In January 1943, SS and police units returned to Warsaw, this time with the intent of deporting thousands of the remaining approximately 70,000-80,000 Jews in the ghetto to forced-labor camps for Jews in Lublin District of the Government General. During this period, the Germans deported about 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka they killed approximately 35,000 Jews inside the ghetto during the operation. Deportations and Uprisingįrom July 22 until September 12, 1942, German SS and police units, assisted by auxiliaries, carried out mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center. Only partly recovered after the war, the Ringelblum Archive remains an invaluable source about life in the ghetto and German policy toward the Jews of Poland. This record came to be known as the "Oneg Shabbat" ("In Celebration of Sabbath," also known as the Ringelblum Archive). Widespread smuggling of food and medicines into the ghetto supplemented the miserable official allotments and kept the death rate from increasing still further.Įmanuel Ringelblum, a Warsaw-based historian prominent in Jewish self-aid efforts, founded a clandestine organization that aimed to provide an accurate record of events taking place in German-occupied Poland while the ghetto existed. Czerniaków wrote in his diary entry for May 8, 1941: “Children starving to death.” Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease. In 1941 the average Jew in the ghetto subsisted on 1,125 calories a day. Abraham Lewentįood allotments rationed to the ghetto by the German civilian authorities were not sufficient to sustain life. The hunger in the ghetto was so great, was so bad, that people were laying on the streets and dying, little children went around begging. Financed until late 1941 primarily by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, these organizations attempted to keep alive a population that suffered severely from starvation, exposure, and infectious disease. Among the welfare organizations active in the ghetto were the Jewish Mutual Aid Society, the Federation of Associations in Poland for the Care of Orphans, and the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training. Jewish organizations inside the ghetto tried to meet the needs of the ghetto residents as they struggled to survive. The Jewish council offices were located on Grzybowska Street in the southern part of the ghetto. German authorities forced ghetto residents to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 persons per room. The population of the ghetto, increased by Jews compelled to move in from nearby towns, was estimated to be over 400,000 Jews. The ghetto was enclosed by a wall that was over 10 feet high, topped with barbed wire, and closely guarded to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw. The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area, which German authorities sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940. On October 12, 1940, the Germans decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw. The German authorities closed Jewish schools, confiscated Jewish-owned property, and conscripted Jewish men into forced labor and dissolved prewar Jewish organizations. On November 23, 1939, German civilian occupation authorities required Warsaw's Jews to identify themselves by wearing white armbands with a blue Star of David. As chairman of the Jewish council, Czerniaków had to administer the soon-to-be established ghetto and to implement German orders. Less than a week later, German officials ordered the establishment of a Jewish council ( Judenrat) under the leadership of a Jewish engineer named Adam Czerniaków. German troops entered Warsaw on September 29, shortly after its surrender. The Warsaw Jewish community was the largest in both Poland and Europe, and was the second largest in the world, second only to New York City.įollowing the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Warsaw suffered heavy air attacks and artillery bombardment. Warsaw's prewar Jewish population of more than 350,000 constituted about 30 percent of the city's total population. Before World War II, the city was a major center of Jewish life and culture in Poland. A city of 1.3 million inhabitants, Warsaw was the capital of the resurrected Polish state in 1919. The city of Warsaw, capital of Poland, flanks both banks of the Vistula River.
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