Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto containing at its height more than

400,000 people. It was the site of the first urban uprising in occupied Europe.
The Warsaw shared many characteristics with other ghettos: Conditions
worsened over time as did accompanying mortality from starvation and
disease; social welfare organizations ministered to the needy; there was a
rich cultural life; the ghetto was administered internally by a Judenrat and
policed by the Jewish Police; many residents were employed in workshops
virtually as slave laborers; there was an underground resistance
organization; deportations ultimately decimated the population; the ghetto
was merely a way station in the Nazi plan to destroy the Jewish people.
Because of its size the ghetto evolved slowly, only being sealed on
November 16, 1940. The construction of the wall took many months. It was
11.5 feet high; the Judenrat was forced to pay the costs of its construction.
Initially, some 30% of Warsaw's population was being crammed into 2.4% of
the city's area. This resulted in 6 to 7 people per room. The population
increased as Jews from outlying areas were relocated there.
The daily food ration was 181 calories. Some could supplement this by
purchasing food from smugglers. The workers in the factories received a
meal at work. One of the diarists of the ghetto, Stefan Ernst, wrote that
20,000 to 30,000 people, the social elite, have enough to eat, 250,000
people who are all beggars, completely bereft of everything, wage a daily
struggle to postpone death by starvation, and in between are about 200,000
people who somehow manage.
Smuggling goods across the wall was a risky occupation; everyday people
were caught and lost their lives. Children aged 7 or 8 gathered near the
ghetto gates to look for a smuggling opportunity. Smuggling took place
through buildings that were connected with buildings on the Polish side,
across the wall, through openings in the wall and through the sewers.
The head of the Judenrat was Adam Czerniakow. Czerniakow tried to manage
the affairs of the ghetto without the direct involvement of the German
authorities. He was in daily contact with German civil and police
administration and attempted to ameliorate the conditions in the ghetto.
He was deceived by ghetto commissar, Heinz Auerswald, regarding the mass
deportations. He refused to help roundup Jews and committed suicide on July
23, 1942. According to one version he left a note to his wife that said, "They
are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands.

There is nothing for me to do but to die." He was buried in the Warsaw Jewish
cemetery which survived the war intact. Czerniakow's diary was found and
published.
The mass deportations began on July 22, 1942 and continued until
September 12. The goal was to deliver 7,000 Jews a day to
the Umschlagplatz, and from there to trains heading to Treblinka. Jews tried
to buy their way into the ghetto workshops where they felt they would be
exempt from deportation.
At first the Jewish police, numbering some 2,000 men, took charge of
rounding up the deportees. Later, after their had been days when the quota
was not met SS, German police and their Ukrainian and Latvian helpers took
charge grabbing people despite any permits they might have.
In August in an march observed by many 200 orphans were sent from Dr.
Janusz Korczak's orphanage to the Umschlagplatz. Refusing efforts to save
him the elderly educator and his team of assistants went with the children.
Before the first wave of mass deportations ended they took on the character
of a manhunt. Anyone who could be caught was seized. The Jewish
policemen were compelled to bring in 5 Jews a day or their families would be
taken.
The second wave of deportations began on January 18, 1943. The Jews were
ordered to assemble in the courtyards of their apartment houses; many went
into hiding. The group of 1000 that the Germans rounded up were marched
in the direction of the Umschlagplatz. A group of fighters belonging to the
resistance including Mordecai Anielewicz infiltrated the column. At a signal
the fighters engaged the German guards in hand-to-hand fighting. The group
of 1000 disbursed.
The deportation continued for a few more days during which 6,000 were
deported; then it was abandoned. The fact that it was halted in response to
Jewish resistance had a tremendous impact on the ghetto and was
instrumental in unifying support for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which took
place in April. It was not known that the goal of the January deportations was
the limited to removing 8,000 Jews from the ghetto.
The final liquidation of the ghetto began on the eve of Passover, April 19,
1943. The Germans were expecting resistance. When the German forces
entered the ghetto they were met with Molotov cocktails, hand grenades and
bullets. This was the beginning of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising resulted in the physical destruction of the

ghetto and the deportation or escape of the survivors. It is estimated some
20,000 Jews left the ghetto to seek refuge on the Polish side.
Our knowledge of the Warsaw ghetto is immeasurably enhanced by the
chronicles of historian Emanuel Ringelblum and his group of clandestine
archivists. Their documents, known as the Oneg Shabat Archive, were buried
in milk cans and found after the war under the ruins of the ghetto.
When the war ended some 20,000 to 30,000 Jews settled in Warsaw, but the
overwhelming majority of these left during one of the 3 waves of emigration
prior to 1968.
There was a second uprising in Warsaw, the Warsaw Polish Uprising. The
general population revolted against the Germans in anticipation of the Soviet
entry into the city. The Soviet Army delayed coming into Warsaw, and in a
brutal campaign the Germans killed 150,000 civilians, including some Jews
who were hiding in the general population. As an act of revenge the Germans
razed 85% of the city.
Only a few sites of Jewish interest remain, they include the Nozik synagogue
and the historic Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street. The Zydowski Instytut
Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute) is located in the former library of the
Great Synagogue. In 1948 an heroic monument designed by sculptor Nathan
Rapaport was dedicated on the site of the former ghetto.
Two events made April 19, 1943, an especially tragic day in the history of the
Holocaust: In an exclusive resort on the island of Bermuda, British and
American delegates began a 12-day conference supposedly to consider what
their countries could do to help the Jews of Europe. Very little, they
concluded. At the very same time, on the other side of the world in Poland,
the Nazis moved to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto. In a desperate last stand,
the remaining Jewish inhabitants of the walled-in enclave began a hopeless
month-long battle against the Nazis. It was the first time during the war that
resistance fighters in an area under German control had staged an uprising.
It would end in the complete destruction of the ghetto.
The Nazis had established the ghetto two and a half years earlier. In midNovember of 1940, after ordering all Jews in Warsaw to collect in a
designated part of the city, they sealed it off from the rest of the city with a
medieval-like 10-foot high wall. Moving to the ghetto was a ghastly
experience; it was like moving to prison. One inhabitant wrote, "we are

segregated and separated from the world and the fullness thereof, driven out
of the society of the human race." Jews weren't allowed out. In November
1941 the Nazis went so far as to institute the death penalty for any Jew found
beyond the ghetto walls. And very little information was allowed in. Earlier in
the occupation, the Nazis had already taken away radios. Now they also
removed telephone lines, censored mail and frequently confiscated incoming
packages.