Chapter 2. Escape

2. Escape 

The thirty months of the Warsaw ghetto’s existence can be divided into the fol­lowing periods, each offering different prospects of escape and posing different problems:

1. The closing of the ghetto, from the ghettoization decree of 12 October 1940 until the deadline for resettlement, 15 November. During this period Jews had to decide whether to enter the ghetto or to live illegally outside it.
2. 2. The main ghetto period, from 16 November 1940 until 21 July 1942: the Jews of Warsaw were shut up behind the ghetto walls and many others were forced into the ghetto later, from surrounding towns and then from Germany and Czechoslovakia. In all, some 490,000 Jews lived in the Warsaw ghetto at one time or another. Conditions were grim: 78,000 people died from starvation or disease, and tens of thousands were rounded up for service in labour camps, where the mortality rate was still higher. Contact with the Aryan side was mainly through food-smuggling and other forms of illegal trade. Hundred and perhaps thousands of Jews, many of them children, crossed over to the Aryan side daily in connection with this trade, but few meant to stay out for good.

The main ghetto period can be subdivided into two shorter periods:

• Before Hans Frank’s decree of 15 October 1941, escape was risky but did not carry the death penalty as a matter of policy.
• After Frank’s decree, discovery on the Aryan side in principle (not always followed) meant death for the Jew and all ‘accomplices and instigators’.

3. 3. The liquidation of the ghetto. As Jews gradually came to realize that the ghetto was doomed, they began to escape in ever-increasing numbers. Escape during this period was usually effected through the work parties that left the ghetto daily – escapees would mingle with the workers and steal away after they had crossed the wall –, but many other techniques were used as well.

The liquidation actions stretched over nine months and were carried out in stages:

1. The Grossaktion or Great Deportation, 22 July–12 September 1942: all but about 55,000-60,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka and killed. During this Aktion conditions in the ghetto were chaotic, and the true nature of the deportations became known only gradually. The ghetto was much more closely guarded, and escape was very difficult.
2. The ‘shops’ period, when the shrunken ‘Restghetto’ was divided into German-owned work­shops and, in effect, converted into a labour camp.
3. Between the Great Deportation and the January Aktion (18–22 January 1943), when a further 6,000 Jews were transported to labour camps. The number of escapes diminished, as many people thought the deportations had run their course, at least for the time being. Few doubted that the Nazis meant eventually to destroy the ghetto altogether, but it was thought that they would need to preserve their labour force for the time being.  Serious preparations for an armed uprising began at this time, but involved only a few hundred people.  Many “bunkers” were built, in which Jews hoped to be able to ride out the final Aktion (which, it was theorized, would not take place until the war was nearly over).
4. From the January Aktion to the outbreak of the Ghetto Uprising on 19 April 1943. The ghetto was finally convinced that it was doomed. The number of escapes increased greatly, but Jews were divided over whether it was best to escape, offer armed resistance, or hope to survive in the bunkers.
5. 4. The Ghetto Uprising and its aftermath: once fighting started, normal escape routes ceased to exist. Jews escaped through sewers and tunnels; they jumped from the deportation trains or escaped from labour camps, or they hid in the ‘wild’ ghetto, which had officially been cleared of Jews, and then made their way to the Aryan side, usually at night.

To determine proportions, 224 individual cases were examined. The absolute number of people in hiding (28,000) will be calculated in Chapter 6, and on this basis the absolute number of people who went into hiding during each period can be estimated as well.  The results are summarized in Table 2.1.

 

It can be seen that very few people stayed out of the ghetto or escaped before the deportations. The number of escapes increased rapidly during the first deportation, but in proportion to the ghetto population it was still quite small (the percentage given in the table is based on the ghetto population about halfway through the depor­tation). The bulk of escapes took place only after the first deportation ended, at which time almost a quarter (22–24 per cent) of the 55,000–60,000 remaining Jews (35,000 living in the ghetto officially and 20,000–25,000 ‘wild’ Jews) managed to get away. ¹

If more than 13,000 Jews escaped from the ghetto after the 1942 deportation, and another 6,000 were deported during the January Aktion, then the total number of Jews who remained in the ghetto during the uprising could not have been greater than 41,000, whereas Jürgen Stroop’s report on the suppression of the Ghetto Uprising claims to account for 61,000–62,000 Jews: 5,000–6000 ‘destroyed in explosions or fires’ and 56,065 Jews either killed by his men during the uprising or deported afterwards. This discrepancy need not detain us too long, however. German figures concerning the Warsaw ghetto are generally inflated. The number 56,065 is suspiciously palindromic, and its accuracy is clearly spurious: it is the sum of a number of figures that are themselves broad estimates. ² On the basis of German figures and Judenrat estimates, Berenstein and Rutkowski found room for 42,500 fugitives from the ghetto;³ that number is clearly overstated, but it does show how much uncertainty there is in ghetto

Table 2.1 Time of Escape from Warsaw Ghetto or Arrival on the Aryan side

Number Percentage

			of all	of
			escapes	remaining
			and	ghetto
Category	in	projected*	arrivals	population
	sample
Never entered the Ghetto	19	2,400 ± 1,100	8.5	0.6
Escaped
before deportations	26	3,250 ±  1,250	11.6	0.8
during first (1942) Aktion	48	6,000  ± 1,600	21.4	5.0
between Aktionen	20	2,500  ± 1,100	8.9	4.2
between second Aktion and
Ghetto Uprising	60	7,500 ± 1,700	26.8	12.5
during or after Ghetto
Uprising from ghetto	21	2,600 ±  450	9.4	5.2
from train or camp	8	1,000  ± 700	3.6	2.5
Came to Warsaw to hide	22	2,750  ± 1,150	9.8	—
Totals	224	28,000	100.0	5.5†

 

* Error bars at .95 confidence level. Overall total has been estimated independently (see Chapter 6).

† Of total ghetto population (490,000).

population figures. The estimates given here – nearly 23,000 escapees and more than 5,000 who stayed out or came to Warsaw to hide – are based on the direct evidence presented in Chapter 6, and are certainly more reliable than Stroop’s braggadocio.

Staying Out: The Formation of the Ghetto

At the time of the establishment of the ghetto, the number of Jews on the Aryan side was negligible. Even totally assimilated Jews and also converted Jews pre­ferred to live in the ghetto for fear of punishment. In the Aryan sector there remained a very small group of people of Jewish origin who were linked by family ties to Polish surroundings and who did not have the courage to wear the Jewish armband.

Adolf Berman⁴

 

The Jews in Warsaw [. . .] could be divided into two categories: those who, from the first moment [. . .] as a matter of principle sabotaged all decrees applying to Jews, ignoring the threat of disproportionately heavy punishments, and exposing themselves at the same time to criticism from their fellow victims of persecution; and those who ‘risked’ themselves only at the time of the final liquidation [. . .] or shortly before.

‘Citizen Frajnd’⁵

One of the most serious errors [. . .] was the hostile attitude to the acquisition of ‘Aryan papers.’ Until the time of the big deportations this was regarded as a kind of desertion. The consequence of this attitude was that during the most tragic period there were not enough workers on the ‘Aryan side’ and there was not even the minimum point of support outside the walled-in ghettos.

Michal Borwicz⁶

Waldemar Schön, director of the Resettlement Office for the Warsaw District and the first Commissioner for the Jewish Residential District, reported that he had been forced to mount a ‘great police operation’ on 16 November 1940 to round up 11,130 Jews who had remained outside the district.⁷ Like Stroop’s figures, and other figures in Schön’s report, this one is no doubt inflated in the service of his own prestige. Still, the report is not altogether an invention, and it is likely that quite a few Jews did stay out of the ghetto for the moment. It is also very unlikely that such a razzia caught all its intended victims, especially since it was limited to a few dis­tricts. Viewing the round-up from the other side, Citizen Frajnd was not impressed. ‘Fortunately’, he writes, ‘the hunters had not yet attained the per­fection that they would reach three years later, so that there were relatively few victims.’⁸

Most Jews who missed the 15 November deadline for moving into the ghetto probably did not mean to avoid ghettoization: they could simply not find quarters in time. And final details of the ghetto boundary were not published until 14 November, when some Jews suddenly found themselves on the wrong side. Wrangles over certain streets (Graniczna and Biała) continued until well past the deadline, so resettlement continued even into the first week or two of the ghetto’s exist­ence. ⁹ Schön’s ‘great police operation’ was thus carried out in an  atmosphere of confusion, and largely entrapped the victims of that confusion rather than genuine evaders. Even those who escaped Schön’s round-up eventually moved into the ghetto voluntarily, by and large. As we have seen, only 2,400 or so remained.

Every Jew who stayed outside the ghetto was highly acculturated, and usually a convert. Only highly acculturated Jews were able to live “on the surface”, passing as Poles;  and no case has turned up of a Jew who did not enter the ghetto but lived in hiding, ‘under the surface’. But most acculturated Jews and even converts did enter the ghetto, because it was obviously dangerous to defy German decrees.  The decision to stay out of the ghetto required exceptional cir­cumstances.

Usually, the decision to pass as a non-Jew was made before the ghet­toization decree was published, and not entering the ghetto was just a further consequence of that decision. When it did not follow from the resolve to ‘sabotage all German decrees’, as in Frajnd’s case, the decision to pass was usually a result of entering into a mixed marriage after the occupation began: there was a rash of such marriages, mainly in the hope of evad­ing anti-Jewish measures. Since marriages between Jews and Aryans were illegal under the Nuremberg Laws, the Jewish spouse – and often close relatives as well – had to establish a false identity. ¹⁰ Other factors such as youth and a sense of adventure, weak links to the Jewish community and limited Jewish family ties, ¹¹ a strong attachment to a non-Jewish spouse or companion¹² and good connections with the Polish underground¹³ were often also present.

Bearing in mind that people who stayed out of the ghetto had to survive on the Aryan side for more than four years before liberation, might pro­jections based on survivor testimony understate the case? To test this possibility, the fate of eight such people was determined from third-person reports. Three of them survived,¹⁴ one moved to the ghetto after being harassed by her Christian neighbours and died there, ¹⁵ one was killed in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944¹⁶ and three died on the Aryan side. ¹⁷ So life on the Aryan side presented many dangers, but some people survived them, even for such a long time. In fact, three survivors out of eight represents about the same proportion as the overall survival rate (41 per cent) calculated in Chapter 6.   Although the sample is too small to support firm conclusions,.there is thus no definite reason to suppose that the Jews who stayed out are underrepresented,  The Aryan side was less dangerous in the early days than it would become later on, when blackmailers and denouncers multiplied, and, for highly assimilated Jews, it was probably less dangerous than the ghetto. Once mass escapes started, Jews newly emerging from the ghetto entered a city that seemed deceptively familiar but was really a new and frightening world, while those who had spent years living there already knew the ropes.  These advantages offset the risks added by the mere passage of time .

 

 

The Main Ghetto Period: 16 November 1940–21 July 1942

1 The Porous Wall

Unlike the ghettos in many other Polish cities, the ‘Jewish Residential District’ in Warsaw was centrally located and could not easily be isolated from the rest of the city. Aware of the problem, the German authorities had initially

60 Secret City

considered building the ghetto ‘on the outskirts of the city, namely embracing the districts of Koło and Wola in the West of the city and Grochów in the East’, according to Schön. But they had to take into account the ‘special and extremely complex conditions in the city of Warsaw’. ‘The point was made’, wrote Schön, ‘that the creation of a ghetto would cause considerable disruption to industry and business. Since eighty percent of the artisans were Jews, one could not place them under siege for they were indispensable.’ Here then was an early victory for the ‘productionists’, as Christopher Browning has called them – the Germans who wanted to keep the Jews alive and exploit their labour -, over the ‘attritionists’, who saw the ghettos as a means of extermination. So the decision was put off, while; in the mean­time, the pre-war Jewish neighbourhood was declared a ‘quarantine district’ (Seuchensperrgebiet).  Apparently the Nazis believed their own propaganda, that the Jews were ‘immune carriers’ of typhus. As if by way of commentary, construction of a wall to isolate the ‘quarantine district’ began on April Fool’s Day in 1940.

Paradoxically, the Nazis’ eagerness to seal off the Jews resulted in a ghetto that was not completely sealed off:  The wall was a commitment, and the delay caused an atmosphere of haste, even panic, later on. When the decision to create a closed ghetto was made, on 20 August 1940, it was decided to leave the Jews where they were. Economic factors were invoked, but the fear of typhus may have decided the issue:

hermetically sealed Jewish ghettos should not be created, but rather Jewish residential districts which permitted economic links with the surrounding Aryan area, which would be vital to the survival of the Jewish residential dis­trict. [. . .] The creation of a ghetto at the edge of the city would have taken four to five months in view of the need to regroup nearly 600,000 people. However, the resettlement measures had to be completed by 15 November [. . .] since experience showed that the winter months saw an increase in epidemics. ¹⁸

The ghetto thus roughly coincided with the city’s traditional Jewish area, in the very heart of Warsaw: its borders started two blocks west of Marszałkowska Street and two blocks north of Jerusalem Avenue, the city’s two most important streets. No fewer than five tram lines transected the ghetto.

The wall itself was makeshift in character:

The Jewish Residential District is separated from the rest of the city by the util­ization of existing walls and by walling up streets, windows, doors and gaps between buildings. The walls are three metres high and are raised a further metre by the barbed wire placed on top. They are also guarded by motorized and mounted police patrols. ¹⁹

 

It was punctured by twenty-two gates, soon reduced to fifteen; at each gate was a Wache or sentry-post, manned in principle by one German gendarme (of the 304th Ordnungspolizei battalion), one Polish ‘Blue’ policeman, and one member of the Jüdische Ordnungsdienst (Jewish Order Service), the ghetto police. There continued to be some legal traffic across the ghetto wall: ‘Passes are issued for passage in and out of the ghetto for essential purposes’, as Schön wrote, though the number of such passes was sharply curtailed in time. All trade across the wall was supposed to be handled by a new agency, the Transferstelle; all other commercial traffic was forbidden. Nevertheless:

Smuggling began at the very moment that the Jewish area of residence was established [. . .] It was calculated that the officially supplied rations did not cover even 10 percent of normal requirements. If one had wanted really to restrict oneself to the official rations then the entire population of the ghetto would have had to die out in a very short time. ²⁰

In fact, not only food was smuggled: an extraordinarily varied underground econ­omy soon sprang up, most of it based on illegal trade across the wall. The methods developed for smuggling goods later served for smuggling people and weapons as well.

 

The means of physically crossing the ghetto wall were as numerous as human ingenuity could devise; among them were:

1. 1. Trams. Each tram on the five lines that traversed the ghetto stopped at an entrance gate on its way into the ghetto, where it was boarded by a Blue policeman. The tram would then pass through the ghetto, stopping only at the exit gate, where the policeman would alight and report to a German gendarme. At certain points, however, these trams had to slow down for sharp turns, where people could jump on or off the open cars. Bags of food or other goods could also be thrown to or snatched from confederates within the ghetto as the trams went by. The conductor and policeman would usually have to be bribed – Dawid Białogród says that 2 zł was the usual rate ²¹ – and any Polish passengers would have to be counted on for their discretion. Jack Eisner, himself one of the child smugglers who used this technique, describes it in detail.²² Białogród later escaped from the ghetto by tram, together with his wife and child.
2. Other conveyances. Various other vehicles could enter and leave the ghetto with official permission. People could cling to the underside of fire engines or garbage wagons as they left the ghetto. Food was regularly smuggled in by the ghetto’s garbage collectors:

The garbagemen smuggled from the beginning of the ghetto’s existence. [. . .] They took the garbage to a dump in Wolska [Street]. When they left the ghetto, things being exported would be hidden under the garbage, and on the way back they would buy some hay and rye for their horses. Under this [. . .] they would hide food.²³

Another technique: a cart would enter the ghetto drawn by two horses, and leave with only one.  The other would be butchered and eaten (not kosher, but permitted under the circumstances).

A private ambulance service offered passage out of the ghetto for a price, and hearses ostensibly carrying deceased converts for burial in Christian cemeter­ies could carry the living instead. In these cases, the Germans’ fear of disease could be exploited: dropping the word ‘typhus’ would discourage a closer search. People could also hide aboard trucks legally carrying goods into or out of the ghetto, the guards having been bribed not to search them too thoroughly.

3. 3. Legal passes. Some Poles could enter the ghetto legally. The priests of the two functioning Catholic churches within the ghetto, All Saints’ in Grzybowski Place and the Holiest Virgin Mary in Leszno Street, could pass freely in and out of the ghetto. The director of the Warsaw zoo, Jan Z^˙abin´ski, obtained an appointment as inspector of trees and could enter the ghetto to carry out his duties, as could various municipal workers, and rent and tax collectors. Polish owners and managers of enterprises within the ghetto, as well as their Polish workers, could similarly pass in and out. Officials of the welfare agency RGO were allowed to visit the Pawiak prison within the ghetto. Jews already living on the Aryan side could get passes on various pretexts: A.P., for example, was able to visit her relatives by claiming that she was having a dress made by a seamstress in the ghetto. Jacob Celemenski, a courier for the Bund, was equipped with Aryan documents and a range of forged passes, identifying him as an electrician or municipal worker. A few Jews who were not living ‘on documents’ also had passes to leave the ghetto: for example, Marek Edelman, at the time an orderly at the Bersons’ and Baumans’ Children’s Hospital, routinely carried laboratory samples for analysis. In time, however, the number of passes was greatly reduced, and all passes were cancelled when the deportations started.
4. 4. The courts. Though officially on the Aryan side, the main court building in Leszno Street was entirely surrounded by the ghetto. Access from the Aryan side was provided through its back entrance, by means of a narrow passage along Biała Street – the buildings on both sides of which were in the ghetto – which connected it to Mirowski Place on the Aryan side. Since both Poles and Jews could be involved in court proceedings, they were allowed to mingle freely within the building, though Jews had to wear their Star-of-David armbands. In principle, special passes were needed, but enforcement was lax and a bribe could generally deal with any difficulties. A Polish woman, H.Z., describes how she smuggled food into the ghetto through the courts: she would enter the building from the Aryan side, carrying full shopping bags, and go into a stairwell. There she would put on an armband and then go out on the ghetto side. On the way out, she would reverse the procedure.

(She adds that once, while trying to exit to the ghetto, her shopping bags got caught in the revolving door.  Inadvertently, she exclaimed “Jesus, Mary”. She had to pay the nearby “Blue” policemen a 2,000 zł bribe.) [rozmowa z p. H.Z.]

²⁴ The same technique could easily be used to leave the ghetto for good: Eugenia Rolnicka, for example, escaped through the courts in May 1941. ²⁵ Though access to the court building was pro­gressively tightened, this escape route stayed open even after the deportations began, until the building was zoned out of the ghetto in mid-August 1942.

The court was not the only building that allowed access to the Aryan side. The municipal offices in Długa Street also had entrances on both sides of the wall, and until the Germans got wind of it the concierges would allow people in and out of the ghetto for ‘a few zlotys’. A pharmacy in Dzika Street was also accessible from both sides, and the pharmacist would allow anyone through who could give a good reason.²⁶

5. 5. ‘Mety’. Large-scale smuggling was most commonly carried out at the so-called mety (singular: meta) or ‘hideouts’, places where the ghetto boundary was formed by internal walls in adjacent buildings. Smuggling was carried out through holes knocked in the shared walls, or across the rooftops. Liquids and grains were poured down drainpipes. Diana Kagan writes that she regularly visited her relatives in the ghetto through such adjacent buildings, jumping from one rooftop to another. ²⁷
6. 6. Ge˛sia Street Market. This was actually located in a lane running from Ge˛sia to Niska Street, where open trade was carried on between Jews selling used cloth­ing and other goods and Christian buyers who were allowed to enter the ghetto for this purpose. The Ge˛sia Street market was closed down at the start of the deportations.
7. 7. Over, under and through the wall. Child smugglers in particular made their way in and out of the ghetto through holes in the ghetto wall, filled in with loose bricks when not in use. In some places, a proper wall had not been built and the ghetto was separated from the Aryan side only by a wooden fence or barbed wire: the emaciated children could easily (though not without risk) slip through the wire or a loosened plank. Food and goods could also be thrown to confeder­ates on the other side, or the wall could be scaled, with lookouts keeping watch on both sides. In the secluded remoter reaches of the Jewish cemetery, no lookouts were needed: there, smugglers could climb unobserved into the neighbouring Powa˛zki Catholic cemetery or the Evangelical cemetery. But the Jewish cemetery was separated from the rest of the ghetto by its own wall. Contraband moving in or out had to pass through the Okopowa Street gate, which was often manned by the infamous ‘Frankenstein’ (a particularly sadistic German guard so named, appar­ently, for his resemblance to Boris Karloff). The transfer was done by undertakers from the Pinkert firm, who hid the smuggled goods in special com­partments in their coffins. ²⁸ Smuggling at the cemetery wall was one of the few channels that stayed open after the deportations, during the ‘shops’ period.
8. 8. The ghetto gates. The policemen guarding the gates could often be bribed or distracted, and occasionally turned a blind eye out of good will. Szapse Rotholc offers the following description of smuggling at the gates, worth quoting at length partly for its colourful character, and partly for the light it casts on this form of smuggling, particularly on the relations between Jewish and German policemen. It helps also to answer the argument made popular by Daniel Goldhagen: here are some of ‘Hitler’s willing executioners’, closely observed by a Jewish eyewitness:

[nie tłumaczyc – polski oryginał]

If you sensed that a new gendarme was prepared to talk to a Jewish policeman, if he just let you stand next to him, that meant he’d be good for a bribe. There were different kinds of gendarmes. They were from different places. If you met a gen­darme from Austria, he’d offer on his own to help with the smuggling. The worst were the gendarmes from Germany.

Quite often, we talked politics with the gendarmes. Sometimes a gendarme would express a sort of sympathy. In 1942–3 [during the deportations] you would often say to one of those gendarmes, ‘What good is your sympathy? The next time you come on duty I’ll be dead.’ That kind of gendarme would be glad to see you [alive] the next time. If you asked him, ‘Where are your seven million German Communists?’ a gendarme like that might say, ‘You don’t know what’s going on underneath my uniform.’ That kind of gendarme wouldn’t take any money for helping with the smuggling. That kind of conversation could happen in the later period.

Most often gendarmes broke down and made friends with Jewish policemen during conversations about family. If you got them onto the subject of their families you could easily lead them. Some of them would tell you about letters they’d got from their families, where they’d been told about the deaths of their dearest ones. At a moment like that a gendarme would lose interest in every­thing and would say, ‘Everything is shit already, do what you want.’²⁹

Goldhagen claims that the ‘willing executioners’ acted sadistically towards Jews because they had been culturally programmed with ‘eliminationist antisemitism’. But according to Rotholc, ‘Quite a few gendarmes said that the battle with the Jews is only politics but they hate the Poles from the heart.’

Once relations had been established, not only food and goods could be smug­gled through the gates.

There were ‘players’ [grajkowkie – Jewish policemen involved in smuggling] who [with the help of] ‘their’ gendarmes would rarely let contraband through but mainly let people [. . .] go back and forth. This lasted for the whole time the ghetto existed until [the last period] when letting people through to the Aryan side assumed an entirely different character. [. . .] These ‘players’ we called noggin-men [łebkarze ].³⁰ 

[check Rotholc again re Polish policemen – also szmalcowniks at the gates.  Also “gypsy roads” method of leaving – 301/4659]

All Rotholc says about the Polish policemen at the gates is that they wanted a share of the bribes and were usually unnhappy with what they got.  Assuming that Rotholc would have mentioned it if they had caused trouble, we can infer that they were greedy but co-operative. Some Polish policemen later got involved in helping people escape, but others became blackmailers or zealously carried out German orders to hunt down Jews. More will be said about this in Chapter 4.

In short, all three police forces contained various kinds of people: some were sadistic, some officious, some corrupt, and some  were honest and decent men. The Germans, having the most power, could commit the most extreme abuses, and of course the routine exercise of their duties ensured the starvation and ultimate destruction of the ghetto. But having the most power to harm, they also had the most power to help. Two things are certain: first, without those policemen who did retain their humanity, including some of the ‘ordinary Germans’ of the 304th Orpo battalion, the ghetto could not have been kept alive through smuggling, and the ‘Greatest Escape’ could not have taken place.  Second, their behaviour stands as an accusation against the others, and negates their excuse that they were under orders, and there was nothing they could have done.

9. 9. Work parties. Groups called ‘placements’ (placówki) left the ghetto every day on work assignments; there were also Polish placówki within the ghetto. Members of these work parties could smuggle goods out to sell on the Aryan side, and smuggle in food on the way back. Only small amounts could be smuggled in this way, and at first the number of work parties was also quite small. This form of smuggling became much more important once the deportations started, however, when most other methods stopped. A significant development during the months leading up to the first Aktion in July 1942 was a sharp increase in the number of Jewish placówki, to make up for labour shortages on the Polish side (in turn created by the round-ups of tens of thousands of Poles for forced labour in Germany: this was one of the many ways in which the irrationality of the Nazi system created opportunities for the Jews). The number of Jews employed in these work parties rose from 700 in March 1942 to 1,700 in April and 3,000 in May. ³¹ Placówki continued to operate until the end of the ghetto’s existence, and even – in the form of small work camps on the Aryan side – after its destruction. They proved to be by far the most important channel of escape. Jews wanting to escape in this way would join a work party, bribing the overseer and the policemen at the gates to miscount the workers and turn a blind eye to the extra clothing they were wearing and to anything they were carrying. (The bribes would not always save the escaping Jews from a trip to the Wache, however, where they could expect to be beaten and have their money and valuables confiscated. In this way the police­men increased their profits and presumably squared bribe-taking with their consciences.) Once on the other side, the Jews would then take off their armbands and slip away. This is what Rotholc means when he says that in the final period letting people through at the gates ‘assumed an entirely different character’.
10. 10. Sewers and tunnels. This method was rarely used during the main ghetto period, but became more important shortly before and during the Ghetto Uprising. Several tunnels were constructed by the Revisionist Z^˙ZW as a route for smuggling arms.³² Their own fighters left the ghetto through the tunnel under Muranowska Street, which was also discovered fortuitously by a handful of others after the defeat of the uprising. The story of the escape of seventy of the Z^˙OB ghetto fighters through the sewers is well known, and a handful of memoirists also say they got out in this way. Occasionally small quantities of goods, includ­ing firearms for the ghetto fighters, were also smuggled by this method.

 

 

The Autumn and Winter of 1941–42: Measures to Combat Smuggling; the Development of the Ghetto Economy

To combat smuggling, the authorities adopted a series of increasingly severe measures, which had a marked effect on the problem of leaving the ghetto. I have mentioned that passes were increasingly curtailed and finally cancelled altogether. The ghetto boundaries were changed in October and November 1941 to eliminate adjacent Aryan and non-Aryan houses. Usually the whole city block would be zoned out of the ghetto, with the wall rebuilt to run along the length of the street behind it, taking up the sidewalk on the Jewish side. The number of gates was reduced still further, and the guard was strengthened. Lightning raids were carried out at known smuggling points, and German and Polish police patrols circulated outside the ghetto wall; on one occasion, a hundred Jewish policemen were executed for their part in the smuggling. The tram lines were re-routed or closed. The Catholic churches in the ghetto were shut down.

 

None of these measures suc­ceeded in stopping the trade, leading to a ghetto joke reported by Ringelblum: ‘Three things are invincible: the German Army, the British Navy, and Jewish smuggling’. Further steps to isolate the ghetto preceded the liq­uidation action: most (but not all) of the telephones in the ghetto were discon­nected, the number of gates was reduced yet again, and all remaining non-Jews were forced to leave, except for managers of German enterprises.

Physical measures were reinforced by draconian laws.  On 15 October 1941, Governor General Hans Frank issued a decree which read in part:

1. 1. Jews who leave their designated districts without authorization will be subject to the death penalty. The same penalty will apply to those who knowingly give such Jews hiding places.
2. 2. Instigators and accomplices are subject to the same penalties as the perpetrator, and an attempted act will be punished in the same way as an accomplished act. In less serious cases imprisonment with heavy labour or imprisonment may be imposed.³³

 

On 10 November, this was reinforced by a still more draconian decree from the Governor of the Warsaw District, Dr Ludwig Fischer:

Recently, jews who have left their designated district have in numerous verifi­able cases spread spotted fever. In order to forestall the resulting danger to the population, the Governor General has decreed that a jew who without authorization leaves the district designated for him will be subject to the death penalty.

The same penalty applies to anyone who knowingly gives help to such jews (for example, by making available a night’s lodging, support, offering trans­portation of any kind, etc).

I draw the attention of the entire population of the Warsaw District to this new administrative resolution, since from now on mer­ciless severity will be applied. ³⁴

Fischer’s version makes no mention of ‘less serious cases’, and extends the death penalty to various minor acts, not just giving Jews hiding places.

After the publication of these decrees – which were widely posted around the city, especially near the ghetto – the number of escapes decreased markedly, with only half as many over the next nine months as in the previous eleven. But fear for their own safety was not the main factor that dissuaded Jews from fleeing – indeed, Dawid Białogród, for one, decided that crossing the wall once and for all would be safer than continuing to smuggle. ³⁵ As the case studies discussed below demonstrate, people generally escaped during the main ghetto period only if they were facing an acute personal crisis that seemed to make survival in the ghetto impossible; and in such cases, the degree of risk that they would face on the ‘other side’ was hardly relevant. Jews were also reluctant to put their friends in danger. Karol Popower writes: ‘We had Polish friends [. . .] who had long been trying to persuade us [to leave the ghetto] and had invited us to stay with them, but we had kept putting it off because we didn’t want to be a burden on them.’³⁶ Poles could in any case probably help more effectively, and certainly more safely, by smuggling food in than by trying to smuggle their friends out. Finally, during this same period, under the ‘productionist’ administration of the new Ghetto Commissioner, Heinz Auerswald, there was a marked improvement in the ghetto’s economy and a slight decline in the death rate. This probably had far more effect in reducing the number of escapes than Frank’s and Fischer’s decrees.

It is possible that before these decrees survival was statistically more likely out­side the ghetto than within it. But the prospects were not the same for everyone. The ghetto’s flourishing underground economy provided at least a thin living for those who were able to find a place in it, and a few even became wealthy. At worst, the Jewish upper and middle classes were able to sustain themselves by selling off their belongings: it was the poor who were overwhelmingly the victims of starva­tion and disease. The Judenrat estimated at the end of 1941 that the average ghetto resident consumed 1,125 calories daily, enough to sustain life; but there were great inequalities. Officials of the Judenrat received 1,665 calories a day, shopkeepers 1,429, unemployed members of the middle class 1,395, workers in German work­shops 1,229, refugees (that is, Jews who had been forcibly moved into the Warsaw ghetto and lived in shelters run by the Judenrat) only 805, and street beggars 785. ³⁷ The last two groups, together with orphans, accounted for most of those who died of starvation. ³⁸ But these were primarily unassimilated, Yiddish-speaking Jews, with few social contacts among Poles who might have provided hiding places and no prospects at all of being able to live ‘on the surface’ by passing as Poles. The refugees, even when assimilated, were strangers to Warsaw and had even fewer contacts, either directly or through Jewish assimilants in the ghetto.

The poor, out of desperation, did cross the ghetto wall, not to find hiding places but in search of food: their children became the ghetto’s celebrated child smug­glers. This sort of smuggling, without benefit of bribed policemen or contacts on the Polish side, was the riskiest of all. Emaciated ghetto children in their torn and shabby clothes were also easily recognized, and thus especially vulnerable on the Aryan side. The following is a characteristic anecdote, from a Jewish woman, A.P., who had stayed outside the ghetto.

One evening I was returning home from my work in the city later than normal. In order to get home I had to cross a large bridge as we were living on the east bank of the Vistula river, which parted us from the city. I was in the middle of the bridge which was quite empty at this late hour according to the imposed curfew. Only a lonely SS patrolman was walking slowly on the other side of the bridge.

Suddenly a tiny shadow nearing the SS man emerged from the opposite direction. The shadow grew bigger and bigger and I could recognize in this little pathetic figure a small boy walking towards the SS man. I could only guess that this was a Jewish boy. He was around ten years old, very thin and dark haired. [. . .] No child living in the Polish district would be allowed out on the street at this hour. This boy in his hunt after some bread was probably delayed in returning home [. . .] This boy on the bridge, he was a brave one, he dared to go out of the ghetto to bring some food maybe for his sick parents or small brothers or sisters. They waited in vain.

The little boy was now nearer the SS man, who suddenly without uttering a word, without asking the boy any questions, seized him by the collar and threw him into the dark and turbulent waters of the Vistula. The boy did not even have time to utter a sound.³⁹

A similar story is told by another Jewish woman who was living on the Aryan side:

At the corner of Jerusalem Avenue and Krucza Street, a Jewish child sat, a little skeleton, four or five years old, as in India. People wouldn’t give him money, but someone put a bun in his hand. An elegant German came up, opened a sewer-grating, took the child, and threw him into the sewer. I can’t forget this picture. ⁴⁰

If even Germans could recognize these children as Jews, then Polish policemen or szmalcowniks could certainly do so.

Despite these risks – not to mention the risk of crossing and re-crossing the wall – the child smugglers kept at it, to support their fam­ilies. When they no longer had a connection with the ghetto – after their families had died or been killed – they often stayed on the Aryan side for good.

If the poor were forced into desperate measures, the relatively affluent Jews who did escape later on could survive in the ghetto by selling off personal belongings or otherwise making enough money to pay for food at black-market prices. Władysław Szpilman, best known as the subject of Roman Polanski’s film, The Pianist, played the piano in a café that catered to the ghetto elite.  His brother sold books.

Those who could feed themselves still faced dangers such as typhus or deportation to a labour camp (the death rate in such camps was appalling), but there were greater risks on the Aryan side. Escape from the ghetto in any case solved nothing . Apart from the obvious dangers, a Jew’s life was even in economic terms no easier outside the ghetto than within it. Food prices might have been lower on the Aryan side, but fugitives usually had to pay exorbitant rents and pay off the szmalcowniks, and they had no ready way to earn money. The  relief organizations that would later provide some support did not yet exist.  Therefore, even in hindsight, the rational course of action for most Jews before 22 July 1942 was to try to stay alive in the ghetto rather than risk life on the outside.

2 Escape during the Main Ghetto Period

Those few Jews who nevertheless did escape during this period had certain characteristics in common. First of all, nearly all those who escaped lived ‘on the surface’; life ‘under the surface’ could be contemplated only by Jews with very good Polish friends who were prepared to provide all material needs, as well as a hiding place, without charge (Jews who could pay for a melina were better off staying in the ghetto and using their money to buy food). Even then, life in confinement was depressing and dangerous, and made it impossible to earn a living or help relatives left behind. Therefore, nearly all of those who escaped during this period had what were believed in the ghetto to be the essential prerequisites for life ‘on the surface’ – ‘good looks’ and good Polish. Whether these characteristics were actually essen­tial for survival will be considered in the next chapter; but it was the belief, not the reality, that decided the case. A second common characteristic was some form of pre-existing contact with the Aryan side, either through illegal trade or through Polish friends who had stayed in touch. Those who escaped had therefore either some experience in moving about freely on the Aryan side, or friends upon whom they could rely. A third characteristic was that nearly all those who escaped during the main ghetto period faced some personal crisis which, they felt, made survival in the ghetto impossible.

Not all of these factors were present in all cases: for example, a few Jews escaped from the ghetto without having any outside contacts. Diana Kagan, who left shortly after the ghetto was closed, seems to have been quite self-sufficient at first, although she mentions a number of Polish helpers later on. She moved to Min´sk Mazowiecki, forty kilometres from Warsaw, where she lived on ‘Aryan papers’ and supported herself as a municipal worker. Thirteen-year-old Szlama Rotter and his younger brother smuggled to support their father, but when they both came down with typhus he died of hunger  Having no way to support themselves inside the ghetto, they escaped and lived in attics, begging food during the day. Subsequently they left Warsaw for the coun­tryside, where Szlama survived by going from village to village doing odd jobs. He became separated from his brother and does not know what happened to him.⁴¹

In most respects, even the Rotters conform to the usual pattern: they had ‘good looks’ (as Szlama puts it, ‘We didn’t have a Jewish physiognomy’), enough knowl­edge of Polish Catholic customs to be able to recite Catholic prayers on demand, and Szlama had good enough Polish to be able to live with a Polish peasant for a year apparently without being suspected. They faced a crisis, precipitated by their father’s death. Although they lacked personal contacts on the Aryan side, they were used to being there, and as children, they did not need identity documents .

3 Ominous Signs: The Spring and Summer of 1942

By mid-1942, the Jews of Warsaw had been hearing reports of massacres and liq­uidations of ghettos for nearly a year and had, of course, been apprehensive about their fate from the moment of the German invasion of Poland. Chaim Kaplan wrote on the first day of the war: ‘Wherever Hitler’s foot treads, there is no hope for the Jewish people. Hitler, may his name be blotted out, threatened in one of his speeches that if war comes the Jews of Europe will be exterminated.’⁴³ Concrete reports of massacres had been arriving in the ghetto for many months before the liquidation action began. An echo of the Einsatzgruppen massacres is found in Kaplan’s diary on 2 February 1942:

It is reported that the Führer has decided to rid Europe of our whole people by simply having them shot to death. [. . .] You just take thousands of people to the outskirts of a city and shoot to kill; [. . .] The reports are bloodcurdling: In Vilna 40,000 Jews were shot to death.⁴⁴

Kaplan, moreover, had reason to believe that these were not isolated incidents but part of a larger plan:

The day before yesterday we read the speech the Führer delivered celebrating January 30, 1933, when he boasted that his prophecy was beginning to come true. Had he not stated that if war erupted in Europe, the Jewish race would be annihilated? This process has begun and will continue until the end is achieved.⁴⁵

In the same month, Jacob Grojanowski had escaped from the death camp in Chełmno, reached Warsaw and reported in detail on the camp’s operations. ⁴⁶ Rumours of an expulsion from Warsaw had also been circulating for months: for example, on 2 November 1941 Kaplan expressed the fear that Hans Frank’s recent visit to Warsaw portended the expulsion of the Jews. ⁴⁷ On 2 February 1942 he added: ‘Heretofore we were afraid of expulsion. Now we are afraid of death.’

When the Final Solution began in earnest, in the spring of 1942, reports of the destruction of Jewish communities began to trickle in. On 22 March Kaplan mentions the liquidation of the Jewish communities of Lublin and Równo, and on the following day reports that Jews are being deported from Lvov at the rate of 1,100 daily. ⁴⁸ On 26 March, Abraham Lewin noted that the Jewish communities in Wa˛wolnica, Słonim, Nowogródek and Izbica had been destroyed.⁴⁹ A report in the Oneg Shabbat archive, dated 5 May, lists details of the liquidation of Jewish communities of Wa˛wolnica (22 March), Mielnik (23 March), Rejowiec (7 April) and Dubienka on the Bug (13 April).⁵⁰

But the information received in Warsaw was mixed, and however obvious the pattern of events might appear in hindsight, it was not so obvious at the time. Some of the rumours that reached Warsaw were untrue: Kaplan reports as a ‘defi­nitely established fact’ that the ghetto in Łódz´ had been liquidated, but for ‘a meager remnant’.⁵¹ It was said that German Jews being relocated in Warsaw (another aspect of the Final Solution) would be allowed to settle in the Aryan quarter, and that the Warsaw ghetto would be cleared to make way for German civilians whose homes had been bombed out.⁵² When stories were broadly true, they were often ambiguous or mistaken on points of detail. The Oneg Shabbat report of 5 May states that the Jews of Wa˛wolnica had been sent ‘to an unknown destination’ (in quotation marks in the original), while in Rejowiec 200 Jews had been massacred and the rest ‘driven in the direction of Bełz˙ec’; but there is no indication that the significance of that destination was understood.⁵³ Those who tried to hide were said to have been sent to a labour camp in Krochowice; others were supposedly taken to Chełm and released. The population of Mielnik was reportedly destined for ‘immediate resettlement in the eastern regions of the General Government’, and the detail was added that they had been relocated to ‘Dubienka on the Bug, as well as to other localities in that region’. And these reports, qualified as they are, are mixed with less dramatic stories about the Jewish communities of Szczebrzeszyn, Mie˛dzyrzec Podlaski, Grodzisko and several others. Resettlement actions of various kinds, directed against Poles as well as Jews, were in any case old news: they had been taking place sporadically since the occu­pation began, especially in the territories incorporated into the Reich and in the Lublin region.

Until now, furthermore, German actions, though barbaric, had at least had some comprehensible motive behind them: to concentrate the Jewish population in the larger centres, the better to control them and exploit their labour; to clear certain areas for colonization; to prevent the spread of infectious diseases that the Jews supposedly carried; to remove unproductive elements. The Nazis were ruthless and antisemitic, of course, but they were thought to be at least rationally self-interested and hence predictable.  And the reported actions did not yet seem to be aimed at total extermination. In Vilna, 40,000 had been killed, but 10,000 had survived to be confined in a ghetto. Jewish leaders in Łódz´, the second-largest ghetto, were proud of their achievement in putting the ghetto to work: by making the ghetto useful to the war effort, they believed, they had insured it against destruction. Moreover, they seemed to be right: after a wave of deportations in the spring, directed against the ghetto’s social margins, things seemed to have settled down, and on 1 July there were still more than 100,000 Jews in the Łódz´ ghetto (most of them would survive another two years, until their ghetto was finally liquidated in July 1944).⁵⁴ As to Warsaw itself, deportations had not yet reached the city, and the optimists believed that they never would. The Germans might move with impunity against remote provincial towns, it was argued, but would never dare destroy the largest and most prominent Jewish community in Europe.

It was therefore difficult for the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto – even those as well informed as the Oneg Shabbat circle – to form a complete picture of the unfold­ing events or to assess them accurately. Kaplan, in a calmer moment, wrote: ‘I must confess it was careless of me to put on paper rumours which were born of certain moods and were not based on solid facts.’⁵⁵ And it was also difficult to work out the reasons for the deportations. There was little alternative, in the end, to believ­ing that the Germans were behaving rationally, and the ‘work to live’ strategy of the Jewish leadership in Łódz´ was in practice adopted by all the other Jewish Councils as well. Most of the ghetto’s inhabitants followed same reasoning, and struggled, not to escape, but to have themselves counted among the productive rather than the unproductive.

 

 

The First Liquidation Action, 22 July–12 September 1942

The date when the ‘resettlement action began’, 22 July 1942, marks the begin­ning of mass Jewish crossing to the Aryan side.

Emmanuel Ringelblum⁵⁶

On 22 July 1942 the Warsaw Judenrat was informed that ‘all Jewish persons living in Warsaw, regardless of age and sex, will be resettled in the East’. The deportees were to take food for three days and 15 kilograms of personal baggage, including (pointedly) ‘all valuables such as gold, jewellery, money, etc.’. Exemptions were granted to Judenrat members and employees, the ghetto police, hospital staff and patients, people in German employment or fit to work, and their wives and children.⁵⁷

This was the opening blow of what is variously called the first Aktion, the Grossaktion or the Great Deportation of the Jews from Warsaw. It was part of Operation Reinhard, the German plan to destroy the entire Jewish population of the General Government, but by degrees, so as to soften the blow to German war production and economic interests. Himmler’s order of 19 July to Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, Higher SS and Police leader for the General Government, specified that ‘from December 31, 1942, no persons of Jewish origin may remain within the [General Government], unless they are in the collection camps in Warsaw, Kraków, Cze˛stochowa, Radom and Lublin’.⁵⁸ All work requir­ing Jewish labour was to be concentrated in these ‘collection camps’. The Warsaw ghetto was in effect to be converted into a work camp, and all ‘unproductive elements’ were to be taken to the death camp of Treblinka and gassed. In Warsaw the operation started on the day that the Treblinka camp was completed and ended, after 270,000 Jews had been killed, on 12 September, Rosh Hashanah. In January 1943, Himmler then ordered the remaining Jews to be  transferred to labour camps in the Lublin area (Majdanek, Trawniki, Poniatowa and others), making Warsaw judenrein. This was carried out in two stages: the second Aktion of January 1943, in which 6,000 Jews were transferred or killed, and the third Aktion in April, which was delayed by the ghetto revolt. Finally, all Jews in the Lublin labour camps were murdered in the ‘Harvest Festival’ of 3 November 1943.

All of this was, of course, unknown to the Jews on 22 July. Kaplan’s interpretation of the deportation order is probably characteristic: despite his earlier speculations, he now speaks merely of ‘a whole community of 400,000 people condemned to exile’.⁵⁹ The next day, he writes that ‘in comparison with the Lublin expulsion we have before us a liberal document’,⁶⁰ noting the various classes of exemptions. It took some time for the ghetto to work out that ‘resettlement in the east’ actually meant transportation to a death camp, and longer still to comprehend the scope of the Nazis’ plans, and that no-one was safe.

Accurate information may have been available fairly quickly. According to Bundist sources, the Bund courier Zalman Friedrich left the ghetto on 23 July to see where the trains were going. Their destination, he learned from Polish railwaymen, was a camp near Treblinka station that was obviously too small to accommodate the thousands of people being taken there each day. He also learned that no food was being delivered to the camp, that the trains returned empty and that civilians were not allowed to enter the station. Subsequently, he met two escapees from the camp who described just what was going on. The Bund activist Jacob Celemenski maintains that Friedrich returned with this information on the 27th, and that it was published in the Bund newspaper Shturm on the following day. ⁶¹ (According to Israel Gutman, however, Friedrich left the ghetto ‘at the beginning of August’ and the article appeared in another Bundist newspaper, Oyf der Vakh, only on 20 September. But not all of the ghetto’s underground press has been preserved, and Oyf der Vach may have merely reprinted the earlier article. See also Abraham Lewin’s reference to ‘a Jew named Slawa’- perhaps a corruption of Zalman – on August 11, in the passage quoted below. )⁶²

Even if Celemenski’s account is correct, the story did not circulate widely, or perhaps was simply disbelieved. Chaim Kaplan wrote on 1 August, four days before he himself was taken: ‘We have no information about the fate of those who have been expelled. When one falls into the hands of the Nazis he falls into the abyss.’⁶³ Lewin refers to ‘Treblinka (the place of execution?)’ on 6 August, his source of information apparently being an official of the Judenrat. ⁶⁴ Not until 9 August does he write that ‘it is clear to us that 99 percent of those transported are being taken to their deaths’. On 11 August:

[Hirsch] Smolar [. . .] was told that those deported, or if they are deported, to Tr., are going to their ‘death’. [. . .] In Warsaw there is a Jew by the name of Slawa who has brought reports of Treblinka. Fifteen kilometres before the station at Treblinka the Germans take over the train. When people get out of the train they are beaten viciously. Then they are driven into huge barracks. For five minutes heart-rending screams are heard, then silence. The bodies that are taken out are swollen horribly. ⁶⁵

However, again these stories had the character of rumours – Lewin’s description contains a number of inaccuracies – and were not always believed.

 

There were other rumours as well. On 16 August Lewin wrote: ‘Rumours have reached me again that letters have allegedly arrived from the deportees saying they are work­ing in the area of Siedlce and conditions are not bad.’⁶⁶ In fact, it seems that some letters and postcards were received: Gutman speculates that some had been sent by Jews who had managed to escape from the trains, while Jews arriving at Treblinka had been forced to write others to dictation.⁶⁷ These shreds of evidence were enough: wishful thinking did the rest.

But it was not only wishful thinking that kept information from being assimilated: many Jews were simply too preoccupied with their own daily struggle for survival to pay much attention to such things. It took still longer to work out that the various classes of exemption were illusory, an exercise in divide-and-rule: one sup­posedly exempted group after another lost its privileged status in the course of the Aktion. In the end even the bulk of the ghetto police, who had been forced to carry out the ‘resettlement’ under the threat that they and their families would meet the same fate, were packed off, with the rest, in a special shipment on 21 September (Yom Kippur).

The illusion created by the exemptions was a powerful one. For example, Adam Starkopf formed a plan to leave the ghetto with his wife and child early during the Aktion; but

[w]hen I revealed this plan to my father and to Pela’s parents, they were horri­fied. It was insane, they said, to take such chances with Pela and the baby. They begged our neighbours and friends to talk us out of our madness. One of my neighbours tried to impress upon me that instead of exposing my family to the perils of the unknown I should concentrate on obtaining a legitimate work permit [. . .]. Once I had a job [in a German factory] I could be certain that the Germans would not deport me and my family, and I would not be risking the lives of my wife and child.⁶⁸

A lucrative trade developed in work certificates (Ausweise), and, since the wives of exempt men were also exempt, a wave of fictitious marriages took place. Crude hideouts began to be built, in which Jews hoped to evade the round-ups. And for the first time, among all these alternatives, more and more people were thinking of escape.

The barriers to escape were formidable, however. The deportation action had been carefully prepared, as we have seen, and paths out of the ghetto had been systematically blocked off. An anonymous child smuggler writes that ‘[d]uring the action it was impossible to cross, because the walls were solidly guarded by Ukrainians and Latvians’, and that ‘the German and Polish police organized raids on the Aryan side and caught a lot of our friends’.⁶⁹ Two German gendarmes were now posted at each of the ghetto gates, so that next to each ‘friendly’ policeman was another whose attitude was unknown. Smuggling ceased on the day the deportation started, not only because it was harder than ever to leave the ghetto, but because the smugglers, like everyone else, were preoccu­pied with evading the roundups. The price of food therefore rose astronomically – on 27 July Kaplan reported a price of 60 zł for a loaf of bread,⁷⁰ seven times higher than on the Aryan side, five times higher than a few days earlier in the ghetto – and the ghetto economy was disrupted, leaving only those who worked in the German ‘shops’ with any income or apparent security. People who had managed so far now faced hunger, and thos who had been hungry faced starvation – even volunteering for deportation in return for a little bread and ersatz jam.. The struggle to find food, the scramble to evade the round-ups, and anxieties over captured relatives consumed their time and energy.

Escape during the Great Aktion

Despite these difficulties, a few thousand Jews did manage to flee during the Aktion. The number of orphaned child smugglers like the Rotters swelled greatly: practiced at leaving the ghetto and living by their wits on the other side, and with no more ties to the ghetto, they found escape the natural course of action.  These children also knew each other, and became firm, mutually supportive friends. They sur­vived on the Aryan side by begging or petty trade and sleeping rough.⁷¹ The best-known account of their lives is Joseph Ziemian’s memoir, The Cigarette-Sellers of Three Crosses Square. ⁷²

For adults, leaving the ghetto was more complicated. Jews who wanted to live ‘on the surface’ needed to have false identity documents; if they planned to live in hiding, they needed a suitable melina on the Aryan side. Either way, they needed to have a friend and protector outside the ghetto, either a friendly Pole or a Jew already established there, who could make the necessary arrangements. Jews were generally reluctant to leave without their families, but it was hard to find places for larger groups. Forced to choose single individuals, families would often send out adult children, if they had ‘good looks’ and Polish contacts, with the idea that after they had established themselves they would bring the rest of the family out. On the other hand, younger children were placed with Polish families simply in the hope of saving them, though sometimes the rest of the family would follow. As one such child remem­bered: ‘In July or August 1942 my sister and I went out to the Aryan side to Poles on Krochmalna (for money). By degrees the whole family moved there (this took a week).’⁷³ Parents who sent their children alone believed that they could not leave the ghetto themselves, usually  because they lacked close contacts with Poles.  They would thus find themselves dealing with people who were motivated by money rather than friendship, and had to pay large sums in advance. Some of these children were later sent back to the ghetto, either because they looked ‘too Jewish’ and therefore posed too much risk, or because the parents had been deported and could no longer pay. To encourage this trend (and because the ghetto’s existing orphanages had been emptied by then), the Germans set up a special showcase orphanage in Dzika Street which accumulated some 200 children, many of whom had been returned from the Aryan side. The children were given decent clothing and extra rations, and were placed in the care of Jewish staff who tended them with kindness and warmth. The Dzika Street orphanage was then liquidated, children and staff alike, during the second Aktion in January. ⁷⁴

The role in organizing escape played by the ‘bridging community’ of converts and Poles in mixed marriages is illustrated by the testimony of Dr Jan Kucin´ski:

When [. . .] the German authorities announced the so-called ‘resettlement’ of the Jewish population to the east, I realized perfectly well what this smelled of. [. . .] I quickly began looking around for a means of getting out of the ghetto. Since I didn’t have much  money, the matter looked less than jolly for me. But [. . .] by chance, I learnt that in one of the German factories on the territory of the ghetto [. . .] a Pole named Mr Kauczyński was employed in a management pos­ition. He was the elder brother of a [school] friend of mine [. . .]. Well, this Kauczyn´ski [. . .] had married a Jewish woman [. . .] and settled in Łódz´. Now, suddenly, he had shown up in the ghetto. I went to him and, mentioning our pre-war acquaintance, asked for help. He immediately expressed his willingness to help me, but there was a problem with my child. He advised me to get the child out through the courts and he would simply add me to the work brigade leav­ing the ghetto daily for the Aryan side, and there I’d be able to get away. And that’s what I did. At the end of July, my son was taken in by the Aryan wife of Kazimierz Grossman, a director of the firm where I worked before the war [. . .] and I left on 2 September. ⁷⁵

As this example shows, Jews wanting to escape could sometimes rely on quite remote and indirect connections with the convert community, though everything of course depended on the decency and courage of those who were approached.

Dr Kucin´ski, as it happened, could meet face to face with his helper, but that was exceptional. Arrangements were usually made through telephone connections, which, strangely, kept working even during the Ghetto Uprising. Was this an oversight? Or was telephone contact convenient for the Germans themselves? Were there practical difficulties, or obstruction by Polish telephone workers? Or did the Germans simply not care what the people in the ghetto were up to, since they were doomed anyway? Whatever the reason, though the number of telephones was severely reduced, they were still available at key points. There were also experts in the ghetto who could hook up telephones illegally, even in private homes and underground bunkers. ⁷⁶

The psychological barriers to escape diminished as the Aktion proceeded. One by one, the illusions and false hopes fell away and more and more Jews, finding themselves alone, no longer had family ties to keep them in the ghetto or compli­cate the problem of leaving. Practical barriers, too, were overcome. As the number of Jews already established on the Aryan side increased, those who had escaped could often make arrangements for others, and the techniques and channels of escape became perfected with time. Thus the number of escapes increased steadily towards the end of the first Aktion, even as the ghetto population dwindled.

 

 

The ‘Shops’ Period

We are the tiny remnant of the greatest Jewish community in the world.

Diary of Abraham Lewin, 11 September 1942⁷⁷

[cytuję z wydania angielskiego – oryginał bodaj po hebrajsku. Chyba niepotrzebne nawiązywać do „oficjalnego” wydania polskiego – można tłumaczyć z angielskiego.]

The first Aktion not only destroyed most of the ghetto’s people, but also wrought a fundamental change in its structure and function, once more changing the nature of the problem confronting the Jews who remained. The new situation required new adaptations and affected both the prospects and the means of escape. What had been a relatively autonomous community with its own govern­ment was now a shrunken remnant, the Restghetto, divided into a set of mutually isolated labour camps. These served privately owned German workshops (called ‘shops’ in the ghetto jargon, using the English word) and were controlled by the SS. Geographically, the Restghetto was divided into a small northern section, called the Central Ghetto, and the much larger area that had been emptied by the Aktion, called the ‘wild ghetto’, where several of the shops formed enclaves. The ‘wild ghetto’ was also the area of operations of the Werterfassung, whose task was to salvage the property of the deported Jews for the Reich and to rehabilitate their homes for occupation by Aryans. Jews were confined to the territories of the individual ‘shops’, each in principle a housing block or a set of contiguous hous­ing blocks, in which Jews lived and worked. They were forbidden to appear in the streets except in work parties under guard. Administratively, the Restghetto came under the control of the Judenreferat of the Warsaw Gestapo, headed by the very junior Untersturmführer-SS (Sublieutenant) Karl Brandt; but the real power in the ghetto was the Project Reinhard team (Einsatzstab Reinhard ), whose task was not to manage the ghetto but to liquidate it.  The Jewish Council became a powerless rump. Most of its agencies and departments were dissolved, the Order Service was reduced to 300 men, and police functions passed to the Werkschutz (Works Police), consisting mainly of former members of the Order Service but employed by the shop owners.

Apart from these remnants of the Jewish Council, only those working in the shops, in the Werterfassung, or in placówki were legally allowed to remain in the ghetto: these were the 35,000 or so Jews who had received ‘numbers for life’ in the final stage of the Aktion, the so-called ‘caul­dron’ (kocioł ) of 6–12 September. But there were also a large number of ‘illegals’, or ‘wild’ Jews, who had managed to evade the deportation and lived in hiding within the ghetto. Their number has been estimated as 20,000–25,000; if so, then there were 55,000–60,000 Jews in the Restghetto all told.⁷⁸ Since we now know that the number of people who escaped from the ghetto during the ‘shops’ period must have been considerably greater than pre­viously thought, it may be necessary to revise this estimate upwards.

Adaptation to these new conditions included ways of getting about, despite the prohibitions on movement and the barbed-wire boundaries between the ‘shops’. Gradually, the Restghetto developed a veritable rabbit’s warren of underground pass­ages. Holes were knocked in the cellar walls of adjacent buildings, tunnels were dug under streets, and ultimately it became possible to travel considerable dis­tances within the Restghetto without coming to the surface.

The black-market economy continued to exist – without it, the ‘wild’ Jews could not have survived – but in a different form. Its engine now was szaber, aptly described by Abraham Lewin as ‘looting from the looters’;⁷⁹ in other words, Werterfassung workers would ‘steal’ Jewish property they were supposed to be reclaiming, smuggle it back to their housing blocks, and the placówkarze would then smuggle it out to the Aryan side and sell it (at preposterously low prices, as Lewin noted). The proceeds were used to buy food, which the placówkarze then smuggled back into the ghetto. ⁸⁰

Leaving the ghetto during the ‘shops’ period was accomplished almost entirely through the placówki: usually Jews attached themselves to Jewish work groups leaving the ghetto for work in the morning, but sometimes also to Polish work groups going home for the night The general procedure was much the same as before, except that it might first be necessary to traverse the ghetto illegally to reach the work group’s assembly point. People did this either through the underground passages, or by attaching themselves to work groups moving about within the ghetto, or with the help of the Werkschutz. As before, arrangements had to be made and bribes paid; the trade in szaber largely paid for it all.

80 Secret City

A new method of escape now became available as well. Once the Aktion was finished, certain categories of passes were restored, allowing some Jews to leave the ghetto legally, but only under the escort of an Aryan Begleiter (companion).⁸¹ Begleiters could readily be bribed, giving Germans an easy source of income and Jews an easy way to leave the ghetto: Chaskielewicz even says that his parents were led out of the ghetto by a member of the Einsatzstab Reinhard, who was very polite and wished them good luck.⁸²

Escapes that were not accomplished through placówki or Begleiters were managed during this period by scaling the wall, or by bribing a guard and walking out through one of the gates. This last method was the riskiest, however, since the gates were beset by whole armies of szmalcowniks. Leaving through tunnels and sewers was still uncommon, and the courts, trams and mety were no longer available.

The introduction of the regulation concerning Begleiters, without considering what a loophole it created or putting any controls on it, was symptomatic of the chaotic nature of the German administration during the ‘shops’ period. That so junior a man as Brandt was placed in control of the ghetto shows how little the SS were now concerned either with the economic production of the Restghetto or its internal affairs. Brandt was no match for the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the Warsaw Jews, and it turned out to be easy to bamboozle him in various ways. A great many Jews were shot for appearing in the streets illegally, ⁸³ but no real effort was made to root out the ‘wild’ Jews, and the underground commu­nications network seems never to have come to Brandt’s attention. Indeed, Brandt agreed to let air-raid shelters (!) be built within the ghetto, allowing cement and other supplies to be brought in for this purpose. That despite the tighter controls the underground trade continued to flourish, and Jews now managed to escape in droves, was in great part thanks to Brandt’s incompetence (or was it perhaps sab­otage?). But for the same reason, seemingly realistic alternatives to escape also pre­sented themselves.

Alternatives to Escape: ‘Bunkers’ within the Ghetto

The ‘air-raid shelters’ that Brandt allowed were actually thousands of bunkers, many connected by the network of underground passages, in which Jews hoped to be able to hide out until liberation. Rudimentary shelters or bunkers had existed since the first days of the ghetto, when they were used mainly to hide valuables and trade-goods from German ‘requisitions’, but the number and variety of shelters had multiplied greatly during the first Aktion, when people had used them to evade capture. When the Aktion was over, construction efforts were redoubled. On 24 December 1942 Ringelblum wrote:

a new series of hiding places began [to be built] after the selection [of 6–12 September], when ghetto life had settled down somewhat. [. . .] But these are entirely different places from those built in the summer, during the action. First of all, they had to be adapted to winter conditions. Secondly, they were fur­nished so as to make it possible to survive in them for several months. The idea behind these hiding places was as follows: if they will liquidate all the Jews of Warsaw, then we will go down into the shelters and stay there until liberation.⁸⁴

By the time the Ghetto Uprising broke out the following April, the network of shelters and underground passageways was so extensive that the entire population of the ghetto could disappear into it. Although the hope of surviving until liber­ation was too optimistic, this underground city proved to be a formidable redoubt, in which the ghetto fighters held out for nearly a month. Its con­struction, in only seven months, must be rated as one of the most extraordinary coups of the Second World War.

Those historians who have stressed the ghetto’s preparations for armed resist­ance during this period have sometimes characterized the construction of bunkers as part of these preparations. ⁸⁵ In fact, as we can see from Ringelblum’s contem­porary testimony, the underlying intention was evasion rather than resistance: the chief alternative to the construction of bunkers in the ghetto was escape to the Aryan side. The whole of the contemporary record shows that most of the ghetto’s Jews at that time vacillated between these two alternatives, with only a small minority of mainly young people thinking about armed resistance. As the ghetto fighter Simcha Rotem put it candidly: ‘Our environment wasn’t very encouraging. The relatively few Jews left in the ghetto were generally not enthu­siastic about our operations. Thus the Z^˙OB was in a double underground, hiding from the Germans and from most of the Jews as well.’⁸⁶  [należy tłumaczyć – polskie wydanie różni się znacznie od angielskiego.] The choice between the two forms of evasion was by no means clear-cut, and contemporary observers dif­fered widely in their assessments. Stefan Ernest wrote:

There is a dilemma: here or there? Should we build shelters here, hiding-places with supplies to last for weeks, or should we go over the wall? It is an insoluble problem. There, on the other side of the wall, you need money – either money or friends. On that side, one false step, one piece of blackmail, can overturn all the careful planning for hiding for weeks or months. Not to mention more dramatic circumstances. And to leave aside a whole mass of unbelievable difficulties connected with ‘getting settled’.⁸⁷

Despite these difficulties, he added, ‘[t]he few telephones in the ghetto are con­stantly besieged; whoever can, whoever has a chance, crosses. Going out beyond the walls is becoming a mass phenomenon and is increasing every day.’ But he still felt that ‘in comparison with the general numbers, these are only individual cases. Others [. . .], and they are naturally the overwhelming majority, [. . .] dig in where they are: shelters, hiding places, hideouts. Those who passively await a miracle or death are in the minority.’⁸⁸ Weighing in the balance, on the other hand, were a great number of technical difficulties in building and concealing bunkers within the ghetto, which are described at length by Ringelblum.⁸⁹ Taking these difficul­ties into account, the Bund activist Adina Blady-Szwajger believed that most decided in favour of escape: ‘Those who had friends on the Aryan side, or who had a lot of money, looked for a way of getting out of the ghetto; others built themselves hideouts in cellars [. . .]. But there were very few of these; the majority thought about hiding on the Aryan side.’⁹⁰

Compromise solutions were also sought:

people make arrangements ahead of time with a Christian who, while the Jews are hiding, is supposed to supply them with everything they need. In some ‘shops’ hiding places are built so that they have an underground connection with the Aryan side. That is possible only in ‘shops’ bordering on the Aryan side. To that end, they build underground tunnels leading to a Christian’s cellar on the Aryan side. ⁹¹

The parents of Noemi Szac-Wajnkranc had another idea in mind when they hid in a bunker during the ‘cauldron’: ‘if they add our street to the Aryan district, we’ll come out and make do somehow’.⁹²

Flight to the Aryan side, formerly regarded as a kind of betrayal, now became not only respectable but was even seen as a form of active resistance:

Everyone you talk to says the same thing: ‘We shouldn’t have allowed the depor­tation to happen. We should have gone out into the street, set fire to everything, blown up the walls and fled to the other side. The Germans would have taken their revenge. It would have cost tens of thousands of victims, but not 300,000. And now we are ashamed, of ourselves and in front of the whole world, that our compliance has proved worthless. Now we can’t allow that to happen again, now we must put up resistance, everyone without exception must face up to the enemy.’ . ⁹³

Thus the ghetto did not necessarily see hard-and-fast distinctions between resistance and evasion, or between honour and survival; nor were people ‘paralysed’, as Hilberg would have it; but they mulled over practicalities and tactical considerations, and tried to decide between the available alternatives, as people generally do.

Contemporary Perceptions of Escape

We have seen, on the basis of memoir evidence, that most escapes from the ghetto took place during the ‘shops’ period, and that a considerable part of the remaining ghetto population – nearly a quarter – succeeded in escaping. Such a large exodus naturally found an echo in contemporary accounts. We have already seen that Ernest and Blady-Szwajger were impressed by the magnitude of the phenomenon, though they differ in their overall assessment. Here are Abraham Lewin’s observations in October 1942:

The Jews dream of escaping to the Aryan side, to the Poles, or to the ‘East’ in the area of Białystok. Each day someone leaves the shop secretly and gets out of the town. [. . .] Friends around me are having photographs made and are trying to negotiate papers of various kinds, Kennkarten, and are preparing to leave Warsaw. I, having no money, do not involve myself with these matters. ⁹⁴

This entry was made in the early part of the ‘shops’ period, when the number of escapes had in fact initially diminished somewhat.

As I have mentioned, our perceptions have hitherto been shaped by those of the ghetto fighters and other activists, who believed escape to be very difficult, if not impossible. Ringelblum, like Lewin, believed that it was possible only for the rich: ‘Some – the wealthier ones – began going over to the other side’,⁹⁵ or the corrupt: ‘a hundred men from “number 13” [13 Leszno Street, headquarters of the ‘office for combatting usury and speculation’, known in the ghetto as the ‘Jewish Gestapo’], who caught people, are on the other side. Their headquarters are on Litewska, Szternfeld is their chief.’⁹⁶ He took a negative view of prospects on the Aryan side:

The Poles have been reminded of the regulation prescribing the death penalty for helping Jews. Very weak activity of progressive organizations. So far [only] for individuals. [. . .] Bands of szmalcowniks hold court outside the wall. [. . .] The Polish intelligentsia quake with fear and do not want to take in their Jewish friends; an exception is the idealistic element. From the start of the deportation to the end of October 150 Jews have been caught on the other side. ⁹⁷ 

And: ‘Divide and conquer. They have poisoned relations between Jews and Poles and have made all help from the other side impossible.’⁹⁸ But writing in hindsight, after his own escape from the ghetto, Ringelblum arrived at a different view: ‘it was estimated that over a period of several months, hundreds of people left the ghetto daily by means of the work posts’⁹⁹ – an estimate that indeed seems considerably exaggerated. If, as proposed in Table 2.1, about 10,000 people escaped in the seven months between 12 September 1942 and 18 April 1943, then the average daily number of escapes was only forty-six, rather than ‘hundreds’; and even in the most active period, the ninety days between 18 January and 18 April, the 7,500 escapes still amounted to only eighty-three people daily. Put another way, one or two people slipping away from each placówka on each of its forays to the ‘other side’ would both fit with contemporary reports and easily account for escape on the scale observed.

Ringelblum’s view therefore was inconsistent: according to his numerical estimate, a very large number of Jews were escaping, yet elsewhere he maintains that escape was difficult and almost impossible, only for the favoured few. Had he lived to polish and refine his work, he would no doubt have reconciled these inconsistencies. ¹⁰⁰

We can see, then, that contemporary observers had some inkling of the magni­tude of what was going on, but because it took the form of a trickle over a period of months rather than a sudden flood, it was difficult to appreciate its true dimensions. The belief that escape was limited to the rich and those with good connections was entirely rational, but it was the product of a priori reasoning and not observation. The reality was that many, perhaps most, of the surviving Jews had enough direct or indirect connections with the Polish side that in time they might have been able to find their way safely out of the ghetto. The flood of escapes, indeed, was showing no signs of diminishing when the third Aktion and the Ghetto Uprising cut it off: if the Germans had delayed the final liquidation by six months, and escape had continued at the same rate, another 15,000 Jews might have fled. If they had delayed until the summer of 1944, as they did in Łódź, they might have found that practically their whole labour force had evaporated. Of course it is unlikely that flight on this scale could have been sustained (for one thing, the Germans would have noticed, and would have cracked down much harder), but certainly it was time rather than lack of opportunity that cut the flood off.  During this final period, the belief that escape was nearly impossible was in many cases a bigger obstacle than any reality to which it may have corresponded.

German Responses to Escape

Though they had no idea of the true magnitude of the phenomenon, the Germans were of course aware that some people were escaping, and took appro­priate steps. The simplest of these were propaganda and persuasion. Eugenia Szajn-Lewin writes:

The resettlement staff has its spies. They know that Jews are escaping and hiding among the Poles. Brand[t], head of the [. . .] Vernichtungskommando, makes a speech: the Jews are to work, workers will stay where they are, and those who hide on the Aryan side will be betrayed by Poles in any case.

There’s a good deal of truth in this. On the Aryan side there are specially organized groups of agents, who are helped by the Polish ‘Blue’ police. Jews are starting to come back from the Aryan side. There is no way to make it over there; people lack money to pay off the blackmailers. ¹⁰¹

Jews caught outside the ghetto were offered an ‘amnesty’: on 1 November a decree announced the establishment of six ghettos in the Warsaw District and gave Jews in hiding until 1 December to report to one of them. While this ‘amnesty’ was in force, Jews who were caught were returned to the ghetto instead of being killed. At first they were kept at Z^˙elazna 103, the offices of the Werterfassung. When this facility filled up, they were moved to the Ge¸sia Street prison. Those who were not put to work in the Werterfassung were then transported to the Lublin-area work camps in January and eventually killed there.

 

Escape during the ‘Shops’ Period: Case Studies

Ringelblum writes that the standard bribe to the foreman of a placówka was only 50–100 zł: roughly, in today’s money, $7–$15. But money was needed for all sorts of other things as well: ‘You had to pay to go with them, and it was very expensive. The foreman . . . had to bribe the gendarmes at the gate, who would then miscount those leaving, and, of course, he wanted something for himself as well.’¹⁰² These expenses were only the beginning, as many memoirists attest. Ringelblum’s con­clusion that escape was only for the rich therefore seems well founded; but then how was it possible for so many people to escape?

Noemi Szac-Wajnkranc and her husband began to think about escaping during the ‘cauldron’. After her husband had had to rescue her twice from the Umschlagplatz (by bribing policemen), he arranged for her to leave with a placówka: ‘For a few hundred złotys the group’s director takes a few non-workers who want to cross the “border”.’¹⁰³ She wore several changes of clothes, a common expedi­ent, and some items of jewellery that she intended to sell to support herself. But no arrangements had been made on the other side. Once at the workplace, a lug­gage factory, Szac-Wajnkranc began telephoning friends, but everyone was afraid to talk to her. She became depressed, contrasting her situation with that of her fellow-workers: ‘There are people here who come every day, waiting for acquain­tances who are supposed to come for them, take them to a pre-arranged dwelling, deliver documents to them; some have already spent huge sums on this. No, I think to myself, I’ll never manage.’¹⁰⁴

Nevertheless she managed to make contact with Alina K., a Polish woman to whom Szac-Wajnkranc and her husband had signed over their factory to save it from expropriation by the Nazis. K. had stayed in touch  with them in the ghetto, until the factory’s equipment was ‘requisitioned’ by the Germans – or, at least, that was K’s story. K. was now disconcerted to hear from Szac-Wajnkrantz. She did not offer to take her in, but sent a Mr S. to see her. Szac-Wajnkranc ‘naïvely’ (in her words) told him everything – to his aston­ishment, as he had been told only to appraise her jewellery, and had no idea that she was Jewish. He offered to escort her to a friend’s house and look into having documents made. In this haphazard way, Szac-Wajnkranc managed to establish herself on the Aryan side; her husband followed two days later.

Eugenia Szajn-Lewin describes how two of her relatives escaped:

Józek and his wife [Anna] worked in an SS placówka on the Aryan side, in the old Soviet embassy. [. . .] They lived there, in barracks [. . .] from the first days of the action. They didn’t live through the nightmare of the deportations. Their director, an SS man named Schmedke, cared about his people. He was strange, not like an SS-man. During the ‘cauldron’ in Miła Street he went there and rescued the father and brother of one of his workers. [. . .] The food was miserable, but there was a canteen at the placówka and you could buy the odd thing.  Some of the workers had money of their own.  Schmedke turned a blind eye to their extra income. Anna, like the others, traded. She would come to the ghetto under the protection of a soldier, buy Jewish clothing practically for nothing, and sell it at a profit to Poles.

Just before 11 November [. . .] Schmedke declared that he would have to reduce the staff of the placówka. Anna and Józek were on the elimination list. Schmedke said he would personally escort them to the Werterfassung, [. . .] where they would get jobs. [. . .] But Józek, Anna and their friend Jadzia didn’t believe him. [. . .] At nine o’clock in the morning, they jumped out of a high ground-floor window straight into the arms of the astonished passers-by in crowded Poznańska Street.¹⁰⁵

Jadzia was a former dancer and had many friends, but each would put the group up only for a single night. Jadzia eventually found a long-term melina, but Józek had become discouraged and gone back to the ghetto. Soon after, Anna and Jadzia were betrayed.  With the January Aktion under way, they were taken to the Umschlagplatz, where Anna ‘shouted and fought with the Germans’ and was shot dead. Schmedke rescued Jadzia and led her back out to the Aryan side.

This example, first of all, documents an extraordinary case of an SS man who helped Jews, and without being bribed. This was not the only such case: for example, Elkana Ahlen writes of a Polish-speaking Silesian SS man named Karol Porchet who supervised a dentistry placówka, the Zahnstation, whom Ahlen describes as a ‘regular guy’ (równy chłop).¹⁰⁶ These were obviously rare cases, but they are important because, once again, they stand as an accusation against the others.  Second, it shows again that escape was possible –very risky, of course, but possible – without money, advance preparations, or good contacts on the Aryan side

 

Examples like this could be multiplied, but one more will suffice:

An old friend from university days came up to me. [. . .] He gave me 200 złotys. He said: ‘What are you sitting here for? Tomorrow morning at five o’clock, go to the corner of Z^˙elazna Street and give these 200 zł to the German who guards the gate there. He’ll either shoot you or let you through.’ [. . .] I went. The German took the money and didn’t even look around. [. . .]

I knew well where my friends lived. [. . .] But I was dazed. It’s hard for me to describe my state at that moment. I remember walking along some overpass. [. . .] [S]ome man in a worker’s outfit came up to me and asked if I’d escaped from the ghetto. I didn’t know about szmalcowniks then, or perhaps it had slipped my mind. I said yes. To that he said: ‘Then come with me, ma’am. After the war we’ll need educated people.’ [. . .] He lived in two rooms with his wife and two children. I lived with them for two weeks. ¹⁰⁷ 

On the basis of these examples of unprepared escape, one might naively ask why more Jews did not simply ‘give it a go’ in a similar manner, once they realized that the alternative was almost certain death. Unprepared escape was clearly a game of Russian roulette, but surely some chance is better than none. But did the only alternative ever seem to be almost certain death? There seemed to be a chance of surviving in the bunkers, and even those who were determined to flee could hope that some less risky chance would turn up soon. At any rate, it would be presumptuous for anyone to judge how people in such an extraordinary situation behaved. But these examples do suggest, once again,  that the supposed prerequisites of survival on the Aryan side were not really prerequisites. Those with money and good friends were no doubt better placed, but three of the five people just mentioned did survive, and they are by no means the only ones.

 

[Należy ominąć cały następny paragraf.  Ta sprawa jest zbyt delikatna w obecnym klimacie. Zostawiam, bo jakaś wersja może znaleść miejsce w drugim wydaniu angielskim]

A matter that gave rise to much controversy, and continues to do so, was an offer by the Catholic church to hide Jewish children in convents. On 14 December 1942 Ringelblum commented as follows:

The priests want to rescue Jewish children. Certain circles have lately been discussing the matter of saving a certain number (several hundred) of Jewish children by placing them in convents in all corners of the country.

What has inclined the clergy to this? There are three contributing reasons. First of all: hunting little souls. The Catholic clergy have always taken advan­tage of difficult moments in the life of the Jews (pogroms, expulsions etc) to win over adults and children. The present moment no doubt plays the most import­ant role, although the clergy give assurances that they have no intention of christening Jewish children whom they take into their institutions.

Second: a factor of a material nature. For every Jewish child it will be necessary to pay, for a year in advance, 600 zł a month. That’s a fairly good transaction for the convents. Feeding them will be very cheap, since they have their own lands and estates. Parents of wealthy children will pay double, to pay for poor children whose parents are not in a position to cover this sum.

Third: the factor of prestige. The Polish clergy have so far done very little to rescue Jews from the slaughter, deportation. In connection with protests spread­ing throughout the world against the mass murder of the Polish Jews, the rescue of a few hundred Jews may serve to testify that they have done everything they could to rescue Jews, especially Jewish children.

I have taken part in a discussion among intellectuals on this subject. One said categorically that he was against it. Despite the fact that, in accordance with our wishes, children between ten and fourteen will be taken into the convents, they will after all come under the influence of the priests and will sooner or later accept baptism. [. . .] He felt that we should follow in the footsteps of our ances­tors and die in the name of our faith. [. . .]

Others maintained: [. . .] a basic knowledge of our history teaches that not death in the name of our faith was the reality, but the opposite: marranism – pretended Christianity. The Jews always adapted themselves to the most diffi­cult circumstances, always managed to survived the most difficult times. Taking a small number of Jews over [to the other side] will preserve the creators of a new generation of Jews. We must not take away the right to life of this new generation. [. . .]

[Still] others [. . .] agreed that one ought to proceed in this way, but without the approval of the representatives of Jewish society. People save themselves in various ways, let the action of the convents bear an individual character. ¹⁰⁸ 

The last position seems to have won out; at any rate, there is little evidence in the historical record of an organized effort from either the Jewish or the Polish side to help Jews escape – with the exception only of the activists themselves, a few hundred of whom got out with the aid of their organizations. Catholic organiz­ations did help hundreds of Jewish children on an individual basis, once they had been sent out of the ghetto; whether they could have saved more if this offer had been taken up must remain moot.

The terms in which this debate was couched are somewhat disturbing to modern sensibilities: among other things, the phrase ‘looking a gift horse in the mouth’ springs to mind. Ringelblum’s conjectures about the motives of the Catholic church are not entirely without foundation – we shall see evidence of conversionist motives in Chapter 4 – but Jewish intellectuals could surely have taken a less jaundiced view when the lives of children were at stake. To be fair, Ringelblum himself refused an offer to smuggle him and other Zionist leaders to Hungary with the dismissive remark that ‘the concept of duty no longer means what it used to’.¹⁰⁹ These were men of a certain generation, in wartime, when nation was all, the individual nothing and self-sacrifice the order of the day. But to disdain an offer to save children on similar grounds is surely more dubious. The Jewish leadership protested mightily when it judged shipments of arms from the Polish underground to be inadequate, but was content to grumble in private about the inadequacy of institutional rescue efforts, which they clearly mistrusted. In sum, the fate of individuals was not on their minds.

Escape after January 1943

After the January Aktion, many people gave up the  hope of surviving in the ghetto.  Paradoxically, we now know that the Aktion of 18–21 January, probably ordered by Himmler when he visited the ghetto on 11 January, was meant as a limited operation to remove 8,000 people, who were taken,  not to Treblinka and death,  but mainly to labour camps, as part of the project of trans­ferring the ‘shops’ and their production to the Lublin area. Shortly before the Aktion, the owners of the ‘shops’ had appealed to their workers to volunteer for transportation to Lublin, assuring them that they could work and survive there; a group of eight Jewish workers were brought back from Lublin to testify to the decent conditions. But the Jews no longer trusted such assurances; and in the long run, of course, they were right. When German police and their Ukrainian and Baltic auxiliaries entered the ghetto on 18 January, it was widely assumed that the final liquidation of the ghetto was at hand. The resistance movement as yet had virtually no weapons, but a few members of Z^˙OB opened fire with pistols, and word of this daring act spread rapidly through the ghetto. When the Aktion was stopped on 21 January, only 6,000 Jews having been taken, the ghetto reasoned, post hoc ergo propter hoc, that the Germans had been frightened off by the resistance. No one doubted that they would be back, however, and sooner rather than later. It was at this point, therefore, that the greatest wave of escapes began.

By this time the ghetto had adapted itself to the new conditions, and the methods of escape had become well oiled. Stefan Chaskielewicz writes: ‘At the end of January 1943, when I was leaving the ghetto together with my parents, the act of crossing to the Aryan side was no longer difficult. Germans keeping watch at the gates or so-called Wachen could be bribed, drank too much and were altogether depraved.’¹¹⁰ As the number of escapes multiplied, it became increasingly possible for Jews to rely on Jewish friends and relatives already established on the Aryan side:

Although I was born and educated in Warsaw, I didn’t have any Polish friends on whom I could count for help and support on the Aryan side. On the other hand, my brother-in-law, who left the ghetto in Novemberr 1942, had possibilities of setting himself up on the Aryan side. He was the one who decided to get me out of the ghetto. His plan was realized on 15 January 1943, as follows: he gave me the address of a tailor’s shop in the ghetto, bordering on the Aryan side [. . .]. To this shop a sizeable group of Aryans would come to work every morn­ing, and go back every evening to their homes on the Aryan side. I spent a whole day in this establishment. I can remember a small but characteristic detail. Someone sewed a fur collar onto my winter coat … Jews didn’t have furs, because the previous year there was a collection for the German army and all furs were taken away from the Jews.. In the evening, I left with a column of these workers [. . .]. After the group broke up – a friend of my brother-in-law’s, a Jew, but with very good looks and living at that time on the Aryan side, piloted me – I was led to a house near the ghetto, in the area of the Small Ghetto, which had been liquidated a couple of months previously and had already been settled by Poles..¹¹¹

Irma Morgenstern was helped to escape by a Jew posing as a Polish peasant, whom she identifies only as ‘Mr Antopolski’ (incidentally, a much more Jewish than Polish name). As a Pole, Antopolski could pass in and out of the ghetto fairly freely, and according to Morgenstern was able to rescue a number of Jewish children, especially girls. Antopolski had a confederate, a Polish policeman named Eliasz Pietruszko, who organized Morgenstern’s escape in February 1943 and kept her as his own daughter. Pietruszko was supposed to have got her parents and brother out as well, but these plans came to naught.¹¹²

Again, contacts were sometimes formed in an impromptu fashion. Thus Tadeusz Grundland, Morgenstern’s future husband, established contact with his main helper while working in a placówka, unloading coal for trains at Warsaw’s Eastern Station. In March 1943 he was approached by a Mr Broniak, who told him that he was willing to take him in and had built a shelter. Grundland took advantage of this offer, and stayed with the Broniaks in the right-bank suburb of Bródno until liberation.¹¹³

 

 

90 Secret City

Even now, there was still some resistance to the idea of leaving the ghetto. Michał Line had made arrangements well in advance, and had got some members of his family out, but he delayed leaving the ghetto himself. As the man­ager of a Jewish factory, he feared that the factory would be closed if he left, and the workers deported, so he stayed until the Ghetto Uprising. ¹¹⁴

Activists began leaving at this time as well, as preparations for armed resistance intensified. At the end of Januaru 1943, the Bund assigned Blady-Szwajger to work on the Aryan side. She describes the deliberations that led to her departure:

Marek [Edelman] explained that I had ‘good’ looks – I had blonde hair and blue eyes –, that I had no accent when I spoke Polish, which meant I could walk around the town freely, and that I would be of more use to them there than here; but it still seemed to me that it would be simply desertion, and that they would die here, and I might survive there, and that I couldn’t do it [. . .] Then Abrasza Blum joined in. [. . .] He didn’t speak much, he just smiled with that serene smile of his and said that it had to be done. And that it wouldn’t be safe at all. But we had to have people over there who would take care of various things. [. . .] After all, our weapons came from the other side, he said.¹¹⁵ 

Most of the activists who left to make preparations for armed resistance had not meant to stay on the Aryan side permanently, but were caught there by the outbreak of the Ghetto Uprising. But Leon Feiner had established himself as the Bund’s permanent representative on the Aryan side early in 1942, staying with the Polish actor Aleksander Zelwerowicz. Adolf Berman took up the corresponding post for the Zionist Z^˙KN shortly after it was formed in October 1942. He had been the director of CENTOS, the organization that ran the ghetto’s orphanages, but when they were liquidated his post became redundant.  As a psychologist, he also had good professional contacts with Polish colleagues, which became the nucleus of his network. In each of these cases, the activist was leaving on party business, so the party paid the bribes and made the arrangements.

In these examples I have emphasized some exceptional cases: decent SS men, escape without prior preparations, escape through very indirect contacts. It should be understood that these cases are not the norm: the great majority of escapees relied on networks like those described in Chapter 1. I have stressed the exceptions here, giving numerous examples, to make the point that these were not simply freak events that can be ignored. Not many people left the ghetto in these ways, but enough of them to demonstrate that possibilities of escape did exist even for people who lacked some or all of the supposed pre­requisites – ‘good looks’, good contacts, money and so forth. But of course having all these things did help a great deal.

 

 

Escape during and after the Ghetto Uprising

With the outbreak of the Ghetto Uprising on 19 April, the ghetto once again became hermetically sealed. Nearby streets on the Aryan side were emptied, machine-guns were set up at strategic points on the ghetto wall, the gates stopped functioning altogether. The vast majority of the remaining ghetto popu­lation disappeared into their well-prepared bunkers and virtually all traffic with the Aryan side stopped. Only the sewers and the tunnels remained as channels of communication; but the sewers were a maze, requiring a guide – an experi­enced sewage worker – for safe navigation; while very few people knew of the existence, let alone the location, of the tunnels. Jews remaining in the ghetto could do no more than hide, wait and hope. After a few days’ fighting, the Germans started burning the ghetto to the ground, block by block. After an area had been burnt out, it was searched by policemen with dogs, sometimes accompanied by informers who co-operated in the forlorn hope of saving their own lives. But ‘a certain number of bunkers’ as Janina Baran explains, ‘were not engulfed in flames, nor discovered. The people in them, mainly at night and with the help of an organized action, crossed the wall to the Aryan side.’¹¹⁶ There is regrettably no historical evidence of an organized action, but there are several accounts of individuals and small groups escaping like that.

As the advancing flames and smoke threatened their bunkers, some Jews made their way at night or through underground passages to other hiding places, in the ‘wild’ ghetto or in areas that had already been burnt and searched. There they could hold out for some time, scavenging from the homes of Jews who had been killed, and could eventually make their way out of the ghetto. Most of them waited until the Ghetto Uprising was over, when the ghetto wall was no longer guarded and people could steal out under cover of night. One or two stragglers, however, managed to hold out in the ghetto, even  until the outbreak of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. But the great majority did not escape. Those who did not succumb to the smoke and flames came out of hiding and were sent to the Lublin camps.

On 28 April, the Germans again declared one of their ‘amnesties’, offering to transport all those who surrendered voluntarily to the labour camp at Poniatowa. Michał Line, whose workshop had by now ceased to exist, had spent nine days with his daughter and Maria, his future second wife, sitting in complete darkness in a cramped and stifling bunker at Leszno 76. The Lines decided to take advan­tage of this ‘amnesty’ and gave themselves up; but as they were waiting to be loaded onto trucks, Maria was seized with misgivings and told Line she would not go to Poniatowa.

And then Line, not hesitating, moved in the direction of the Wache. [. . .] The Wache was strongly guarded by German gendarmes, Polish police and police agents. Line went up to a group of German soldiers and said, ‘Let five people through!’ They didn’t shoot him. They looked at him with stunned expressions. They remained silent. A couple of gendarmes left. Two remained. Then Line said, almost as if giving an order: Retten Sie drei Seelen! [Save three souls!]. One of them answered, aber schnell! [but be quick!]. And by that miracle, so hard to believe, they managed to get out of hell.¹¹⁷

Very few people would have even thought of making such an audacious move; but was the outcome really miraculous, rather than simply lucky?  We have seen other examples of ordinary Germans, even occasionally SS men, behaving decently.  Wiesław Kielar has estimated that even at Auschwitz, about 12% of the SS guards were decent, at least when their officers were not watching: he writes that without their help, the underground camp economy could not have existed, and many more people would have died.[1] Ordinary soldiers and policemen, not having undergone the intensive indoctrination of the SS, were much more likely to be reluctant recruits who conformed to the Nazi state but had little sympathy for it.  The group dynamics that made such men kill, which Christopher Browning discussed in his celebrated study Ordinary Men, were not operative in a situations like this one: these men had no specific orders to kill, and letting people escape, for anyone but a psychopath or a hardened Nazi, would not have been seen as a sign of cowardice or weakness. Ordinary policemen would mainly have been worried about not getting in trouble, and the two who left may have been saying, in effect: “you go ahead if you want, we’re not getting involved”.  One can broadly divide uniformed Germans into four categories: sadists and ideological Nazis, who carried out their orders with enthusiasm; the officious and conformist, who put duty above all else; the corrupt, who could at least be bought; and the decent, who stayed true to higher principles if it did not cost them.  A very few, the noble, risked themselves for the sake of principle: perhaps the only example in this study – a party member, though not uniformed – is Stefan Chmielewski’s friend, Erich Horst

Escape through placówki was still possible during the Ghetto Uprising, but only in the case of permanent workposts that were not caught up in the fighting. Zofia Goldfarb-Bachniak¹¹⁸ worked in the Werterfassung until the outbreak of the Ghetto Uprising. Her father died as a ghetto fighter, the last of her thirty close relatives to have remained alive. On 23 April she was assigned, together with a group of artisans and mechanics, to the same Ostbahn labour camp in Bródno from which Michał Grundland had escaped. She worked there until 13 July when, a few days before the camp was dissolved, she managed to slip away.

Still another method of survival, the most improbable of all, was to be incar­cerated in a German prison. Israel Hochberg¹¹⁹ was an inmate of the Pawiak prison, inside the ghetto. He survived there until he managed to escape in February 1944. As we shall see, other prisoners in the Pawiak were rescued in August 1944 when the Warsaw Uprising broke out.

Escape from Camps and Trains

The deportees from Warsaw, especially those who were taken to labour camps, still had slight chances of escape. A few Jews escaped from camps and trains even during the first two Aktionen, but this form of escape assumed the great­est importance during and after the Ghetto Uprising, when the deportations were exclusively to the labour camps near Lublin.

The cattle cars that took Jews to the camps moved slowly and stopped on sid­ings often, to let higher-priority traffic pass. The 50-kilometre trip to Treblinka could easily take several hours; the journey to Lublin could take much longer. ¹²⁰ The wagons themselves were equipped with small windows strung with barbed wire, but the wire could be removed or filed through, and anyone small and agile enough could jump out. Alternatively, the doors could be prised open. Jumping from the trains was dangerous, of course: not only because of the direct risk of injury, but because each train included one or two wagons with roof-mounted booths, manned by guards with machine-guns. It was therefore safest to make the attempt while the train was moving, the faster the better. Jumping therefore  took a fair bit of nerve. Still, people tried it.  George Pfeffer, who was deported to Majdanek after the Ghetto Uprising, writes that there were 150 people in his wagon, of whom ‘some’ escaped through the windows, despite the difficulties. He himself did not, because he had his wife and son with him.¹²¹ In the testimonies reviewed here, Stanisław Laskowski (Antypolski)¹²² escaped from a train; so did Marian Berland¹²³ and Irena Mikelberg’s sister. ¹²⁴ Ringelblum had earlier heard of such instances; he wrote in October 1942: ‘They escaped from a wagon! Those with experience. Young men. One escaped twice. Organized eight jumpers.’¹²⁵

Escape from concentration camps was much harder, and was further inhibited by the principle of collective responsibility, which the SS freely applied. At Majdanek, writes Pfeffer, ‘comrade-prisoners watched each other even more assiduously than the SS men, for, according to the regulations, if a prisoner attempted to escape, every second prisoner-worker in the unit would be hanged.’¹²⁶ But Pfeffer reasoned that all the prisoners at Majdanek were doomed in any case. He had the good fortune to be given a job in the camp kitchen, and by selling favours to other prisoners was able to accumulate 1,700 zł. He used this money to ‘organize’ civilian clothes and to bribe his way onto a placówka working outside the camp grounds. He walked off the worksite by posing as a Polish worker, then made his way back to Warsaw over the space of several weeks.

Majdanek was a proper concentration camp, one of the worst, from which escape was indeed difficult. The same was not true of some of the labour camps nearby, which were under the jurisdiction of German businessmen and only indirectly of the SS. Janina Baran found herself in the camp at Poniatowa, where the Többens ‘shop’ had been relocated. In order to convince his 13,000 workers that they were safe with him, Többens equipped the camp with a well-staffed hospital and even a kindergarten, and security at the camp was quite lax. ‘From the beginning’, writes Baran,

escape from this camp presented almost no difficulty. And so many Jews did escape. The escapes were both organized and ‘loose’. In the first days of May, caravans of people went from there to Warsaw. Often Soviet partisans would come to the camp at night and try to talk the Jews into escaping, but unfortunately these people were so blinded or discouraged that no one wanted to make the move. [. . .] Why people didn’t escape from there can only be explained by the fact that some had nowhere to go, others were discouraged – for them it was all the same – and others no doubt believed in Többens. ¹²⁷

The Poniatowa camp was liquidated in November as part of the ‘Harvest Festival’. Baran herself managed to escape before then. She writes that ‘our escape was organized by a Jewish fighting group that had been on the Aryan side the whole time after the deportation action in the ghetto’.  This was no doubt one of the ŻOB units that Antek Zuckerman mentions in his memoirs (see below)

The best-known person who escaped from a labour camp is Emmanuel Ringelblum. Ringelblum left the ghetto, with his wife and son, in February 1943. He returned to the ghetto for a  meeting with party comrades just before the uprising and was caught up in it. Sent to Trawniki,  he managed to smuggle a letter out to Warsaw in July 1943, and was soon rescued from the camp by the young Polish activist Teodor Pajewski and Emilka Kossower of the Z^˙KN.

Apart from getting their own party activists out, neither the Polish nor the Jewish underground played any significant role in the flight of the Warsaw Jews to the Aryan side, which had overwhelmingly an individual and spontaneous charac­ter. Yitzhak Zuckerman writes, somewhat defensively:

[cytuję z wydania angielskiego, oryginal po hebrajsku.  Chyba należy tłumaczyć.]

we didn’t have to be convinced that one of the essential things for us was to rescue Jews; we all knew that. However, the essential function of the Jewish Fighting Organization was to organize Jews for war wherever possible. [. . .] [T]here were Jewish remnants in various places. What did we want to do with those Jews? We couldn’t bring them to Warsaw because we didn’t have any place to hide them. [. . .] Very few were brought to Warsaw; and each one of them is known by name, like Ringelblum and [Jonas] Turkow. Every person was important, but it was symbolic and you could count them on your fingers, there were so few of them. Nevertheless, there were some tens of thousands more Jews, even in the two camps of Poniatów [sic] [pomyłka jest chyba w tłumaczeniu, Antek by dobrze znał nazwę obozu.  Uważam, że winno po prostu poprawić, bez (sic)]  and Trawniki.¹²⁸

Zuckerman also claims that plans had been discussed with the Polish underground which came to naught:

there were still concentration camps and we encouraged the spirit of uprising in them. .. . The Poles lied; they didn’t set up contact stations as they promised. We didn’t have the power to set them up. The stations were needed for shelter and passage in case inmates escaped from the concentration camps before they were executed.¹²⁹

[U]ntil September 1943 [. . .] we were trying to construct a joint plan to rescue young people from the Poniatów and Trawniki camps, where we formed groups of the Jewish Fighting Organization. They promised to help but they didn’t keep their promise. ¹³⁰

Zuckerman finally alludes to the difficulty of escape:

You could escape from the camps, but you had to know where to go, you needed some base, some assistance, some friendly village, hut, forest. Where could a Jew escape? What happened to the Jews who escaped from Treblinka? After all, hundreds did escape and only a few dozen arrived from Treblinka! Sometimes there are such naïve and absurd questions. You can’t convey the ‘cli­mate’, and the ‘geography’ of Poland in those days. You simply can’t describe the relations between Jews and non-Jews, everything that threatened the Jew in that period! As an individual, a Jew might still have a chance to escape from Poniatów [znowu] or Trawniki; but when there were dozens or hundreds of people, someone had to prepare the escape. ¹³¹

This was an activist’s view, and is the received wisdom. But as we have seen, indi­vidual Jews did escape, without help; they did make it back to Warsaw – even from Treblinka – and some of them did survive.  Collectively, their numbers were at least in the hundreds.  Zuckerman’s view is similar to that of Pinchas Freudiger, cited in the Introduction, and the answer is the same: perhaps only a few dozen out of hundreds who escaped from Treblinka survived; but among those who did not escape, there were no survivors at all.

 

The Case of the Pianist

 

Probably the only Jew to have escaped from the Warsaw ghetto who is known to the general public is Władysław Szpilman, the protagonist of Roman Polanski’s film, The Pianist.  It is worth reviewing Szpilman’s case in the light of the argument advanced in this chapter.

 

Szpilman, a celebrity with many friends in Polish Radio and in musical circles, could presumably have arranged to stay out of the ghetto, or to leave it at any time.  But he had family responsibilities. During the main ghetto period, he supported his family by playing the piano in several cafés, and by selling off some possessions. When the deportations started, he thought he had succeeded in saving his relatives’ lives by getting them jobs in German workshops, but too many Jews had had the same idea: the workshops were overstaffed, a ‘selection’ was carried out, and Szpilman found himself at the Umschlagplatz with his parents and one of his sisters. Soon his other siblings joined him: they had volunteered, to be with their family. But they were deported almost immediately, after Szpilman’s attempt to bribe a Jewish policeman failed. Szpilman explains, without emotion, that the policeman had to deliver his quota or be deported himself.  Szpilman, with his parents and his remaining sister, queued to board the next deportation train.  Another Jewish policeman recognized Szpilman and pulled him out of the column: saved, because he was a celebrity. He desperately tried to rejoin his family, but policemen blocked his way.  He stole back into the ghetto, and through his connections in the Jewish council was assigned to a placówka carrying out demolition work on the Aryan side. There he encountered a friend, Tadeusz Blumenthal – a Jew passing as a Pole – who promised to find him a hiding place, but he failed.  One day – Szpilman’s chronology is not clear, but likely at the end of August – Jan Dworakowski,  the conductor of the Warsaw Philharmonic, spotted him at work.  They embraced, and in conversation, Dworakowski  told him the truth: that he would never see his family again.  It was only then that he realized what deportation really meant.

 

During the ‘kettle’ he received a number for life, and was assigned to various work parties.  At one, inside the ghetto, the German overseer allowed one Jew, nicknamed ‘Majorek’ (‘The Little Major’), to cross to the Aryan side each day to buy food for the group. In December, Szpilman asked Majorek to contact some Polish friends about the possibility of hiding him, but they refused, indignant that they should be asked to risk their lives.

 

Majorek began smuggling arms into the ghetto: evidently he had made contact with some element of the Jewish underground.  The January Aktion came and went, and now Szpilman began to feel a sense of urgency. The final liquidation of the ghetto, he thought, was surely soon at hand. Majorek contacted some artistic friends of Szpilman’s – the singer Janina Godlewska, and her husband, actor Andrzej Bogucki – and they, finally, agreed to take Szpilman in.  On February 13^th – memoirists always remember the date of their escape – he took off his Jewish armband, slipped away from his work party, and found Bogucki waiting for him.

 

Viewers of Polanski’s film, if they know nothing about these things, will assume that Szpilman’s story was unique and miraculous, exceptional because Szpilman was an exceptional man.  The film, indeed, deliberately gives the impression that Szpilman was the only Jew to escape and, at the end, the only survivor in a completely ruined city. It is a dramatic and effective device.  But in almost all respects, Szpilman’s case was quite typical.  Though he had ample Polish contacts, the idea of escaping did not occur to him until the final stages of the first Aktion.  His duty to his family kept him in the ghetto, and he thought, first, of providing for them, and then, during the Aktion, of saving them through work. How could he have known German plans?  How could he have guessed that the largest Jewish community in Europe was going to be destroyed?  He counted on the Nazis to act in their own rational self-interest, supposing that they meant to preserve their labour force, and took what seemed the most reasonable action. Only after he had lost his family did he start thinking of escape, and only after the January Aktion, which  made him realize that working would not save him, did he take decisive  action.  It was timing, the Nazis’ deviousness and, the lure of illusory alternatives, rather than lack of opportunity, that doomed Szpilman’s family and delayed his own decision to escape.

 

Szpilman’s escape, like almost all others, was initiated by Szpilman himself, relied on personal contacts rather than any organized effort, and contains elements of Jewish self-help.  His contact with the Aryan side was mediated by fellow Jews – Blumenthal and Majorek – even though he had direct and warm contacts with Polish friends.  The telephone was a more usual means of communication, but Szpilman had no access to one. His story is unique – like all the others.[2]

 

 

Conclusions

 

 

Normally, leaving the ghetto required friendly contacts with Poles of the sort documented in Chapter 1, though increasingly these contacts were indirect, through friends and family members or through Jews already established on the Aryan side. Probably most Warsaw Jews enjoyed contacts of this kind. Normally, leaving the ghetto had to be arranged in advance through such contacts, who could have documents made up and provide at least a temporary melina on the ‘other side’. Normally, also money was needed to bribe policemen and the foremen of work parties, to pay off szmalcowniks and to pay for food and lodging, often at exorbitant prices. The general perception in the ghetto was that all these things were prerequisites, in addition to the ability to pass seamlessly as an ‘Aryan’, so that escape was only for the rich, the well-connected, the blond and blue-eyed, with good Polish and good friends: certainly, therefore, for only a small minority, and not for ordi­nary Jews.

Yet there were people with none of these attributes who escaped successfully, and hardly anyone could claim all of them. The sheer volume of escapes, especially after January 1943, shows that despite the assimilationist and middle-class character of most of the fugitives, some at least were indeed ordinary Jews with no special resources, who happened to have a willing Polish friend, acquaintance, colleague or former servant, or who were related to someone who did, or who were prepared simply to ‘give it a go’.

The wave of escapes was showing no signs of abating when the Ghetto Uprising broke out: if escapes had continued at the same rate for another six months, half of the Jews of the Restghetto might have fled; if until late in 1944, when the Łódź ghetto was liquidated, in theory all of them might have got away.  As was so often the case in the Holocaust, it was above all German timing and intentions that determined the out­come; all other influences have to be put in that context.

We cannot know, of course, whether the rate at which escapes took place between January and April 1943 could have been sustained. Most likely not, since limiting factors would eventually have come into play. But with escape still accel­erating when the possibilities were cut off, we can only speculate as to what those limiting factors might have been, or how many Jewish fugitives the Polish quarter might have absorbed.. In any case, the scale of this ‘greatest escape’, without equal in occupied Europe, suggests that we should be looking to explain its success, not its failure.

Warsaw was unique in many respects: the size of the Jewish community and its degree of assimilation – modest by Western standards, but unusual for Poland; the centrality of the ghetto and its many links with the Aryan side; the vigour of the smuggling operation, the channels and contacts that it created, and its corrupting effect on the various police forces; the size of the city; the peculiar course of the liquidation operations, stretching over nearly a year with many stops and starts: all these factors made escape possible on a larger scale in Warsaw than anywhere else. The sud­denness of the 1942 Aktion ensnared most Jews before they could react, but it also destroyed illusions  which Jews else­where continued to entertain.

Survivors have in conversation urged on me the conclusion, often found in activist memoirs, that many more Jews could have escaped but for the inhospitable conditions on the Aryan side – the ‘climate’ and ‘geography’ of which Antek Zuckerman writes. But in truth the decision to escape could not have depended on these considerations. Whatever impressions they might have formed, the Jews could not have known what awaited them in that other world, from which they had become so estranged during their two-and-a-half years behind the ghetto wall and which they were now about to rejoin.

 

 

 

 Wiesław Kielar, Anus mundi (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1980) s. ??

[2] Władysław Szpilman, Śmierć miasta (Kraków: Wyd. Znak, 2000)