to Jewish ritual robes.  The space between the front and back walls symbolizes an open railway car.

The entry is topped with a tombstone carved with a destroyed forest (in Jewish art, a broken tree = a premature, violent death):

The second wall has 400 of the most popular Polish and Jewish given names engraved in alphabetical order. 

Information is provided in several languages, including English.

The second "gate" is also shaped like a tombstone. It has a much narrower opening and symbolizes the passage to death. However, a beautiful tree is growing on the other side, a symbol of hope: 

Pawel insisted that we stop at the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Sweeping historical museums are great, especially if we can go through them ourselves without a guide. Honestly, we weren't too excited to go through with Pawel. Guides tend to spend a lot of time on things we don't find as interesting as they do.

However, yet again we were wrong and Pawel was right. This is a must-see museum, and you don't need to spend a whole day there. Pawel moved us quickly through the exhibits, and we learned a lot.

The Polin Museum was also built within the ghetto boundaries. The Hebrew word Polin means either "rest here" or "Poland," a significant double meaning.  The museum opened on April 19, 2013, the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and faces the Uprising Memorial discussed earlier.

The museum begins with the immigration of Jews into northern Europe. Eventually, Poland would have the largest population of Jews in the world.

Fancy multi-media exhibits made our quick trip through several centuries very interesting.

Apparently, the region that is now Poland was pretty tolerant of the Jews, which accounts for their large population there.

The museum has a spectacular reconstructed vault and bima from an 18th-century synagogue.

I loved the section on changing fashion ideals for Jewish women.

 Information about the Jewish focus on education was also interesting.

 Over two million Jews immigrated to the United States between 1881 and 1914.

"On the Jewish Street" is a gallery focused on the period of the Second Polish Republic (1914-1939), a second golden age for Polish Jews.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) was a Jewish Pole and a leading figure of the Yiddish literary movement during the pre-war years. Fortunately, he immigrated to the United States in 1935 and settled in New York City. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.

The next section of the museum dealt with the Holocaust. It was a different experience to see the Holocaust in the context of the 800 or 900 years that preceded it.

The quote below is from the head of the Jewish Council in the Ghetto who committed suicide rather than assist in "relocating" the ghetto residents to Treblinka.

Emanuel Ringelblum was a key leader of the resistance movement and is credited with saving much of the archives created by ghetto residents by burying documents in milk cans and metal boxes.

"Before the eyes of the whole world . . . "  The liquidation of the ghetto is an event of shame, not just for Germans and Poles, but for much of the rest of the world.

The museum has a copy of the Stroop Report, an official document prepared for Heinrich Himmler by Jurgen Stroop, a Nazi general serving in the ghetto. It describes the suppression of the Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the subsequent murder or transportation to death camps of ghetto residents, followed by the destruction of the buildings.

Photographs in the report include this iconic picture of women and children being pulled out of the bunkers.

One more very important piece of Jewish history in Warsaw is the Jewish Cemetery.  I'll cover that in my next post.

READING
Wladyslaw Szpilman (1911-2000) was a celebrated Polish pianist and composer of classical and popular music. He worked for Polish Radio, performing classical and jazz piano music. Just before the bombing of the radio station in September 1939, Szpilman played a Chopin recital. It was the last live music broadcast from the station.

The Szpilman family's home happened to be in the area that became the Warsaw Ghetto. Wladyslaw played the piano and various cafes in the ghetto until the horrible day when he and his family were to be deported to Treblinka. At the last moment he was pulled from the line by a member of the Jewish Police, who recognized him from a concert. His parents, a brother, and two sisters were not so fortunate.

He was able to escape the ghetto before it was burned to the ground after the uprising, and was able to find places to hide in the city. However, he was discovered by a German officer in November 1944 who, upon hearing Szpilman play the piano, helped him to stay alive by showing him places to hide, bringing him bits of food, and even giving him a coat.

Szpilman recorded his experiences in The Pianist right after the war, but it wasn't published until 1999.  It is a very powerful read, and I can also recommend the 2002 movie.

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As I have mentioned in previous posts, our guide Pawel was really good at picking up on our interests. He gave me many suggestions for books and documentaries, which I wrote down in my journal. I am still catching up on my reading and viewing of other things he recommended, but I hope to eventually get to the books and movies listed below.

These two books are autobiographies of two women who survived the ghetto.  Adina Blady Szwajger is the pediatrician who gave all the children in the hospital morphine before they were shot by the Nazis as part of the liquidation of the ghetto.  Mary Berg's diary of her life in the Warsaw Ghetto from 1940-1943 has been compared to Anne Frank's with a key difference being that Mary survives the war.  I've ordered used copies from Amazon. I'll be back to review after I read them.

MOVIES
Pawel recommended four documentaries, three about the Warsaw Ghetto and one about the Warsaw Uprising.

A Film Unfinished (2010) examines the making of a 1942 German propaganda film about the Warsaw Ghetto just a few months before its liquidation, and Uprising (2001) is a two-part made-for-television story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Both movies are available through Amazon Prime.

Who Will Write Our History (2018) is the story of the group of historians led by Emanuel Ringelblum who collected and miraculously preserved the writings of the Warsaw Ghetto residents. The movie includes those writings but also has some rarely seen footage and some dramatizations that help transport the viewer inside the ghetto. The documentary is produced by Nancy Spielberg, the daughter of Steven Spielberg. This movie is available on YouTube.

Kanal (1957) is about the Jewish flight from Warsaw's Old Town through small manholes that led to the sewer. Almost 12,000 people escaped this way during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. While not specifically about the Jewish population of Warsaw, this event was a critical follow-up to the Ghetto Uprising of 1943. This movie is available through Amazon Prime.