Networks
Introduction
The secret city of the Jews in Aryan Warsaw could not have come into existence without a substantial network of contacts between the city’s Polish and Jewish communities, despite the religious, cultural and linguistic barriers that had separated them for centuries. This chapter will examine the nature, origin and extent of this network, and a case study will probe its development during the war. In the process, various propositions will be put in summary form that will be developed more fully in later chapters.
The secret city crystallized around three separate nuclei. The first, which already existed before the war, consisted of Jewish assimilants and converts. Such people generally had longstanding personal, professional and often family contacts with the Polish milieu, and were well-enough integrated into Polish society not to attract attention outside the ghetto. The second consisted of ordinary Jews and Poles who formed their contacts during the ghetto period, mainly through illegal trade. The third comprised Jewish and Polish activists, whose connections were mainly institutional, through fraternal political parties or social organizations. Contacts between Polish and Jewish organizations had existed for years, but new ones formed during the German occupation. For example, Jewish couriers moved about in the Polish district, carrying messages between ghettos, while Polish activists provided them with forged documents and helped them in other ways as well. Besides these underground connections, there were overt links between the Polish city administration and the Jewish Council, and between charitable organizations inside and outside the ghetto. Particularly important were the connections between CENTOS, which cared for orphans within the ghetto, and the Polish Red Cross aas well as the RGO, the main above-ground Polish relief agency. The initial group of Polish activists drawn into helping Jews came from this milieu; many of them also had Jewish spouses or other connections with the Jewish community.
Those Jews who never entered the ghetto, or left it early, were almost all converts and assimilationists. They were anathematized by most Jews, who regarded them as traitors and probably antisemites; but in truth they often brought aid to relatives and friends within the ghetto, and later found hiding places for them and helped to smuggle them out. They were few, but they were the kernel of the secret city, which could not have arisen without them.
As the number of Jews in hiding grew, so did the possibilities for this kind of Jewish self-help. Although most authors have portrayed the Jews in hiding as passive and almost totally dependent – there is a considerable literature about Polish helpers, in which the Jewish voice is limited to providing testimonials and expressions of gratitude – the fact is that escape and hiding required considerable initiative on the part of the Jews, and that they received much help from fellow Jews. An outstanding example is the wealthy Jewish lawyer, Maurycy Herling-Grudziński, who passed as a Pole throughout the occupation and hid hundreds of Jews on his estate in Boernerowo (today Bemowo). Herling-Grudziński’s cell, code-named “Felicja” after his wife, was the largest cell of Żegota, the Council to Aid Jews, and accounted for one-fifth of the people under its care in Warsaw. The Żegota council also included representatives of the two Jewish self-help organizations, the Bund and the Jewish National Committee, which between them had twice as many Jews under their care as Żegota did, and subsidized the Polish organization out of money received from Jewish organizations abroad. Besides these organized efforts, there were many individual cases of Jewish self-help: in general, Jews who had escaped from the ghetto and established themselves in hiding would make efforts to bring relatives and friends out as well, to which the large number of family groups noted in the Żegota records testify. These matters will be discussed more fully in Chapters 2 and 3.
This rapidly growing, self-fuelled cycle of escape and help occurred mainly, however, after the deportations from the ghetto in 1942. Before then, Jews in hiding were few and relatively isolated. They, and also a few Poles acting on their own initiative, kept in touch with family and friends in the ghetto, and again later helped to smuggle them out or to hide them after their escape. As with Jewish self-help, the Polish aid effort also expanded with time, as those Poles already involved in helping Jews drew in others, and as Jews needing help drew in their Polish friends. In these ways, the pre-war networks eventually generated a spontaneous, self-organizing movement on a considerable scale.
The contacts formed during the ghetto period, mainly through underground trade, consisted mainly of people, both Poles and Jews, whose were more interested in money than humanitarian aid. From these circles arose the machers (fixers), who for a price seemed to be able to arrange anything, including escape from the ghetto, Aryan documents and hiding places. On the Jewish side, the ghetto police were heavily involved in the underground trade. They dealt every day with the Polish and German policemen who guarded the ghetto gates, and who could often be bribed to let goods, guns and people pass through. Underground trade also gave rise to the criminal elements: szmalcowniks, who started by extorting money from food smugglers, particularly children, and later preyed on Jews in hiding; and corrupt policemen who, when the liquidation of the ghetto took away the chance to extort bribes, turned to blackmailing instead. The szmalcowniks, indeed, began to operate even before the ghetto was closed, when they would visit Jewish homes, often posing as German policemen, and take what they wanted.[1] Others accompanied German confiscation parties, acting as interpreters: in this way, greed and a shared contempt for the Jews gave rise to a group of collaborators, who would later threaten not only Jews but the Polish underground as well. There is evidence that such people co-operated and passed information to each other, and this underworld was also rather easy for the Gestapo to infiltrate with agents and informers. The enemies of the Jews had their networks, too.
An organized joint effort to help the fugitives did not appear until relatively late in the day, emerging at the end of 1942 almost as an afterthought to the development of Jewish armed resistance. The bulk of escapes took place at about this time (see Chapter 2), but almost entirely independently of the political and social activists, both Poles and Jews. The activists, indeed, found it hard to reach the Jews in hiding, and did not begin to act on a larger scale until a year or so later.
In these various ways, the primary contacts, whether existing before the war or formed during the ghetto period, generated an extensive network of secondary contacts as the secret city grew. By the time mass escapes from the ghetto began to take place, towards the end of the Great Deportation in 1942, a sizeable community of Jews in hiding and non-Jews helping and hunting them had arisen quite spontaneously and largely invisibly, eventually involving tens of thousands of non-Jews and providing the means of escape, hiding places, documents and other necessities of life for tens of thousands of Jews.
Because attention has thus far been concentrated on the small group of activists, whose experiences and perceptions have dominated our understanding of the period, it has been difficult for authors to explain, or indeed accept, the existence of large numbers of Jews in hiding in Warsaw. Shmuel Krakowski, for example, describing the notion that there were tens of thousands of Jews in hiding as ‘absurd’, put me question: ‘how could there have been so many melinas [hiding places], when it was so hard to find places for seventy ghetto fighters who escaped at the end of the [Ghetto] Uprising?’1 One of the purposes of the present undertaking is to provide an answer to Krakowski’s question. The difficulties in finding housing will be addressed in Chapter 3, the numbers involved will be substantiated in Chapter 6, and this chapter will try to explain how there could, indeed, have been so many melinas.
The Jewish Milieu
Origins: Jewish Acculturation and Assimilation in Warsaw
The Jewish community of Poland was one of the least assimilated in Europe: most Jews spoke Yiddish, and Polish only as a second language, if at all. Even those whose Polish was fluent usually spoke it with an accent, and most Jews, even those with perfect Polish, generally thought of themselves as members of a national rather than a religious minority: they were Jews, not Poles, by nationality. Social contacts between the two communities were very limited. One might aptly apply to them the title of Hugh McLennan’s novel about the French and English in Quebec: Two Solitudes.
Yet, like all generalizations, this picture masks a considerably more complex reality. With the founding of the Polish state in 1918, Polish became the language of government and education. With that, the forces that had promoted Jewish assimilation in Western Europe, held back in Poland by 123 years of foreign rule, were finally set in motion. Most Jewish children growing up in the interwar period attended Polish state schools, if only because they were free. There were also private Jewish schools, such as Nasza Szkoła (Our School) in Warsaw, in which the language of instruction was Polish. Even in Yiddish- and Hebrew-language schools, the teaching of Polish as a second language was compulsory, and willingly accepted for practical reasons as well. Anyone under thirty or so at the outbreak of war could therefore speak Polish fluently. Even the older generation had acquired a working knowledge of Polish by then, because they had had to deal with a Polish state for twenty years, and because industrialization and modernization created increasingly complex economic relations. It was still possible, in a city with 360,000 Jews, to live and work entirely in a Yiddish-speaking milieu, but it had become increasingly difficult.
This was acculturation, for the most part, rather than assimilation, of which the litmus test in Poland was the sense of being Polish by nationality. (In the West, assimilation usually means the abandonment of Jewish identity altogether: in Poland, assimilated Jews still thought of themselves as Jews. By Polish standards, the great majority of Jews in the diaspora today are assimilated, and the word is used here in that sense.) Acculturation is usually the first step towards assimilation, but that progression was held back in Poland: on the one hand by the Jewish community’s sense of pride and tradition, as well as its sheer self-sustaining size; on the other hand by a lack of acceptance from the Polish side. In the eyes of both Poles and Jews, even the most ardently patriotic and Polonized Jew was still a Jew – and therefore, by definition, not a Pole. Nevertheless, a small group of assimilated Jews did exist, and they are centrally important to our story.
Assimilation can be defined by three elements. Assimilants: 1) retained the Jewish faith, or abandoned religion altogether (otherwise they were not assimilants but converts); 2) were fully acculturated, not only speaking Polish but considering it their native language; and 3) regarded themselves as Polish by nationality, ‘Poles of the Mosaic faith’.
In the 1921 census, 58,021 Varsovians declared themselves to be Jews by religion but of Polish nationality. 2 Ten years later, when the corresponding question was asked about language rather than nationality, some 19,300 Warsaw Jews gave Polish, rather than Yiddish or Hebrew, as their native language.3 By 1939, their number would have reached about 22,000.
The number of assimilants, despite the seeming precision of the census figures, is hard to estimate. Many traditional Jews, for example, following the long-established policy of ‘loyalty to the Crown’, would have declared themselves Polish by nationality, though they were decidedly not assimilated. Other respondents may have confused nationality with citizenship. In 1931, on the other hand, responses were affected by political considerations. The four streams of Jewish life in Poland – assimilationist, traditionalist, diasporist and Zionist – were ideologically associated with language, so that a diasporist (Bundist or Folkist) who normally spoke Polish might well have declared for Yiddish to show solidarity. And no Polish Jew could honestly claim to be a native Hebrew-speaker: those who did so were declaring their Zionist loyalties. These political considerations played an especially strong role in the capital, as we can judge from the fact that only
5.5 per cent of Warsaw Jews claimed to be native Polish-speakers, compared with 13.1 per cent in the rest of the country, even though Warsaw was (perhaps after Kraków) the most acculturated centre in Poland. If we apply the national percentage to the Warsaw Jews, we arrive at about 46,000 native Polish-speakers, and the true number must have been even greater. Eight years later it was likely to have been greater still. We can safely suppose, therefore, that there were at least 50,000 fully acculturated Polish-speaking Jews in Warsaw on the eve of war.
The Jews claiming Polish nationality in 1921 constituted 18.7 per cent of the Jewish population of Warsaw; by 1939, if this proportion still held, then their number would have grown to about 72,000. But it is impossible to tell, on the basis of the census data alone, how many of them were acculturated. We can assume, at any rate, that Polish-speakers who declared for Yiddish or Hebrew for political reasons thereby made a statement of national affiliation, so that we should look for assimilants only among the 22,000 declared Polish-speakers. In fact, so politicized was the atmosphere in the 1930s that most of those who gave Polish as their language were probably thereby also declaring their assimilationist sympathies. On this assumption there must have been at least 20,000 Jewish assimilants in Warsaw at the time of the 1931 census, and perhaps 25,000 by 1939.
The overall picture, then, would be this: by 1939 nearly all Warsaw Jews spoke Polish, some 50,000–60,000 were acculturated native Polish-speakers, and, of these, 25,000 or so mainly middle-class Jews were assimilated.
This picture changed somewhat after war broke out. A certain number of Warsaw Jews fled eastwards in 1939–40, most of whom would spend the war in the Soviet Union, while large numbers of refugees from the territories incorporated into the German Reich, mainly from ł ódż, flooded into the city. When the ghetto was formed, in November 1940, its population was swelled by still larger numbers of mainly Yiddish-speaking Jews resettled from smaller centres near Warsaw, and later also by Jews from Germany and Czechoslovakia, as well as a few hundred Gypsies.
About 30,000 Jews left the city or were killed in 1939, among whom, pro rata, we should expect to find about 4,500 acculturated Jews and among them about 2,000 assimilants. The losses were eventually more than made up for by the influx of about 100,000 Jews from outside Warsaw. Though relatively few were acculturated, there were probably enough to offset those who had been lost, so the ghetto enclosed roughly the pre-war numbers of acculturated and assimilated Jews.
The great majority of those who died in the ghetto were newcomers and poor Yiddish-speaking Jews, while the generally well-connected Warsaw assimilants were in a much better position to hold their own. Thus, by the time of the deportations, the assimilants would have dwindled somewhat in number, but not by nearly so much as the others. This tendency to concentrate assimilants was accentuated by the deportations themselves. Assimilation, in Poland as elsewhere, was a top-down affair, with the assimilants largely drawn from the bourgeoisie, especially the professional and managerial classes. Such people made up the privileged group that clustered around the Jewish Council, or had other good connections, and despite German expropriations they had by and large managed to keep or hide enough to buy food and favours. About 60,000 Jews survived the first deportation – 12 per cent of the ghetto’s total population -, and given the concentration process, we might expect to find about 10,000 acculturated or assimilated Jews among them. Another 4,000 Jews had stayed out of the ghetto or fled by that time, all of them at least acculturated .
We certainly cannot assume that all the assimilants fled, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, the number of Jews who escaped from the ghetto after the deportations was rather greater than 10,000. Many of those who escaped from the ghetto were thus neither assimilated nor acculturated in the strict sense. Nevertheless, their fluency in Polish can be judged from the fact that nearly 94 per cent of the Warsaw testimonies taken down by researchers of the Central Jewish Historical Committee in 1945–46, before the great majority of unassimilated Jews had left the country, are in Polish rather than Yiddish.4
What the pre-war census figures do not allow us to deduce is what proportion of unacculturated Warsaw Jews were nevertheless truly bilingual. Since the assimilated and fully acculturated Jews cannot by themselves account for all the Jews who escaped, it would seem that most of the later fugitives belonged to this category. Assimilants and converts escaped first, but the secret city ultimately grew beyond these circles as well.
Converts
Converts can be divided into three groups. First there were the old converts, descendants of Jews baptized in the nineteenth century, who no longer counted as Jews under the Nazi ‘racial’ criteria but in many cases retained sympathy for and ties with the Jewish community. Of the many prominent families who chose the assimilationist path during the period of ‘Polish–Jewish brotherhood’ in the 1860s, such as the Bersons, Blochs, Epsteins, Kronenbergs and Wawelbergs, virtually all converted in the second or third generation. The second group were the new converts, more recently baptized, who were still regarded as Jews under Nazi law but not by the Jewish community or most Poles. As apostates, they were viewed with hostility by most Jews. Jewish history is peppered with prominent converts who turned into persecutors of Jews (Torquemada, for example, was said to have been of Jewish descent), and converts were stereotyped as ardent antisemites: the theory was that they needed to make a show of their antisemitism to demonstrate their loyalty to Poland and prove that they were no longer Jews. In truth, however, most converts came from liberal and secularized circles: they converted either to marry, or because they reasoned that if they were going to be non-observant Jews, they might as well be non-observant Catholics instead, and save themselves a good deal of trouble.
Though very traditional families would sever all contact with relatives who converted, few converts came from such a background. They therefore had both Jewish and non-Jewish family and friends, and whether they lived in the ghetto or not, they served as a vital link between the two communities. Among other things, the two active Catholic churches within the ghetto (All Saints’ in Grzybowski Square and the Holiest Virgin Mary in Leszno Street), which catered to converts, maintained legal and later clandestine contacts across the ghetto wall. Monsignor Marceli Godlewski, the prelate of All Saints’, is particularly well known in this connection, even though he was regarded before the war as an ardent antisemite. 5
The third group of converts can be called emergency converts, people who married willing non-Jews after the outbreak of war in the hope of evading the Nazi anti-Jewish decrees. These converts were viewed with greater sympathy by the Jewish community, and for example, unlike other converts, are under some circumstances accepted as Jews by Yad Vashem.6 Coming from the assimilant community, they resembled assimilants rather than other converts in the nature of their contacts (that is, they were less ostracized by the Jewish community and had fewer Polish contacts than the older converts), except that they enjoyed closer connections through their spouses’ families.
Solid estimates of the number of converts on the eve of the war are hard to come by, as with the exception only of antisemites in search of scandal neither Polish nor Jewish authors, nor the converts themselves, were anxious to publicize the phenomenon. We are therefore obliged to rely on a study conducted at the turn of the century by the antisemitic writer Teodor Jeske-Choiński, based on Warsaw parish records. Jeske-Choiński counted 146 Jewish converts to Catholicism in 1862–99, as well as 198 converts to Lutheranism and 336 to Calvinism: 680 all told. His polemical purpose was to alarm Polish society by drawing attention to the threat of infiltration by opportunistic Jews and to portray the Protestant converts as agents of Germanization. As his figures are hardly alarming, however, they are probably accurate enough.7
Conversion to Catholicism in the nineteenth century was usually for the purpose of marriage, so that Jeske-Choin´ski’s figures would make for a community of more than a hundred mixed marriages with perhaps 250 children, giving in all about 350 first- or second-generation Catholic converts at the turn of the century. Conversion to the Protestant faiths, on the other hand, was normally a personal statement that did not imply intermarriage: there were few Lutherans or Calvinists to marry in Warsaw. If we allow, nevertheless, for fifty Protestant convert families with 125 children, then the convert community, circa 1900, may have stood at about 1,000. These were the converts of the first type, the old converts.
The pace of conversion increased steadily: Jeske-Choiński gives twenty-six Catholic converts in 1862–80 and 120 in 1880–99. If the latter rate had merely been maintained over the next two decades, then at the moment of Polish independence there would have been about 380 first-generation Catholic converts. Alina Cała maintains, however, that in the twentieth century conversion was almost exclusively to Catholicism, with many Protestant converts also changing to the Catholic faith.8 In that case, the 534 Protestant conversions of 1862–99 should have been matched by about the same number of Catholic conversions between 1900 and 1919. Adding the Protestants who became Catholics, first-generation Catholics at Polish independence must have numbered at least 1,000, with 2,000 or so in the second generation, and perhaps 500 first- and second-generation Protestants: about 3,500 all together. By 1939 their number would have grown to about 4,000. These were the converts of the second type, the new converts.
In January 1941, according to the Demographic Statistics Division (Wydział Ewidencji Ludnści Żydowskiej – WELŻ˙) of the Jewish Council, the ghetto contained 1,540 Catholics, 148 Protestants, thirty Orthodox Christians and forty-three people of other non-Jewish faiths: 1,761 in all.9 NNote that the ratio between Catholics and Protestants supports Cała’s contention. These cannot have represented all the converts in Warsaw in 1939, let alone in 1941 after hundreds of emergency conversions. The next chapter will show that some 2,400 Jews as defined by the Nazis stayed out of the ghetto, most of them first- and second-generation converts, so when the ghetto was closed there must have been about 4,000 new and emergency converts in Warsaw, inside and outside the ghetto. Thus, the number of emergency converts seems to have just made up for the converts who were killed or fled in the first two years of the war: pro rata, perhaps 400.
Table 1.1 provides a likely statistical picture.
| Table 1.1 Characteristics of the Warsaw Jewish and Convert Community, 1939–42
October 1939 |
March 1941 | September 1942 | ||||
| Category | Number | % | Number | % | Number† | % |
| Unacculturated | 306,000 | 84 | 406,000 | 87 | 46,000 | 77 |
| Acculturated | 35,000 | 10 | 35,000 | 8 | 8,000 | 13 |
| Assimilated | 20,000 | 6 | 20,000 | 4 | 5,000 | 8 |
| Converts | 4,000 | 1 | 4,000 | 1 | 1,000 | 2 |
| Total | 365,000 | 101 | 465,000 | 100 | 60,000 | 100 |
† Not counting those in hiding.
(Percentages do not necessarily add up to 100 because of rounding errors.)
Secondary Networks
Mixed marriages contracted in Poland by Jews of the educated class were characterized by their outstanding permanence, in contrast to Germany, where the majority of such [. . .] marriages broke up. [. . .] It can be taken as axiomatic that if a Jew had Polish relatives, he could count on their help, even if the family was antisemitic. Polish antisemites didn’t apply racialism where relatives or friends were concerned. On that score, the old maxim prevailed: every Pole, even the greatest antisemite, had his own Jew [swego Żyda], of whom he was fond.
Emmanuel Ringelblum10
[Małżeństwa te, zawierane przez inteligencję żydowską, odznaczały się niezwykłą trwałością w przeciwieństwiedo Niemiec, gdzie większość takich mieszanych małżeństw rozpadała się … Można przyjąć za aksjomat, że o ile Żyd miał w rodzinie polskich krewnych, mógł liczyć na ich pomoc, nawet jeśli rodzina ta składała się z samych antysemitów. Polscy antysemici nie uznawali rasizmu, o ile chodziło o ich krewnych czy znajomych. Pod tym względem panowała stara maksyma, że każdy Polak, nawet największy antysemita, ma swego żyda, którego lubi. – wyd. Czytelnik s. 76]
Supposing that half of the 4,000 converts were married to non-Jews (since the first generation usually converted in order to marry, and some of the second generation were married as well), then the bridging community of which the converts were part would have included about 2,000 non-Jewish spouses, 4,000 parents-in-law and some 15,000–20,000 Christian members of their extended families. Beyond that were widening circles of friends and other Christian contacts. As I have noted, most converts came from assimilationist families which did not reject them, and had friends and colleagues on both sides of the ghetto wall as well. Conversely, most assimilants and many acculturated Jews had one or two relatives who had converted, or had personal or professional relationships with converts. Between them, then, the 4,000 converts are likely to have had connections with most of the 20,000 assimilants, many of the 30,000–40,000 acculturated Jews, and perhaps a few thousand of the more traditional Jews as well. Thus, the converts were at the heart of a community of something like 100,000 people that spanned the ghetto wall. The converts were the first to leave the ghetto – if they entered it at all – and through their contacts, resources, and knowledge of conditions on the Aryan side were later able to help many others do the same.
Assimilants knew or were related to many of the same people as the converts, and had independent contacts on both sides of the wall as well. If we suppose that each assimilant had just one independent close contact on each side of the ghetto wall, then this would have added another 20,000 Jews and 20,000 non-Jews to the bridging community. On these estimates, then, more than 70,000 Jews (including the assimilants and converts themselves) maintained fairly direct, close relationships with a similar number of non-Jews, in a city where Poles and Jews on the whole did not mix. In addition, many occasional contacts and friendships inevitably formed in the years of cohabitation – former schoolmates, teachers, clients, servants, employees, employers and so on.
As the case study that occupies most of this chapter will show, these contacts in turn were only the nucleus of a still larger network. As Jews in hiding were passed from hand to hand, the nature of the relationships between them and their helpers grew ever more tenuous: a helper might be a former neighbour’s neighbour, a friend of a cousin’s friend, an uncle’s former client or a chance-met stranger. These networks intertwined and reached into every corner of Polish and Jewish society, and into all social classes and milieus. It is thus likely that even the most unworldly Hassid had a relative who had a friend who had some contacts on the ‘other side’.11 Similarly, in a city where more than a quarter of the population was Jewish, nearly every Pole had some Jewish colleague, friend or acquaintance. If, as Ringelblum says, every Pole had his Jew, then equally every Jew had his Pole.
It thus becomes clear that whatever it was that limited the number of melinas available to the Jews, it was not the lack of people – Poles, and Jews with connections – to whom they could potentially turn for help. The same can also be said, unfortunately, of the less savory elements of Polish society, who had plenty of openings for exploitation or blackmail. The Jews in hiding were, in short, an integral part of underground Warsaw, for better and for worse, however isolated they may individually have felt.
Of course, not all potential helpers were willing, or able, or had the courage to help, and even if they had all been mobilized, it would not have been possible for them to save all the 490,000 Jews who ever lived in the Warsaw ghetto. But those who actually did escape were only a small fraction of those who had the necessary contacts, and probably did not exhaust the city’s absorptive capacity Chapter 2 will look into the reasons why so few made the attempt As it turned out, the secret city was largely made up of the Jewish middle class, which was at least acculturated. More Jewish Jews, while not without resources, had to rely on indirect contacts and were thus at the end of a very long queue. Very traditional Jews almost all perished and, as Helena Merenholc remarked, ‘the Jewish proletariat was lost’.12 [proletariat żydowski zginął] But the wave of escapes was still swelling when the Ghetto Uprising broke out on 19 April 1943; given another six months or a year, perhaps many of these Jews would have been saved as well.
The Polish Milieu
Beyond personal contacts and friendships, the fate of the Jews on the Aryan side was intimately connected with the more general characteristics of the society into which they had escaped. I do not intend to become involved here in an extensive study of Polish–Jewish relations, which is a subject for another book, but a sketch of the political and ideological conformation of Polish society is certainly in order.
Besides being socially isolated from the Jews, the bulk of Polish society was influenced in its views by the institutionalized antisemitism of the Catholic church and the populist incitement of nationalist politicians, as well as by all manner of ingrained prejudices and superstitions. Lurid antisemitic pamphlets circulated freely during the interwar years, and a sizeable segment of the Catholic and nationalist press mouthed extreme antisemitic propaganda.
The Catholic church, more than any other institution, believed itself to be at war with encroaching secularism, of which it believed the Jews to be the main agents. The church of course did not preach violence, but it did support ‘self-defence’. Cardinal Hlond, in a famous 1936 pastoral letter, prefixed an exhortation against anti-Jewish violence and ‘slander’ with a lengthy list of slanders of his own, holding Jews responsible, inter alia, for prostitution, pornography, atheism and Communism, and in the name of ‘self-defence’ endorsed the Endecja’s economic boycott of the Jews. 13
Among the leading disseminators of antisemitic propaganda was Father Maksymilian Kolbe, later canonized, whose publishing enterprise included the Mały dziennik (Little Daily) and the weekly Rycerz niepokalanej (Knight of the Immaculate). These two publications were among the most widely read in Poland, and both consistently attacked Jews, Freemasons and other objects of the paranoia of the time. Mały dziennik, with the largest circulation of any daily in Poland, enthusiastically promoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, claimed that Poland was united in an ‘anti-Jewish war’ (28 December 1937) and told readers, among other things, that the Talmud allowed Jews to murder non-Jews (8 and 22 January 1939).14 Kolbe’s standing and high moral character, together with the evident popularity of his newspapers, are at odds with any claim that extreme antisemitism was a marginal force in interwar Poland, or imported from abroad, or limited to ‘bad Catholics’, as some apologists claim. Kolbe does not seem to have been an overt antisemite himself, but by allowing his newspapers to print such rubbish, especially in the inflamed atmosphere of the 1930s, he, like other churchmen, acted in a grossly irresponsible way.
As might have been expected, the malice of this propaganda, combined with the credulity and settled prejudices of its readers, caused ‘self-defence’ to take violent forms from time to time, despite the official position of church and state. This violence was not limited to the uneducated and ignorant: much of it happened at universities, where right-wing radicalism was popular among students. In Warsaw much of the anti-Jewish violence was inflicted by gangs of student ‘corporatists’ (korporanci ) belonging to the Fascist-style National Radical Camp (ONR). Joining them were razor gangs (żyletkarze), composed of ordinary street thugs. Ultimately the anti-Jewish psychosis led to the infamous pogroms in Przytyk (1936), Jedwabne and Radziłow (1941) and Kielce (1946), [dodać przypisy nawiązując do Sąsiadów i badań IPN-u, zwłaszcza Wokół Jedwabnego, i do debaty między Gontarczykiem a J. Żyndul około Przytyka.] as well as numerous smaller ones. Jolanta Żyndul counted major outbreaks of antisemitic violence in ninety-seven towns and cities in 1935–37, with fourteen Jews killed and 2,000 injured.15 Such events, of course, made an appalling impression on Jewish and world opinion, and have continued to colour the country’s image to this day.
It is difficult, on the other hand, to remember nowadays that, before the First World War, the Poles had quite a different image abroad. The West in those days tended to think of them as dashing revolutionaries, in the mould of Kościuszko and Pułaski, after whom streets are named in every larger town in America. The Jews, too, once thought of Poland as an island of tolerance, between reactionary Russia and assimilationist Germany, where they could live their own life in peace. In choosing Hebrew names for their countries, German and Spanish Jews adopted the names of biblical distant lands, Ashkenaz and Sepharad; but the Polish Jews called their country Canaan, the Promised Land. In Yiddish it was simply der Haym – the Home.
Images are by definition superficial, and the truth about Poland includes both these realities in some proportion. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the romantic nationalism of Pułaski and Kościuszko yielded to a new, more xenophobic form, and by the interwar period Roman Dmowski’s National Democracy movement (Endecja), and with it political antisemitism, were solidly entrenched in Polish society. The older and more tolerant tradition survived, however, particularly in the person and circle of Józef Piłsudski, whom the Jews generally viewed with favour. (Adam Czerniaków, chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council, kept a picture of the Marshal above his desk.) It must be remembered that Piłsudski, not Dmowski, was the dominant political figure of the interwar period and to this day is regarded with a certain reverence in Poland. In addition, the new force of Socialism gained a strong foothold in the country, and the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), then led by Piłsudski, was thought to have been the largest party in Poland on the eve of independence in 1918.
It would not do to draw too romantic a picture of Old Poland, where blood libels and massacres did occur, or to overstate the liberalism of Polish political parties. All agreed that the Jews in some sense constituted a problem for the country, but they disagreed as to its nature and proposed different solutions. To the parties of the right, the problem was that there were too many Jews in Poland: ‘a little salt may improve the taste of the soup’, Dmowski declared, ‘but too much will spoil it.’ Dmowski’s party believed that the Jews were an obstacle to the economic advancement of the Poles, since they made up a large segment of the business and professional classes, and many of the artisans and craftsmen as well. The Jews had in fact, by historical accident, become the pioneers of a new social order: their traditional role as middlemen had placed them in a better position than the largely agrarian Poles to take advantage of the new opportunities in a modernizing society. Taking a traditional, static view of society, the Endecja failed to understand that by developing the country’s economic life the Jews were creating opportunities for Poles and not destroying them (Dmowski’s liberal rivals, the ‘Warsaw positivists’, understood that point well enough).16 Nor was the Endecja moved by the fact that the most successful Jewish plutocrats generally assimilated to Polish society and eventually converted: the right viewed assimilants and converts with deep suspicion, as a fifth column of International Jewry. In any case, Dmowski believed that the Jews were too numerous to assimilate. The solution, in his view, was to remove as many Jews as possible by encouraging them to emigrate (his more radical followers encouraged them with sticks and clubs), and to introduce restrictive measures against the rest.
As a national electoral force, the Endecja was less successful than Piłsudski’s Sanacja. It never ruled on its own, but only as part of the centre–right coalition governments of the early twenties, and Dmowski himself only briefly held a cabinet post. But the dominance of the Sanacja owed less to its nebulous political programme than to the Marshal’s personal popularity, fortified by electoral manipulation, and as an ideological force the Endeks were unequalled. Old hands at organizing boycotts of Jewish business, they also successfully promoted the numerus clausus and ghetto benches at the universities, the ‘Aryan paragraph’ excluding Jews from professional associations, nationalization policies to expropriate Jewish businesses, and legislation limiting ritual slaughter. Their rhetoric, like that of the church, was de facto an incitement to violence, which moderate Endeks opposed in theory but without much conviction. In all these respects it was distinguishable from the ruling party after Piłsudski’s death only by the passion of its rhetoric; effectively, both church and state had embraced the Endek programme by 1939.
To the Left, on the other hand, the Jewish problem lay in the ‘separateness’ of the Jews, that is, in their cultural distinctiveness. Left and Right agreed that the concentration of Jews in certain economic sectors was a problem. Antisemitism, according to the left, was partly the result of xenophobia, and partly the ‘Socialism of fools’, an attempt by the bourgeoisie to split the working class by blaming the Jews for what were really class problems. The solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ was assimilation on the Western model and joining the common class struggle. In the meantime, the Polish left-wing parties were prepared to co-operate fraternally with their Jewish equivalents, the Bund and Labour Zionists; this co-operation extended not only to joint industrial action and bloc voting in the Sejm and Warsaw City Council, but also to support from the PPS for demonstrations against antisemitic excesses, and armed action by the PPS militia against right-wing extremists.
Remarkably, discussion of the relative strength of these tendencies has usually proceeded without so elementary a tool of political analysis as an electoral table. It is true that interwar Polish election results are hard to interpret: there was a bewildering variety of splinter parties and name changes, and elections were often manipulated. Even if corrections are made for these factors, the fact remains that of course not all supporters of a given party will be in agreement with all of its policies, so that there were no doubt those who voted for the PPS despite rather than because of its opposition to antisemitism. Conversely, there were many centrist, and even some right-wing, voters who were not antisemites: the Polish aristocracy, for example, was traditionally friendly, if patronizing, towards the Jews. Nevertheless, election results are at least a starting point towards quantification and give us a rough idea of the disposition of political forces.
The electoral results most pertinent here are those of municipal elections in Warsaw, which were held three times in the interwar period. These were the results:
| Table 1.2 Results of Warsaw Municipal Elections, 1919–39
Party or bloc |
Percentage of seats obtained | ||
| 1919 | 1927 | 1938 | |
| Sanacja | ** | 13 | 40 |
| Endecja | 51 | 39 | 8 |
| ONR | ** | ** | 5 |
| PPS | 19 | 23 | 27 |
| Jewish parties | 23 | 23 | 19 |
| Other | 7 | 2 | 1 |
| Total | 100 | 100 | 100 |
After Edward D. Wynot, Jr., Warsaw between the Two World Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) 118–26.
** Party did not exist in these years.
With the governing (from 1926) Sanacja being able to control the city council at best in a weak coalition with the parties of the right, and the PPS the only party willing to join forces with the Jewish bloc, the lines were clearly drawn. In judging the respective strengths of these groupings, there are a number of caveats. It would be better to have the popular vote rather than the numbers of seats won, but I could find only scattered figures. The 1919 and 1927 elections were held under proportional representation, while a less representative ward system was used in 1938. The 1938 results were skewed by gerrymandering and government money going to the Sanacja, so that these figures overstate the Sanacja’s real support and understate that of its opponents: the degree to which this was so can be judged from the fall in the representation of the Jewish parties, by one-sixth of their former seats. The support of the left is also understated for 1927, when the Communist KPP won a remarkable 16 per cent of the popular vote (compared with 18 per cent for the PPS), but was not allowed to take its seats. Thus, the parties of the Polish left had the support of 34 per cent of voters in 1927, while their proportion of seats in 1938 was again lower by about one-sixth. Since the rightward swing of the Sanacja had alienated its left-wing and Jewish supporters, most of whom would have gone to the PPS, the underrepresentation of the PPS was probably greater still. The same rightward swing, however, drew votes away from the right-wing parties, so that their decline, much greater than one-sixth, is partly real as well as the result of electoral manipulation. Some 18 per cent of Jewish voters voted for Polish parties, almost entirely the Sanacja (in 1927) and the PPS. The following approximate picture can
40 Secret City
thus be drawn of the electorate in 1938, after making corrections for these various factors:
| Table 1.3 Adjusted 1938 Municipal Election Results Party or bloc | Polish voters (percentage) | Jewish voters (percentage) |
| Sanacja | 38 | – |
| Endecja | 14 | – |
| ONR | 8 | – |
| PPS | 39 | 18 |
| Jewish parties | – | 82 |
| Other | 1 | – |
| Total | 100 | 100 |
Voters were thus sharply polarized along both ethical and political lines. About 60 per cent of Poles voted for parties of the right, but nearly 40 per cent for the left. Jews voted overwhelmingly for Jewish parties, with the PPS the only party that still appealed to both. The centrist parties were squeezed out altogether, although the Sanacja still had a centrist element.
The role of the PPS as a bridge between the Polish and Jewish communities is thus clear, as well as the party’s significance in the city’s politics. It was the only major party in Poland with a significant Jewish membership, mostly assimilants and converts, and with a branch in the ghetto. One of its representatives in the wartime Government-in-Exile in London, Ludwik Grosfeld, was a Jew; it maintained fraternal ties with the Bund, and its militia had helped fight off antisemitic attacks by the ONR during the street brawls of the thirties.
The PPS was not the only party that bridged the Polish–Jewish divide. Another was the KPP, which had scored such a success in the 1927 elections. But the KPP was accused of Troskyism and dissolved by the Comintern in 1938; most of its activists were summoned to Moscow, then murdered. In 1938, its voters either abstained or supported the PPS, the Bund or the Labour Zionists. The ghost of the KPP would rise again in 1942, when the Soviet-sponsored Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) was formed. The party’s pro-Soviet orientation would have alienated many KPP supporters, so the PPR remained small; but it would still prove to be an important link across the ghetto wall.
In 1939, the centrist and left-wing Pilsudskiites who had been repelled by the Sanacja’s turn to the right went on to form the Democratic Party (SD – Stronnictwo Demokratyczne), which also had Jewish members and supporters. The party was small, and its popular support is hard to judge.
During the war, the Polish underground coalesced around the various political parties, but there were many splits and realignments. The PPS split over the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, into the anti-Soviet Freedom-Equality-Independence (WRN) faction, and the left-wing and much smaller Polish Socialists (PS), later the Workers’ Party of Polish Socialists (RPPS), which advocated an independent Poland allied to the Soviet Union. The PS maintained close ties with the Bund, and Jewish sources speak highly of it, while WRN was more reserved. An English-language pamphlet published in September 1943 by its American branch, the Polish Labor Group, is a case in point.17 The pamphlet contains a two-page spread on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, recently in the news, but there is no other mention of the Jews. The next two pages describe the ‘battle of the monuments’, in which the Germans tore down statues of Polish heroes, and the two pages after that the massacre of 117 Poles in Wawer in 1939. The killing of two million Jews, on the other hand, is passed over in a single sentence. A similar indifference is displayed in the recently published correspondence between WRN leaders in Poland and their representatives in London.18 The situation of the Jews is mentioned briefly in a report dated June 1942; the next mention of the Jews is in a similar report, a year later. Thus the entire tragedy of the Warsaw Jews, from the start of the Great Deportation in July 1942 until the Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, passes without comment in the correspondence of the most pro-Jewish of the major parties in Poland.
What little is said about the Jews in these letters, in the pamphlet mentioned above and in the PPS publications, is entirely sympathetic and proper, without antisemitic overtones. In the report of June 1942, for example, we read that:
The Jews have already in large measure been murdered. Recently the Jews of Kraków have been liquidated, and ‘cleansing’ units are currently sweeping the Jews out of the smaller towns and townlets. [. . .] Really one must reach for the strongest measures here, because another half year of this destruction, together with the coming winter with no heat, and the number of victims will have to be counted in the millions. 19
But that is virtually all that is said on the subject, in a report of four printed pages. The ‘strongest measures’ recommended are ‘retaliation against Germans, particularly in the United States’; but that was rejected in the West as impracticable and immoral. In fact, the WRN undertook no organized action on behalf of the Jews until December 1942, when Julian Grobelny became the WRN delegate and chairman of the Council to Aid Jews (Żegota). Even so, when Grobelny was arrested in March 1944 several months passed before a replacement could be found.
This myopia on the part of WRN should be regarded as evidence of self-absorption rather than of any anti-Jewish bias: the party’s credentials as opponents of antisemitism were impeccable, and many individual members were very active in helping Jews. Indeed, many of its members were Jews, including the authors of the American pamphlet. But WRN was a source of individual contacts for the Jews, not the nucleus of an organized rescue effort. Like other parties, it tended to help its own comrades within the ghetto, helped to smuggle some of them out and offered them aid on the Aryan side. Individual WRN activists became involved in the organized aid effort from 1943 onwards. But the party as a whole, and its supporters, cannot be said to have exerted itself to an extent appropriate to the circumstances. (There was hardly an institution in Europe or abroad, though, about which the same could not be said.)
In general, Helen Fein’s opinion must be confirmed, that even progressive elements of Polish society regarded the Jews as outside their ‘universe of obligation’, an alien element whose fate was of little concern to Polish society as a whole. 20 This followed from the isolation of the two societies from each other, not the result of some Polish policy of apartheid, but a situation that had existed for centuries by mutual consent. The advantage of the arrangement for the Jews was that it protected them from assimilation. The disadvantage became apparent when they desperately needed their neighbours’ help, and found them, even when friendly, preoccupied with their own affairs.
Thus, the left-wing parties and their large bloc of voters, formed a bridge less solid than it seemed. It would certainly be wrong to conclude from the electoral statistics that 40 per cent of the Polish population were sympathetic to the Jews, or even interested in them. Given the difficult housing situation in occupied Warsaw, described in Chapter 3, only a minority even of the sympathetic could offer melinas. And given the risks involved, only a minority in turn of those who could help had the courage for it. On the other hand, there were also people with no particular sympathy for Jews, or who even remained hostile, but for whom the principle of Christian charity, or the strength of personal ties, or the chance to earn some money outweighed both fear and ideology. Further, the antisemitic trend of the surrounding milieu in some ways worked in favour of the Jews: it made for especially warm relations within the small, beleaguered circle of the Jews and their friends, and it made the Jews more wary and streetwise.
It will be argued in Chapter 3 that 7–9 per cent of the population of Warsaw did become involved in helping Jews, and on the evidence presented so far this does not seem an extravagant claim. The case study that follows will illustrate and flesh out these conclusions..
A Case Study
This study is based on two longer accounts, one Polish and one Jewish, and a number of shorter ones, which, as we shall see, mesh together into a common story. This story is not about members of the organized underground, whose networks were already in place, but about ordinary people, with the sorts of contacts that ordinary people had. They were people who happened to meet, some of whom happened to survive and happened to write their stories down. We will, in the telling, run into some prominent people and activists, but ordinary people would often run into the organized movements, which in turn was trying to reach out to them, so that is not untypical. When we trace connections, we inevitably find our way to the well-connected. But the nature of these connections is rarely remarkable, even when the people are. We shall begin, for example, with a national boxing champion, and soon be led to the director of the Warsaw zoo, who later was deeply involved in Żegota. But the link between these men has nothing to do with their membership in an elite (even supposing that boxers and zoo directors moved in the same circles) – rather, the boxer had a friend whose father-in-law did business with the zoo. Our two prominent individuals thus immediately lead us to two others, the friend and the father-in-law, who were quite average members of the Jewish middle class, and quite representative of the kind of people who escaped from the ghetto. The people we are about to meet, and the relationships between them, are on the whole typical of those reported in the memoirs generally.
Dramatis Personae
Szapse Rotholc was a national boxing champion before the war, and a member of the Bundist Shtern sports club. Together with his friend and fellow-boxer Shmuel Kenigswein, he became a member of the ghetto police and participated in smuggling, in the process forming contacts with German and Polish policemen and with smugglers on the Polish side. 21 Rotholc’s experiences on this front will be described in more detail in the next chapter. Rotholc claims that he used his position as a policeman to help his nephew and several other Jews escape from the ghetto; and he himself, with his immediate family, escaped with the aid of a Pole, another boxer named Tadeusz Mańkowski, who was later killed together with Rotholc’s wife after a betrayal. Rotholc also had a good Polish friend named Stanisław Chmielewski. Kenigswein’s father-in-law had been a supplier to the Warsaw zoo, so that Kenigswein knew the zoo’s director, Dr Jan Żabiński. Both Chmielewski and Żabiński became involved in bringing aid to their friends in the ghetto and later in hiding fugitives on the Aryan side. Chmielewski had twenty-four Jews under his direct care, keeping some in his own flat and helping many others, while Żabiński hid more than twenty-five Jews in the zoo, and again helped many others. Żabiński, in turn, knew the engineer Feliks Cywiński, passing a number of people on to him. Cywiński arranged hiding places and documents for dozens of Jews and kept seven in his own flat at Sapieżyńska 19. Cywiński was drawn into these activities by his friend Jan Bocheński, who had asked him for help in finding
[dalej nie będę poprawiać błędnych liter polskich]
places for two Jewish friends. Both Cywin´ski and Bochen´ski sold family land to raise money, which they used to rent four additional apartments where Jews could be hidden. Cywin´ski and Bochen´ski are credited with having twenty-six Jews under their direct care, of whom twenty-three survived, including the writer Rachel Auerbach, Barbara Temkin-Berman (Adolf Berman’s wife), and David Guzik, director of the Joint.22 In this way, this network was connected to Jewish activist circles, while Z˙abin´ski and Cywin´ski later also acted in Z˙egota. They were drawn into the organized aid effort by another friend, the psychologist Janina Buchholtz-Bukolska, who in turn was inducted by a fellow-psychologist, Dr Jadwiga Zawirska, a friend of the Bermans. 23 Kenigswein, with his family, stayed with both Z˙abin´ski and Cywin´ski; during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he became the leader of a Jewish platoon, organized by Cywin´ski, in the ‘Wigry’ battalion of the Home Army. 24 Another of the Jews under Cywin´ski’s care, the lawyer Mieczysław Goldstein, was passed on to him by Stefan and Marta Koper, the caretakers of a building in the right-bank suburb of Praga, who hid thirteen Jews in their flat.25 It should be noted that in all these cases aid was extended without payment.
Each of these people had further friends and contacts, some of whom have left records of their experiences, so that the description of this network could be extended considerably. Indeed, since the activists were in touch with many thousands of Jews, who in turn had networks of their own, we could probably find our way to all the Jews in hiding if we could trace all of the connections in full. Because only about one per cent of them wrote memoirs, and few are still alive, there are too many gaps in the record to allow it to be done today. Instead of trying to cast a wider net, therefore, let us instead try to look into a few of these stories more deeply.
The ‘One-Man Underground Organization’: Stanisław Chmielewski
Chmielewski – described by Ber Mark, then director of the Z˙IH, as a ‘one-man underground organization’26 – was apparently a homosexual, who was drawn into helping Jews through his relationship with his Jewish lover ‘Karol’ (Władysław Bergman).27 Early in the war, Chmielewski and Bergman fled to the Soviet-occupied sector; once there, Bergman decided to flee deeper into Soviet territory, while Chmielewski promised to return to Warsaw to look after Bergman’s mother Stefania as well as his own. First, though, Chmielewski went to Vilna, where, he maintains, Rotholc was living at the time (Rotholc’s account of events seems to make this impossible).28 In Vilna, Chmielewski associated with the circle of refugees from Warsaw, many of them Jews: ‘I had known many of them already, and got to know many others [. . .], becoming sincere friends with them,’ he writes.[Notuję żółtym cytaty z polkojęzycznych źródeł, których później prześlę dossier. Tych nie należy tłumaczyć]]
Late in October 1939, Chmielewski smuggled himself into the German-occupied part of Poland, carrying letters and messages from his Jewish friends in Vilna. ‘Crossing the border that night’, he relates, ‘I knew how I would fight against the Hitlerite invaders. Not with weapons, which I did not have, but with a weapon that was given to me at birth: God’s commandment, love thy neighbour as thyself. [. . .] So began my fight with the Nazi invader, the daily battle against Fascist racism.’29 Thus Chmielewski was moved by idealism as well as personal friendships to devote himself specifically to helping Jews. Perhaps as a homosexual he was also sympathetic to Jews as fellow-victims of persecution, and his own family obligations were few.
The letters that he delivered put Chmielewski in contact with a wider group of Jews, a number of whom he next helped to escape to the Soviet zone. He was also introduced to wider Jewish circles by Mrs Bergman, who drew him into the work of aiding Jewish refugees from Łódz´. Chmielewski in turn recruited his own mother, and also a young Polish engineer, Andrzej Szawernowski, who ‘throughout the occupation bravely helped me with my daily difficulties’, particularly with arranging documents and finding hiding places for the Jews under Chmielewski’s care. Chmielewski insists that he also had help from other quarters:
even the most stubborn ‘Polish fascists’, from the Camp of Great Poland [OWP] or even the National Radical Camp [ONR], for the most part renounced their youthful ideology, and in an honest, real, brotherly fashion helped first of all me, and later even directly the Jews themselves. The Christian idea, ‘love thy neighbour as thyself ’, eroded the ideology ‘beat the Jew’.30
Unfortunately, Chmielewski exaggerates. There are indeed documented instances of members of the far right who devoted themselves to helping Jews – the case of Jan Mosdorf is well known,31 and a few other cases will turn up later in this book. In general, however, the far right did not ‘renounce its former ideology’: its underground press maintained an uninterrupted barrage of antisemitic propaganda, and partisan groups of the NSZ, the military organization of the OWP and ONR, carried on an internecine war against those whom it saw as enemies of the nation, including Communists, liberals and Jews. The NSZ carried out a series of assassinations, among others of the Jewish historian Marceli Handelsman, and some of its partisan groups carried out attacks on Jewish partisans. Chmielewski’s accurately reports the contradictory aspects of right-wing Christian ideology that warred in the breasts of such people, but certainly ‘love thy neighbour’ did not always, or even very often, win out over ‘beat the Jew’. These issues are taken up in greater detail in Chapter 4.
When the ghetto was closed, Chmielewski resolved to maintain contact with his Jewish friends and bring them aid. But as he writes, he agonizes over the moral dilemma with which the enormity [okropność, nie ogromność] of the ghetto presented him:
Acting almost alone, I could not of course reach most of the prisoners of the ghetto, so that of necessity, of tragic necessity, my aid had to restrict itself to the narrow group of people who were my friends. I knew, in any case, that I was not isolated in my action, I believed that there must be others like me, who had friends among the Jews. This thought and faith gave me strength.
Indeed, there are a number of accounts of Poles who maintained contact with their Jewish friends in the ghetto, and also of Jews who stayed out of the ghetto and smuggled food and other necessities in to their relatives. We shall meet more of them in the present case study, and others in the next two chapters. Ringelblum reports that, in the last few days before Christians were excluded from the ghetto, there was ‘a mass phenomenon: Poles come to their Jewish friends . . . with packages of food, with flowers’.32 How many of these people kept up contact later on is hard to say, but certainly some of them did. As a policeman who participated in the illegal traffic through the ghetto gates, Rotholc noticed that
[t]here were also Poles who went into the ghetto. Polish ‘heads’ [główki]’ . . . were looked after better and more carefully [by the guards at the gates]. It was taken into account that these Poles who came to the Jews were risking their lives, and this gave rise to respect for them. These Poles also arranged things for the Jews. Jews entrusted them with their fortunes. These Poles brought the Jews money. They took all sorts of things out of the ghetto. Those Jews who didn’t have the possibility of smuggling food quite often got money from Poles, which they used to buy food from the smugglers. 33
As for the principle of ‘charity begins at home’ – the ‘tragic necessity’ that Chmielewski invokes – this, more than anything else, decided who would be first in line for hiding places. Though people with indirect contacts had some chance, the assimilated intelligentsia and political activists – those who knew people like Chmielewski – made up most of those who were saved.
Chmielewski’s action during the ghetto period consisted of arranging the sale of his friends’ possessions to raise money for them (he could get a better price on the Aryan side than they could in the ghetto), and smuggling food and medicine across to them. In this work, he says, he had the help of a ‘small, but faithful and reliable group of friends’. Among these was a German member of the Nazi party, Erich Horst, who ‘hated Hitler, and did whatever he could and however he could, always with dedication, to save the victims of persecution, Poles and Jews alike’. 34 Horst gave Chmielewski’s group access to German gendarmes who could be bribed. Later, Chmielewski found a less expensive and less dangerous method of smuggling. The ghetto’s garbagemen, who dumped their refuse outside the ghetto, would (for a price) carry food back with them, hidden in their empty wagons. Still another method was to throw food over the ghetto wall, at prearranged times and places. Chmielewski’s mother helped in this work, together with a friend of hers whose daughter-in-law was in the ghetto: here therefore is an example of how the conversionist milieu helped in maintaining such contacts.
With time, contact with the ghetto became more and more difficult and dangerous. Even the court building in Leszno Street, where Jews and Poles could legally mingle, became a favourite place for łapanki (hostage-takings and roundups for forced labour). Furthermore, access to the court building became restricted to those on court business, so that heavy bribes had to be paid to get in.
Money, in general, lubricated all transactions, according to Chmielewski. Now less sanguine about his fellow-countrymen, he complains that ‘During the occupation, unfortunately – today we have to be completely honest about this – money decided everything. You could look for sentiment with a candle in your hand. Or you could dream or daydream about it’.35 Raising money therefore became an increasing problem for Chmielewski, a man of modest means, especially as his work multiplied with the liquidation of the ghetto. He recounts that:
During that feverish period I was once at a kind of reception. The home was cultured, the company select. [. . .] It started with cold snacks, washed down with strong spirits in the traditional Polish way; there were two green tables for bridge, and in the living room they were getting ready for a concert. The host was a man of inherited wealth, a member of the typical West-Polish [poznan´sko-wielkopolskiej] bourgeoisie, the guests included wealthy landowners. Nota bene: the hostess was hiding two Jews in her house. One of them was a doctor. Both took an active part in the reception, in the discussion, in the numerous disputes and controversies that usually take place under such circumstances.
This was a typical social gathering of that tragic period, [. . .] which in effect not only brought together the representatives of the two nations but, the most important thing then, produced a greater or lesser income. Because all the participants in such gatherings [. . .] had to make a donation to a fund to aid the victims of the ghetto. 36
Jewish sources do not mention any such fund-raisers, butthe recorded testimony reflects only a small part of the whole reality, and Chmielewski is surely a credible witness. There are other examples of private money-raising within Poland – the sale of land by Cywiński and Bocheński has been mentioned, and more examples will follow. More money was thus raised for the Jews than flowed in officially from the Government-in-Exile and Jewish groups abroad, but it seems impossible now to estimate how much.
While on the subject of the plutocracy, Chmielewski also mentions the Berson family, wealthy bankers long ago converted to Christianity but still sympatheticto the Jews. They were best known as the philanthropists behind the Bersons’ and Baumans’ Children’s Hospital, which was incorporated into the ghetto. The Bersons maintained two estates, in Boglowice and Leszno. According to Chmielewski, both gave jobs and hiding places to Jews who had escaped from the ghetto, and both contributed money and food to the relief of the ghetto. It would be an interesting subject of future research to probe the activities of the old convert community as a whole, a group that was numerically tiny but had considerable wealth.
Besides raising money to cope with the flood of refugees, Chmielewski also needed to recruit more helpers. One of these was a Dr Karlsbader of Z˙elazna 31, a woman who ‘gave aid and shelter to many people from the ghetto’; another was a Mrs Gerzabek of Natolin´ska 3: their houses served as temporary shelters for Jewish fugitives. From there, Chmielewski and Szawernowski found them more permanent places.
One of Chmielewski’s Jewish friends, the professor of medicine Dr Leo Płocker, was assigned to a placówka (work detail) outside the ghetto, where he had to perform heavy physical labour for which he was unfit. Chmielewski rescued him from this otherwise probably fatal situation by arranging for him to sneak away from the placówka and spend his days with another friend, Władysław Martyny. In the evenings, Płocker would rejoin the work party and return to the ghetto. After Płocker escaped from the ghetto, Chmielewski found him a place with Dr Karlsbader, and placed Płocker’s wife first with a Mrs Halicka and then with a Mr and Mrs Łukasiewicz in Mokotowska Street.
Mrs Płocker was a concert pianist, a gold-medallist of the Leipzig Conservatory, and of Aryan appearance. She could therefore appear in public, and gave fundraising concerts, often at the home of a couple called Andrzejewski, who had an excellent Bechstein. Chmielewski placed Dr Płocker’s mother with yet another friend, a Mrs Wala, in Wilcza Street. Chmielewski also placed with Wala some relatives of his lover Władysław Bergman, Alina Lewinson and her daughters, Janina and Sophie. Janina Lewinson, under her married name of Janina Bauman, is the author of Winter in the Morning, one of the outstanding memoirs of the period, from which we learn a good deal more about Chmielewski, Wala and many other people. But that is getting ahead of the story.
Chmielewski placed Stefania Bergman somewhere in Wesoła Street, and after that melina was ‘burnt’, with a Mr and Mrs Henrychów in Kopernika Street. This couple was also looking after a Mrs Kasman. Mrs Kasman’s daughter-in-law had been caught while hiding and shot, leaving a small son, whom Chmielewski took into his own flat. At that time, he was also hiding Mieczysław Goldstein, the lawyer.
Thus we come full circle, with Chmielewski’s network connecting with that of the Kopers, and thereby to Cywinski, Z˙abinski and the mainstream Polish underground. These various networks on the Polish side arose spontaneously as a result of the personal contacts and humanitarian impulses of such people, and eventually merged into a single large network, connected to the Polish underground and eventually also to the aid agencies when they arose. As it grew beyond its humanitarian nucleus, it came to include, as Chmielewski tells us, those for whom ‘money decided everything’, and was infiltrated by more sinister elements as well.
Janina Lewinson (Bauman)
Chmielewski’s relatively short memoir (twenty-six typed pages) only skims the surface of his wartime activities. Writing a quarter of a century after the events, he admits that he has forgotten the names of many of the people in his circle, and can tell us little more about the Jews in his care. Janina Bauman’s memory is more vivid: her extraordinarily detailed account puts the experiences of at least one of the families whom Chmielewski helped under the microscope and provides more details of his activities.
[Pamiętnik Janiny Bauman był napisany po angielsku – należy tłumaczyć cytaty.]
Chmielewski’s lover, Władyslaw Bergman, was Bauman’s rather distant cousin. Her main ‘angel’ throughout the occupation, however, was not Chmielewski but ‘Aunt Maria’ – Maria Bułat, her mother’s former nanny and her grandparents’ housekeeper. Bułat was recognized as a ‘Righteous Gentile’ in 1993. 37 Sharing a single room with her sister and brother-in-law, Aunt Maria could not shelter Jews in her own home, but extended help in many other ways. During the ghetto period, she maintained contact with Bauman’s family, by telephone, through the courthouse in Leszno Street and also through her brother-in-law, who as an electrician had a pass that allowed him to enter the ghetto freely. He would bring ‘letters, money, and all sorts of useful things from her’.38 In January 1943, Aunt Maria arranged for the Lewinsons – Janina, her mother and her sister – to escape from the ghetto and escorted them to their first melina. This was a large flat in the centre of Warsaw belonging to the aristocratic family of Chmielewski’s friend, Szawernowski.
Eight Poles stayed at the Szawernowskis’, as well as four Jews – ‘Aunt Maryla’ (Stefania Bergman) and the three Lewinsons. Not all of the Szawernowski family were equally generous or courageous. The Szawernowskis’ daughter, Mrs Simonis, was nervous about ‘keeping cats’ (the wartime slang for hiding Jews): she was cool towards them, demanded large payments and refused to take in Jews after the flat had been visited by blackmailers in June 1943. Mr and Mrs Szawernowski, on the other hand, would later take the Lewinsons in without payment, while their daughter was away on holidays.
Forced out of the Szawernowskis’ flat by the blackmailers, the Lewinsons next turned to Zena Ziegler, the ex-wife of their grandfather’s former chauffeur, who was already giving shelter to Janina’s uncle Stefan and his fiancée, Jadwiga. But Ziegler was a morphine addict, and indiscreetly told her boyfriend, so that the Lewinsons had to find another hiding place after only a few days.
Stefan and Jadwiga found shelter with Ziegler’s sister, Mrs Kulesza, while Mrs Simonis arranged a temporary place for the Lewinsons – with a prostitute named Lily who entertained German soldiers in her flat, and whose brother was a Reichsdeutsch working with the railway police (Bahnschutz), whose job included catching Jews. Clearly this melina was unsuitable, and Aunt Maria next placed them with her sister Helena. Helena was not supposed to take such risks because her son was a high-ranking member of the AK, whose arrest could have serious implications for the movement. Again, therefore, the Lewinsons were able to stay for only a few days.
After this, Janina suffered from fever and her normally acute memory becomes blurred. She speaks of wandering on the outskirts of Warsaw, staying in ‘somebody’s cousin’s flat; somebody else’s friend’s flat’. 39 Chmielewski then came to the rescue, finding a place for her in the city centre. This was a sophisticated, specially constructed hiding place on the burnt-out first floor of a building above a German trading company. Here the porter of a neighbouring building, whom Bauman identifies only as ‘Kazik’, and his mother hid ‘dozens’ of Jews: fifteen were there when the Lewinsons arrived, eight others had just left. Kazik appears to have been middle-class, not the usual sort to be a building porter; Bauman thinks he was a member of the AK, using the porter’s job as cover.
It was now the late summer of 1943 and the Lewinsons had lived in at least seven melinas in perhaps as many months. The Hotel Polski affair was at its height (see Chapter 3), and twelve of the other fifteen Jews staying with Kazik, having presumably had equally unsettling experiences, all decided to go there. The Lewinsons also seriously considered it.
Very soon, Kazik’s melina, too, became ‘burnt’, when a pair of blackmailers robbed the six remaining people of everything they could find. The Lewinsons found temporary refuge with Kazik’s mother, who was also looking after a Jewish woman and her baby (Bauman thinks that the child was Kazik’s). Kazik now placed the Lewinsons with his friends Tom and Wanda, who printed underground pamphlets, forged documents and banknotes in their cellar. But Tom was soon arrested in the street. Since such arrests were invariably followed by a house-search, the Lewinsons had to clear out quickly. They returned to the Szawernowskis’. The Szawernowskis could offer a place only until the unsympathetic Mrs Simonis came back from holiday, so the search continued. Alina Lewinson and her younger daughter, Sophie, were put up in the suburb of Rembertów by another sister of Zena Ziegler’s, Janka Zielin´ska, while Janina was placed in another suburb, Rados´c´,
40
with a family whom she calls the Majewskis.
The Majewskis were not altruists. They demanded a large sum in advance, were rude and uncouth, starved Janina and then invented the story that a stranger had been nosing about, so as to get rid of her and keep the money. Janina then joined the rest of her family at the Zielin´skis, a family of four. Here, at last, the Lewinsons found some stability, staying for six months until January 1944. Between them they had had to move at least thirteen times in eight months.
The Zielin´skis also charged money, but Bauman writes that the amount was reasonable and they were well looked after. Like most Warsaw families, the working-class Zielin´skis needed to supplement their income with some illegal dealings to get by.. Mrs Zielin´ska, a midwife, performed abortions and traded on the black market: keeping the Jews, says Bauman, was no more risky and less exhausting. But living with another family at close quarters and under such conditions could not remain just a commercial enterprise:
for the people who sheltered us our presence also meant more than great danger, nuisance, or extra income. Somehow it affected them, too. It boosted what was noble in them, or what was base. Sometimes it divided the family, at other times it brought the family together in a shared endeavour to help and survive. 41
Thus Janka generously gave up her double bed to Janina and her mother, sleeping in a single bed with her own daughter while her husband slept with their son.
Eventually, this hiding place, too, was discovered by blackmailers, and after they had been paid off there was no money left. To help out, Aunt Maria sold a plot of land that Janina’s grandparents had given her. Chmielewski placed Janina with an elderly woman who was also looking after Stefania Bergman; her mother and sister in the meantime ‘were going through terrible ordeals. For various reasons they had to leave one shelter after another, to hide in wardrobes and chests, often to walk along the streets in full daylight’.42 Since all three had a ‘bad’ appearance (Chmielewski thinks that the younger daughter, Sophie, could safely pass as a non-Jew, but Bauman disagrees), appearing in public was highly dangerous. They disguised themselves by wearing mourning, but such disguises could often draw the very attention they were meant to deflect. They briefly sought refuge in a church, where the priest, suspecting who they were, offered food and consolation.
Chmielewski then found lodgings for all three of them with Mrs Wala, in a space which Chmielewski and Bauman recall differently. Chmielewski describes a flat with many rooms running off a central corridor, all of them sublet to fugitives of various kinds. Bauman describes a single room in which Wala’s neighbours expected her to be living alone, so that mere conversation aroused suspicion. Possibly Wala had sublet the rest of her flat and lived only in the small part that Bauman describes. At any rate, Wala and her boyfriend Edward were also looking after Stefania Bergman at the time and periodically, in Chmielewski’s telling, after many other Jews as well. This melina, too, had to be abandoned when Wala died in hospital. Edward tried to keep up her work, but with her death her flat reverted to the city and all the tenants had to leave. Finally, Aunt Maria found a place for them with a neighbour of hers, where they stayed until the 1944 uprising.
Bauman’s story, though told with exceptional clarity and detail, is otherwise not untypical of the memoir literature: the constant moving from place to place, the repeated threat of blackmail and denunciation, the problem of money, the dependence on the goodwill of large numbers of people who were essentially strangers, the temptation to join in the Hotel Polski scheme are all quite typical.
The Lewinson family were also rather typical of the assimilated Warsaw intelligentsia. Janina’s father was a urologist, one grandfather was also a doctor, the other owned a music shop. Her family were non-observant and had adopted such Christian customs as putting up a Christmas tree. She received her primary education at Nasza Szkoła and then entered a state gimnazjum. She was the only Jewish girl in the whole school, the result of the unofficial numerus clausus that kept out all but the ablest Jews.
Bauman mentions Christian friends of the family only to say that some of them visited just before the ghetto was closed – evidence of Ringelblum’s ‘mass phenomenon’, but showing also that many – probably most – did not follow through. For whatever reason, the Lewinsons did not seem to rely on these contacts later on. Instead, their main point of contact with the outside world was through their servants. Domestic labour was cheap in pre-war Poland, and any respectable middle-class family, even one that was not very wealthy, would have a maid or a nanny or a cook. A number of family servants figure in Bauman’s story: besides Aunt Maria and Zena Ziegler, there is also Ziegler’s husband and a nurse named Sister Franciszka, both Volksdeutsche; and Stefania Bergman’s Christian maid, who moved into the ghetto with the family (there were not a few such cases).43
Summing up Bauman’s story, then: the Lewinsons’ beachhead on the Aryan side consisted of the old nanny, Aunt Maria and the chauffeur’s ex-wife, Mrs Ziegler. They in turn recruited various friends and relatives. Aunt Maria enlisted her sister Helena, her brother Tadeusz and her brother-in-law, the electrician with a pass for the ghetto. This beachhead was then expanded through the further families, friends and neighbours of these servants. These were working-class Poles, most of whom were honest but for whom looking after Jews was mainly a way to earn money. Chmielewski, who as a cousin’s lover was tenuously related to the Lewinsons, was another beachhead. In helping the Lewinsons, Chmielewski used his contacts with the Polish underground, Andrzej Szawernowski and the porter Kazik. Through the daughter of the aristocratic Szawernowskis, in turn, the Lewinsons met the Reichsdeutsch prostitute Lily; while the contact with Kazik led to the ill-fated underground printing shop of Tom and Wanda. This was the structure of the Lewinsons’ network on the Aryan side.
On the Jewish side, Bauman mentions thirteen relatives and eleven friends who were alive and in Warsaw when the ghetto was closed or subsequently. Of these, two relatives stayed out of the ghetto; seven relatives, five friends and three parents of friends escaped from it, and three relatives died or were deported. We are not told the fate of the remaining six friends. Thus, at least fifteen out of twenty-four – nearly two-thirds – either escaped from the ghetto or never entered it. Of those of whose final fate we are told, six survived, two died in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and four died on the Aryan side before that uprising. Thus, at least a quarter of this very well-connected group of Jews survived the war, and more than half of those on the Aryan side survived at least until the uprising in 1944.
Conclusions
It would be premature at this point to draw far-reaching conclusions or try to estimate numbers; but a few things are already clear. First of all, relying mainly on the testimony of one Polish and one Jewish witness, we have found our way to more than a hundred Jews, sixty-odd Poles, four Germans (Chmielewski’s helper Erich Horst, one of Bauman’s blackmailers, the prostitute Lily and her brother) and two Volksdeutsche (Zena Ziegler’s husband and the nurse, Sister Franciszka). Through Kenigswein and his connection with Z˙abin´ski, we have also arrived at the Polish and Jewish aid organizations, which ultimately reached thousands of the Jews in hiding. Each of these Jews in turn had, like Bauman, additional contacts with Poles and other Jews, and the Poles also had further contacts of their own. Here, then, is how the secret city arose: spontaneously, through personal networks.
Nechama Tec has suggested that Polish helpers of Jews largely thought of themselves as ‘outsiders’, a proposition that Michael Marrus finds so self-evident that he describes it as ‘a circular argument’.44 Some of the people described by Chmielewski and Bauman and the others were indeed outsiders: Lily the prostitute, Zena Ziegler the morphine addict, Chmielewski the homosexual. And there is more than a hint that much of Chmielewski’s circle was a homosexual underground, helping its fellow victims of Nazi persecution. But the larger network that these accounts reveal reached into the most extraordinary variety of milieus. It included the aristocratic Szawernowskis and the working-class Zielin´skis, the extreme right-wing ONR and OWP circles with which Chmielewski was in touch, and also the Communists to whom his friend Dr Płocker belonged. It included Poles, Germans, Volksdeutsche and old Jewish converts, members of the Polish underground and of the Nazi party, sportsmen and boulevardiers, priests and atheists, servants and masters. It included people of great kindness and nobility, others whose interest was purely mercenary, and (counting the szmalcowniks) the vilest of criminals. In short, it reached into every corner of Polish society and involved people of every type.
On the Jewish side, the network may in principle have reached most of the Jews in the ghetto – though Bauman’s milieu is assimilated, many other memoirists had relatives who remained traditional – but the principle of ‘charity begins at home’ ensured that those with the closest contacts had the best chances. Many psychological barriers also held back the less assimilated Jews. For many reasons, the community of Jews on the Aryan side consisted almost entirely of assimilated Jews, except for the relatively small group of political and social activists whose organizations arranged their escape.
In the next chapter, we will take up the topic of escape, to show how the secret city arose.
[1] See Jan Grabowski, “Ja Tego Zyda Znam!” Szantażowanie Żydów w Warszawie, 1939-1943 (“I Know This Jew!. Blackmailing the Jews in Warsaw, 1939-1943),(Warsaw: IfiS PAN,, 2004).