Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1940-1943

3. The Judenrat, Self-Help, and the Fight for the Soul of the Ghetto

58 3 The Judenrat, Self-Help, and the Fight for the Soul of the Ghetto The Judenrat The Jewish Council and the Jewish Order Service probably had the most profound influence on the general perception of the assimilated community. Their overblown structure provided jobs for the Polishspeaking unemployed intelligentsia who could not find any place in Jewish grass-root organizations. However, the vast majority of them were completely unprepared for the task and lacked the ability, or sometimes the will, to understand the needs of the quarter, from which they felt strongly alienated. The Warsaw Jewish Council (the Judenrat) was established alongside other Judenrate in the Generalgouvernement by a decree of Hans Frank on November 28, 1939.1 Its chairman, engineer Adam Czerniak ów, had been appointed head of the Jewish community on September 22, 1939, by the Civilian Commissar of Warsaw, Stefan Starzyński. He replaced the former head of the community, Maurycy Mayzel, who fled Poland in the first days of the war. Czerniaków presented the occupation authorities with twenty-four councilmen, among them all of the members of the pre-war Council who were still in the capital. Those of them who later fled Warsaw were replaced, so that the number of councilors always equaled twenty-four. The main role of the Judenrat in the ghetto was to oversee and administer life in the quarter and to carry out the directives of the occupational authorities. The growing number of tasks expected to be fulfilled by the Jewish Council led to a growth in the apparatus—an Figh t f o r t h e Sou l o f t h e Ghet to | 59 extremely complicated structure of commissions and departments with often vague or overlapping areas of responsibility. These included the postal service, police, supervision of primary and vocational education , and an elaborate health organization that included two hospitals. The administration was expected to organize censuses and gather statistical data for the Nazi authorities. It was also responsible for issuing a growing number of passes to go to the “Aryan” side (in the initial stage of the ghetto’s existence), labor cards, exemption certificates, permissions , and food ration cards, all of which proved an immense task given the constantly changing population. As a result, between July 1, 1940, and August 1942 the number of people engaged in the apparatus of the community grew five-fold—from 1,741 to 9,030 employees.2 The position of the Warsaw Judenrat in relation to the German authorities was one of complete subservience, of forced cooperation, devoid of any voluntary actions or autonomous decisions. Yet, for the majority of ghetto inhabitants, the Judenrat was the only legitimate government that they experienced in their everyday lives. In their eyes the institution was fully responsible for their tragic situation. One of the diarists, describing the mood prevalent in the quarter, wrote: All the evils that have befallen Jews in Warsaw: forced labor, roundups , arrests, the Kott affair, beatings on the street, muggings, confiscations of goods, furniture, clothing, being forbidden to help the arrested, no news from them—for all this it was the Judenrat that was responsible. The atmosphere of dislike meant that many people preferred to keep away from it, limiting their contacts to personal matters or social help issues.3 Fully aware of how he was perceived, Adam Czerniaków often complained in his diary about being “blamed without end” for strings of decisions that were completely outside of his control.4 The most painful of these for the everyday lives of the ghetto community were labor camp roundups, anti-typhus measures—the so-called parówki— and taxes. Forced labor for all Jewish men aged between fourteen and sixty was introduced in Warsaw on October 26, 1939.5 Until August 1940 it 60 | Assimil a t ed Jews in t h e Wa r saw Ghet to was to take place locally, in placówki—such as military or police stations and private firms. From August 1940, over 15,000 Warsaw Jews were sent to forced labor camps—initially in the Lublin and Kraków areas and from the spring of 1941 in the surroundings of Warsaw. The second wave of forced labor roundups took place in the spring of 1942. Aside from very few camps where Jewish laborers were treated in a relatively humane way, most were places of torture, and as the first...