THE DAY THE NAZIS BEGAN THE SLAUGHTER OF POLAND’S JEWS
It is 75 years since the SS entered the Warsaw Ghetto to take the first group of 6,000 to the gas chambers. Within eight weeks 300,000 had been exterminated
JULY 22, 1942, dawned hot and muggy in the Warsaw Ghetto. Two years earlier the Nazis had forced the Jewish population of German-occupied Poland into an area occupying just 1.3 square miles surrounded by a 10ft wall topped by barbed wire. And this was the day on which they were to embark on one of the most horrifying examples of mass murder in human history.
Armed with lists and maps, SS soldiers moved methodically among the filthy, disease-ridden Jewish apartment blocks to round up the first candidates for extermination. Children cried, women screamed and old men begged for mercy but this was an operation that was to be carried out with no consideration of age, sex or infirmity.
On that first day 6,000 Jews were put aboard trains as the Holocaust moved into its industrial-scale phase.
They were told they were to be resettled in the east. Instead the cattle wagons they boarded were destined for a complex called Treblinka, just two hours north of the city.
It had been fitted out with 10 gas chambers disguised as shower blocks which could suffocate thousands of people per day in batches of 200. There was no need to tattoo the inmates with serial numbers. Treblinka was purely a death factory with most of its victims dead and buried within two hours of arrival.
Today in Poland, in Israel, in Germany and in every other country where Jewish life flourishes, remembrance and memorial services will be held for the victims of this terrible day – the innocents whose sacrifice laid the first foundation stones of the state of Israel.
The courage and suffering of a doomed people, carted away day after day during that terrible summer, is recalled by the very few who survived the ghetto to bear witness to a dark period the Jews called “the great deportations”.
THEY include people such as Ed Herman, an economist, who was born in Warsaw in 1931. A decade later he was walled up with all the other Nazi-defined “Untermensch” or subhumans – including Roma, Slavs, the mentally disabled and physically handicapped – in the ghetto.
“I had close relatives who lived right across from Pawiak prison, run by the Gestapo, where executions took place daily,” he recalled. “I used to visit my family there often. On one such visit to their house, crossing a checkpoint manned by police, I was beaten up by a policeman simply because I was there.
“In the early summer of 1942 my mother decided that for my survival it was necessary for me to be smuggled out. It was just in time because the transport of Warsaw Jews to the death camp of Treblinka started a few months later.”
Between July 22 and September 21 up to 300,000 inhabitants of the ghetto were deported to Treblinka. Herman survived by being taken in by a Christian family before making his way to Hungary. He lost many relatives but his mother and father survived.
Maja Grabowska was also a child when she heard the nailstudded Nazi jackboots clattering through the ghetto streets. “Day after day the Germans were carrying out human hunting – combing block after block for the whole month,” she said.
“The action was proceeding with a lot of shouting, screaming, beating the helpless, firing at them and using all kinds of abuse. Surviving the first wave left us frightened and terrorised.
“From the start of the ‘action’ our small family group: mama and I, my grandparents, and my aunt, with six-year-old Lenka, moved several times because our first temporary home at Zamenhoff Street was searched a couple of times and left deserted. Those who were not successfully hidden were taken to the Umschlagplatz – the collection point for the trains – and perished.
“In each house we moved into, the first thing to do was to find the hiding place: an attic, or cellar, or some wall closet, which we could disguise. The ghetto was almost empty. Houses were abandoned, apartment doors wide open. In succeeding rooms we entered there was still food on the table, clothing and toys around, unmade beds. Tenants disappeared, probably already gassed in Treblinka.
“I remember thinking with envy of HG Wells’ Invisible Man and fantasising about remaining invisible and not just hidden in the cellar, under the bed, in the closet or behind the furniture.
“We slept in crumpled beds, hugging each other but this time our luck ran out. Shortly after we moved in the next round-up began and our hiding place in the attic was discovered.”
She was marched with her family to the Umschlagplatz – known as the “vestibule of hell” – but their fate was deferred because the last train of the day was full.
“The last train left, leaving on the platform dead and dying people. I heard horrifying screams. Blood was flowing so profusely that it was pouring into the building nearby.” In the event a Jewish policeman working for the Nazis led them to safety. While the rest of her family were to perish in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising the following year, Maja, now 84, was smuggled out of the ghetto. But the horror of those days has never left her. “It is always with me,” she says.
ANOTHER child survivor Janina Davidowicz, 87, recalled how the ghetto Jews were lied to – promised bread if they went willingly to the collection point to board the trains. She said: “People were offered two loaves of bread, some margarine or some sugar if they reported to the Umschlagplatz. Nobody imagined they were going straight to a gas chamber.
“You heard every language in the street – Yiddish, Polish, Hungarian, German. We cooked on sawdust between two bricks and fetched water from a communal tap. Food was bread mixed with sawdust and potatoes.”
Her father joined the police and ensured their survival while their neighbours vanished around them. “Our block of flats was empty. The father of the twins living above us threw himself out of the window when he came home and didn’t find his children there.”
In the winter of 1942 Janina’s father smuggled her to a Christian district. As he had police identification papers he was allowed to escort lorries out through the gates and she slipped out under his watch.
Outside the ghetto in the city she was kept hidden by nuns and changed her name but neither her mother nor her father survived the war. She now lives in London.
German troops returned to the ghetto in April 1943 to remove its remaining inhabitants. But by then news of the mass murder had spread and hundreds of brave Jews rose up.
They all perished but the “Jews of Warsaw” had defied the evil Nazi German state and in doing so gave the future state of Israel, God’s promised land, its motto: “Never again.”