Life was hell for the Jews in the Polish capital, Warsaw, 80 years ago. Since Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, they were subjected to constant persecution by the occupiers, and from November 1940 onwards they were confined to the Warsaw Ghetto in the northwest of the city. Up to 450,000 men, women and children lived crammed behind the high walls of the ghetto. About 100,000 people died of starvation or disease, or were killed in various executions.
Leaving the sealed district without permission was punishable by death, as was giving any kind of outside help to the ghetto residents. The guards would shoot small children who smuggled food or coal. Emaciated corpses lying on the side of the road have become a part of everyday life.
Almost a third of the population of the Polish capital consisted of Jews before World War II. They have been an integral part of the city for centuries. On July 22, 1942, the turning began.
On this day, Adam Cherniakov, a local engineer and politician, whom the Nazis forced to become the head of the Jewish Council of the Warsaw Ghetto, wrote the following in his diary: “At 10 o’clock the Turmbahnführer appeared, we were told that all Jews, regardless of sex and age – with certain exceptions – were to be Deported to the East”. Every day Chernyakov was supposed to prepare 6,000 people from the ghetto for deportation. The SS later increased this daily target to 10,000.
On July 23, Chernyakov wrote a farewell letter to his wife: “They demand that I kill the children of my people with my own hands. I have nothing to do but die.” He ended his life with a cyanide capsule – but his death did nothing to stop the extermination.
The Nazis carried out the divorces brutally, to cut off any attempt at resistance. Every house was surrounded, its occupants were beaten as they were driven out into the courtyard, and then taken to the so-called Umschlagplatz “collection point” at the station.
People were taken to the Treblinka extermination camp in cattle trucks. After a long and miserable journey, they usually arrived only to be killed in the gas chambers that day. The Germans disguised their operation, “Grossaction” Warsaw, as “resettlement in the East”, but soon many realized that they were being sent to their deaths.
At the beginning of August, Janusz Korczak, a Jewish doctor, teacher and director of an orphanage, arrived at the collection point, together with the children in his care. He had the opportunity to escape the ghetto, but refused to abandon the children entrusted to him. To allay their fears, he told them they were going on a “village trip” – and went with them to the gas chamber, as well as Stefania Wilczynska, a Jewish teacher who helped at the orphanage.
Adina Bloody-Schweiger, a Polish nurse, a Righteous Among the Nations, who helped the Jewish children a lot, chose a different way, when the Germans began to liquidate the hospital, shoot the patients and throw them out of the windows, she and one of the nurses administered morphine to the few children who were still alive, to spare them the suffering of death , she gave some of her young patients morphine, killing them before they could fall into the hands of the Nazis.
According to German sources, more than 250,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka in just two months, Jewish sources say the number was closer to 300,000. Several thousand people who were too old or too sick to travel were taken to Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery and shot to death there.
About 35,000 Jews remained alive, and were sent to work in factories. Between 20,000 and 25,000 people escaped deportation, and continued to live illegally in what remained of the ghetto. In April 1943, the deportation of those who remained was scheduled, which sparked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which 13,000 Jews were killed. Those who remained were sent to Treblinka and other camps. As an eyewitness wrote at the time: “Jewish Warsaw ceased to exist.” The largest Jewish community in Europe was wiped out.
The murder of the Jews of Warsaw was only part of the larger plan, code-named “Operation Reinhardt”, to exterminate all the Jews in occupied Poland. As early as October 13, 1941, Heinrich Himmler instructed Odilo Globoknik, head of the SS and the police in the Lublin region, to murder the Jews in the area under his control, in occupied southern Poland. Globonik immediately began building the first of several extermination camps – Belzec. Later, two more were built – Sobibor and Treblinka – where the victims were gassed as soon as they arrived. From 1943 onwards, Majdanek near Lublin was also used as an extermination camp.
The killing continued until November 1943, when these camps were dismantled and camouflaged, and the last remaining prisoners were shot. Holocaust researcher Stefan Lehnstadt estimates that the total number of victims of Operation Reinhardt was at least 1.8 million, maybe even two million. The Nazi extermination of European Jews, which later became known as the Holocaust, continued until 1945. A total of six million Jews were killed.
Only about 150 people in total survived Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, for many years, these extermination camps were almost forgotten, the camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau became the main symbol of the Holocaust. Only gradually did the sites of Operation Reinhardt return to consciousness, but only in 1988 was a memorial erected in the former “Umschlagplatz” where Warsaw Jews were gathered for deportation.