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On and Off the Beaten Path:
Part Two of a Special Three-Part Series
By Carole
Bell
Ford
The Vanished Ghettos of Warsaw and
Łódź
ghet·to
Pronunciation Key (g t  )
A quarter in a European city, often walled, to which Jews were restricted
beginning in the Middle Ages. (Italian, after the Ghetto in Venice where Jews
were made to live in the 16th century.)
As a result of her work
as a travel agent and consultant to many top entertainment industry figures, my
daughter Julie has contacts all over the world. For our trip to Poland, she put
me in touch with an agency, located in Krakow, which customized our trip. One of
their agents arranged for our car rental and for our hotels in Warsaw, Łódź and
Lublin. Most important, the agent arranged for our personal guides, who were
wonderful—generous and gracious with their time, and extremely well-informed.
Two were historians.
On our only full day in Warsaw, after a brief
morning excursion to the old city, which I wrote about in the previous article,
my husband Steve and I took a tram back to the hotel to meet our guide and
driver. He took us to various sites and taught us about the history of “Jewish
Warsaw,” beginning with the obliterated ghetto.
Only a handful of buildings survived the almost total destruction of the ghetto
after the famous uprising in 1943; they are apartment houses today.
The Warsaw Ghetto
The ghetto in ruins
In a few places, fragments of the eleven miles of ghetto walls are still
standing. Memorial tablets are embedded in them, the remains of memorial candles
nearby.
Fragment of the ghetto wall.
Jews first settled in the Warsaw area around the beginning of the 14th
century. Judaism was the only non-Christian religion recognized in Europe—it had
to be, since Christianity is derived from Jewish roots. But Judaism was
perceived as a threat to the Church and common Judeo-Christian roots didn’t
prevent discrimination or periodic pogroms:
organized, officially sanctioned massacres which occurred not only in
Poland, but in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe.
On the contrary.
Still, the Jews of Warsaw adjusted to their disadvantages and the community
thrived. By the late 18th century almost ten percent of the city’s
population was Jewish and in the late 19th century it had become one
of the centers of Jewish culture, with dynamic writers and intellectuals leading
the Jewish Renaissance or Haskala. Warsaw remained an important locus of
Jewish life in Eastern Europe through the first decades of the 20th
century as well.
In August 1940, the Nazis split Warsaw into three zones: German, Polish, and
Jewish. About 450,000 Jews, including those from the surrounding countryside,
were crammed into a ghetto of approximately two square miles. To grasp the
meaning of such density, imagine a city the size of Minneapolis or Kansas City
crammed into the space occupied by the village of New Paltz—or the entire
population of Staten Island, or half the population of Manhattan, or twice the
population of Newark, or five times the population of Albany, or fifteen times
the population of Poughkeepsie.
Until a surrounding wall was built, a barbed wire fence enclosed the area, which
effectively cut the ghetto off from the outside world. At this time, the ghettos
in Poland were supposed to be holding areas. The plan was not yet to exterminate
the Jews but to remove and resettle them; that is, those who were able to
survive the harsh conditions in the ghettos. Large numbers of people lived
together in apartments that lacked amenities, heath or sanitation facilities.
There was no opportunity to work. And the food ration is estimated as having
been no more than 184 calories per person, per day. The Jews had no money to buy
food, but because the Nazis were convinced that they did and that they were
hoarding their valuable property, no food was brought into the ghetto until it
became obvious that large numbers were dying of starvation. Several thousand
each month.
By 1942 the “final solution”–the plan to annihilate all of Europe’s Jews—had
been conceived and, by this time, some of the first extermination camps had been
constructed including Treblinka and Chelmno. Over 300,000 Jews were rounded up
in the Warsaw ghetto, packed into cattle cars, and sent to camps that had been
created solely to function as death factories. They had no other purpose.
When a second action to liquidate the ghetto was launched early in 1943, finally
believing they had nothing to lose, the remaining Jews rose up in a rebellion
organized by the underground. Of course, the uprising was crushed—but it lasted
for an entire month, an amazing feat under the circumstances. The Jewish
leadership, the ZOB Command, was captured on May 8,
1943 at their bunker on the corner of Mila Street (number 18). They were
executed and the ghetto was subsequently demolished. But, in fact, due to a
complicated series of basements and sub-basements and sub-sub-basements, in
which they were able to hide, approximately 300-500 resistors actually survived
the ghetto and the war. Today, a
large mound, capped by a memorial stone, is on the site of Mila 18.
The ruins of the
ghetto have been built over by modern buildings and wider, straighter streets; a
memorial park sits in the center of the battle area.
Like the phantom Ghetto, there
is little that remains of “Jewish Warsaw,” home to over 350,000 Jews before
1939. Today, as our guide told us, there is “one Jewish restaurant, one
synagogue, one cemetery.” There is no “Jewish” neighborhood; the approximately
2,000 Jews who live in Warsaw are assimilated throughout the city.
Since it was Saturday, the
Sabbath, we weren’t able to visit the Jewish cemetery. But, as it was between
services, we were able to go to the Nozyk Shul. It is the one
remaining synagogue in Warsaw; a beautiful building that was constructed at the
end of the 19th century.
Façade and entry to the
Nozyk Synagogue
In all of Poland, very few
synagogues remain of the thousands that were active houses of worship before the
war. Remarkably, the Nozyk Synagogue is one of those that survived the war,
since it was used as a stable and storehouse for food for the horses. It was not
unusual, the desecration of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries was common
throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. Services were held in the synagogue after the
war but the building had been damaged during the Warsaw uprising in 1944 (not
the Ghetto uprising but rather the rebellion by Polish partisans and others).
Restoration began in 1977. When it was, completed, in 1983, services were held
there commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the ghetto revolt.
We were very saddened to see
that two policemen had to be stationed in a little guardhouse outside of the
synagogue to ward off vandals.
The ER Kaminska Yiddish
Theater is named for the actress (Esther Rachel) and mother of another Yiddish
actress, Ida Kaminska, who was well-known outside of Poland. The theater, near
the synagogue, is the only Jewish theater in Poland today. Before the war there
were fifteen, five in Warsaw alone. Its repertoire includes everything from
Biblically-inspired satires to Arthur Miller plays. But the most important role
the theater performs is in the preservation of the rich Jewish culture of
Central and Eastern Europe, the sounds and images of a lost world that had been
captured in the Jewish classics of Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz and others—in
the original Yiddish. Translations into Polish, and occasionally
into other languages, are available for non-Yiddish speaker with the use of
headphones.
Yiddish is the common spoken
language of Ashkenazic Jews; that is Jews of Northern Europe (the most common
language spoken among Southern European Jews is Sephardic).
Another casualty of the Holocaust, one of Hitler’s successes, is the Yiddish
language. Today it is classified among languages that are seriously endangered
or nearly extinct. In fact, most of the actors at the
Kaminska Theater are not Yiddish speakers, nor are most of them Jewish. They
study the scripts for their performances in the way that opera singers who do
not speak the language learn their roles in Italian or French or German. There
has been some revival of spoken Yiddish in America,
Israel, and in several European cities thanks to particular Jewish
groups, such as Hasidim. But most Yiddish speakers were killed in the Holocaust.
Of those who still retain the language, most are elderly.
We would have loved to see the
production that was being performed that night, Fiddler on the Roof.
Unfortunately we weren’t able to because we had already booked tickets for a
Chopin piano recital. But I had the unique pleasure of meeting the director of
the theater company, Szymon Szurmiej. And, best of all, of being able to have a
conversation with him—in Yiddish, our common language. Perhaps, as Isaac
Bashevis Singer famously and optimistically said about post-war estimates that
the language would be dead by now: “From Yiddish you have not yet heard the last
word.”
Later, as I was thinking about
our jam-packed day—too much to take in right away—I remembered something Lusia
had told me. In 1940, before her family was moved to the ghetto, as many Jewish
men did early in the war, Lusia’s father left Łódź looking for work in Warsaw.
He almost certainly spent some time in the ghetto, but he didn’t die there. Some
time later, Lucia’s family learned that he had been deported to Treblinka.
No one survived Treblinka. It
had one purpose—extermination.
Łódź
The morning after our too-short tour of Warsaw, we drove to Łódź to meet with
our new guide, Sebastien; a bright, pleasant, knowledgeable young man who earned
most of his living as a secondary schoolteacher. “In the ghetto, every house has
a history,” Sebastian said. And he seemed to know every detail. As we have been
many times before, we were very impressed with the background, education and
quality of our European guides. Unlike in America, they generally have to study
and take multiple tests to gain their various tourist certifications. Each
certificate (one for a city, another for a region, etc.) requires about a year
of study and fluency in at least two languages. In Poland they usually know at
least three besides their native language: Russian, German and English. Some
also know Czech and Slovak, sister languages to Polish. And many have other
western European languages, commonly French or Italian.
Sebastien told us that Łódź had a large Jewish population before the war, second
only to Warsaw. In this city, which was pretty evenly divided between Poles,
Germans and Jews, each group numbered about 250,000. Today, the Jewish
population of Łódź is about 300. Most of the Jews of Łódź perished in the
ghetto or, as in Warsaw, were taken to death camps. Chelmno, one of the first
death factories, was constructed near Łódź. It’s sole purpose was gassing and
exterminating Jews, although the first to be shipped there from the Łódź ghetto
actually were about 5,000 Roma (Gypsies).
In
contrast to Warsaw, the Łódź ghetto served a function for the Nazis. The ghetto
was a factory—or rather a grotesque mockery of the factory town that Łódź had
been before the war. (See the introductory article to this series if you’re
interested in more details of the history of Łódź .) The Nazi ghetto manager,
along with Chaim Rumkowski, the leader of the Jewish Council or Judenrat,
collaborated to make the ghetto productive for the Germans, although their
reasons for doing so were quite different. The Nazis wanted the ghetto to pay
for itself; they wanted the Jews to pay for their own food, security, sewage
removal, and all other expenses incurred by their incarceration. While Rumkowski
is a controversial figure, most agree that by making the ghetto productive, he
kept many of its inhabitants from being sent to the death camps for as long as
possible. Ghetto workers produced a wide variety of products—mica, paper,
textiles, munitions—and everyone who was able, worked: men, women, young and
old. Consequently, the Łódź ghetto, the first large city ghetto to be
established in Poland, was the last to be liquidated.
A
young child assists older worker in a Lodz paper factory.
I was particularly interested in Łódź since it is where Lusia (whom I’ve
interviewed extensively for my work-in-progress on aging survivors) was born and
raised. As a young girl, Lusia spent almost all of the war years in the ghetto.
From the moment we arrived in Łódź I constantly held an image of her in my mind.
And because, unlike Warsaw, the ghetto was not destroyed, I wondered, “Did she
walk here, on this street? Did she go to that pharmacy which is still standing,
and is still a pharmacy? I hoped she never had to go to the Nazi headquarters,
there, in that red building across the street from the church. Where was the
bridge she walked across?” And the other question, the persistent question, kept
recurring: how on earth was she, was anyone, able to survive such appalling
conditions?
Łódź was occupied only a week after the Nazis invaded Poland, at the beginning
of September, 1939. Immediately, Jews were rounded up for forced labor, beaten
and robbed, their property seized. Some Jewish families in Łódź were quite
wealthy and lived in urban palaces; they had been among the most prosperous
factory owners. But most Jews were of more modest means. Lusia’s father was a
shopkeeper. Soon after the occupation, however, because he had to close his
shop, he left to find work in Warsaw. A fatal decision; if he had remained in
Łódź he would have had a better chance of surviving.
In December 1940, the Nazis confined all of the Jews of Łódź—a population of
almost a quarter of a million people—in a section of the city in which many Jews
already lived. Later, Jews from the surrounding countryside and Roma were sent
there as well, although the Roma were placed in a separate part of the ghetto.
Taking what they could carry or load onto carts, they were packed into an area
of approximately two square miles, about the same size as the Warsaw ghetto, the
approximate area of New Paltz. By the end of April a fence was built surrounding
the ghetto and on May 1, the ghetto was sealed.
Jews of Łódź being
evacuated from their homes.
Food was the biggest problem
in the ghetto since it had to be brought in from the countryside. The supply was
meager, even for those who had better food allowances; the ration depended on
type of work and status. As the war continued, the food ration became less and
less. Hunger—starvation—was constant. There was little fuel for heat or cooking.
Susceptibility to disease, resulting from weakness, was exacerbated by poor
sanitation resulting in a serious outbreak of typhus.
In December, 1941, Chelmno’s
fleet of trucks, in which people were gassed with carbon monoxide, was in
operation. The first deportation of 10,000 Jews took place after Rumkowski
successfully negotiated the number down from twice that many. In less than a
month however, approximately 1,000 people were being deported daily. And so it
continued, with occasional periods of larger numbers being sent off on the
trains to the death chambers. In order to maintain order, the people were told
that there were hot meals waiting for them on the trains; that they were going
to work on farms. The deportations halted when there were no longer any sick or
disabled, elderly or children left in the ghetto.
Those remaining were the ones
who were able to work, to produce the munitions that were desperately needed by
the German army. In June 1944, as the Soviet army was approaching, the ghetto
was finally liquidated. When the Soviets liberated the ghetto they found less
than 1,000 of the former 230,000 Jew of Łódź and the additional 25,000 who had
been brought there from the countryside. The remaining inhabitants had been
deported to Auschwitz since Chelmno, which was closer to Łódź, had already been
closed down. Included on these last transports were Chaim Rumkowski and his
family—and Lusia, her mother and her aunt.
Deportation from the ghetto
After we left the former
ghetto area, Sebastian took us to the Jewish cemetery. We saw the grand and
ornate mausoleums of the rich Jewish industrialists, but mostly simple
memorials. In addition, there were plaques on the cemetery wall to honor Jews
who were lost in the war. And, just inside the cemetery along this wall, there
was a dreadful site: a series of large ditches that the Germans had dug in
haste, even as they were scurrying to leave. They were meant for the massacre of
the remaining Jews of Łódź but, this one time at least, they couldn’t carry out
their plan. The ditches have not been filled in; they remain as a memorial, the
gouged-out earth now covered with soft grass.
Plaques honoring Holocaust
victims on the cemetery wall.
Our last stop was the Łódź Holocaust
memorial, an impressive and moving work, still incomplete. The first structure
that you see on the memorial site displays the names of all of the villages and
towns from which Jews were brought to the ghetto. At the farthest end, another
structure resembles huge tombstones with the names of camps displayed upon them.
Linking the two is a section of the memorial that resembles train tracks and
which lead to the old train station; the actual evacuation site. One of the
original cattle cars used to remove the Jews to the death camps sits there, in
its siding. Again I imagined Lusia, barely fourteen years old. How frightened
she must have been. “She stood here, with her mother,” I thought, “waiting to be
herded into the car that would take them—where? They had no idea.” We know now
it was to be Auschwitz.
Destinations at the train
station.
Our evening in Łódź was
surprisingly pleasant, given the day’s sobering tour. Along Piotrkowska Street,
the main street of the city which is a pedestrian mall on weekends, there was a
very interesting restaurant where we had our dinner. It looked like a greenhouse
from a distance, a small glass house, perched on top of a sidewalk café. Looking
down on the street we watched a steady promenade of teenagers, young families,
old people, pass below us—oblivious, at that moment, to the painful history of
their city.
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