By: Zechariah Schwarzberg Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Warsaw Ghetto: a name, a phrase, familiar to most people today only as a matter of history. Important history, yes, but dry and impersonal just the same. Because even the most vivid of photographs and the most descriptive of texts, whether found on the pages of books or the walls of museums, cannot begin to describe the abject terror and suffering experienced by those who were there.

I was there. I lived with my parents, sisters and brother in Warsaw. On September 1, 1939, the German army attacked Poland. The Polish army was crushed in just three weeks. To us, the defeat of the Poles meant an end to the nightmare of daily bombings – but the beginning of the horrors of German occupation.

The shortage of food was felt immediately. We had to stand in long lines to buy bread. Frequently, the Germans would order the Jews out of the waiting line. Some brave souls, determined to bring bread to their families, would try to stay in the line, but always there were Poles on hand who eagerly pointed out the Jews to the Germans.

Meanwhile, the Germans were taking men away to hard labor without the slightest regard for their physical condition. While they worked, the men would be beaten and kicked – some to death. Those lucky enough to return were hard to recognize. And it continued day after day: Jews taken away, many of the more prominent ones never to be seen again.

We were hungry, scared, degraded, sick and miserable. For the Germans, however, this was not enough. We were ordered to leave our homes and move to an area designated for the ghetto. The area was much too small to hold the Jewish population of Warsaw alone, yet every day new transports arrived from other cities.

But as bleak and as hopeless as our situation may have seemed, it was paradise compared with what was yet to come.

Death In The Streets

When we moved into the ghetto, we had to leave behind many of our possessions without receiving any compensation. The prices for food were sky high. With the sealing of the ghetto, people were cut off from their sources of income, stripped of valuables and other personal belongings that could have been exchanged for food or life-saving medicine.

People were literally dying in the streets. It took days for the bodies to be collected and buried. Young children, who in another time and place would have had nothing more serious to contemplate than their schoolwork, grew all too familiar with death as a daily occurrence. Walking around the ghetto, they learned to ignore the corpses strewn in their path.

And then came a new phase in our mistreatment: The SS began taking people out of the ghetto and shipping them in cattle cars to the labor camps. As the population shrank and the ghetto became steadily smaller, we were forced to move. Not once, but again and again. Still we did not dare fight back. Many of us feared the Germans would torture and kill family members in retaliation. Others simply hoped the Allies would finish off the Germans before the Germans finished off the Jews.

A teenager at the time, I managed to get false papers and attempted to pass as an Aryan in order to safely leave the ghetto to look for food. But it wasn’t easy fooling the Poles, many of whom prided themselves on their ability to detect a Jew. For rewards as small as 1 kilo (2.2 lbs) of sugar, Poles delivered to the Gestapo those whom they recognized as Jews.

One day, after a narrow escape, I returned to the ghetto and found only empty rooms. My parents, my sisters, my brother – my entire family – were all gone. Later I would learn that just a couple of days earlier, the special force known as the “group for the extermination of the Jews,” made up of Latvian and Lithuanian SS together with the German SS, had entered the ghetto with guns raised and taken away more than 10,000 people. They returned at night for another 20,000.

All told, the Germans and their collaborators had removed more than 30,000 Jews from the ghetto in less than 24 hours. All of them put in cattle cars, none of them heard from again. My family was among them.

Buying Guns

I stayed with some other boys who, like myself, had lost their families. A man who had been a Jewish officer in the Polish army joined our group. He thought the time had come to do something. Since neither he nor I looked Jewish, he suggested we sneak out to the Aryan side, where he had some contacts, buy guns and smuggle them into the ghetto.

Some of our expeditions were successful, some not. The Polish gun dealers often would pocket the money but not deliver the goods. Instead they would send the Gestapo to make an arrest. We had many close calls, but we knew from the start we were taking chances.

The deportations intensified in January of 1943. SS troops entered the ghetto and called through loudspeakers for all Jews still in the ghetto to come out, orderly and calmly, for resettlement. We were not to worry, they said. No harm would come to us, and we would work and live in much better conditions.

By that time we already knew these were lies, that the transports were going straight to the extermination center in Treblinka. Large numbers of Jews refused to come out of their homes. In desperation, people tried hiding in the most unbelievable places. Many, unfortunately, were discovered in the house-to-house searches. Those found hiding were savagely beaten as they were led away. The cries we heard that day can never be forgotten.

SS Major General Jürgen Stroop (center) watches buildings burn during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Our leaders were constantly sending messages and cables to England, the United States and other countries pleading for help. But help was not forthcoming. The nations of the world had decided to close their eyes and their ears. And, of course, their gates.

We were fewer and fewer in number, and our hopes for assistance or miracles were fading. The idea of armed resistance was gaining popularity. Our families were gone, we had nothing to lose, preparations were underway. Soon it seemed that everyone was contributing to our efforts.

Erev Pesach: Jews Fight Back

On April 19, erev Pesach, SS troops surrounded the ghetto. The trains to take us to the crematorium were waiting at the railroad station. The call for Jews to come out was ignored.

Most of the women, the children and the elderly remained in their hiding places, but we Jewish fighters were watching from the rooftops. The SS soldiers began approaching the houses to force the Jews out at gunpoint. When they came close enough, the fighters hurled their grenades and Molotov cocktails at them.

Many of the soldiers were killed or injured, and the Germans retreated in total bewilderment. Jews were expected to march meekly to their deaths. Certainly they were not supposed to fight back, and with such ferocity yet.

The SS returned with a tank. We burned it. Our positions atop the roofs gave us an advantage. It was difficult for the Germans to get at us with their small weapons and not be exposed to our grenades and Molotov cocktails.

On the other hand, we had to use our weapons cautiously, without any waste. Our supplies were few, but we used them efficiently and effectively. Hard to believe, but the “invincible” Germans had to call in regular army reinforcements to crush the ghetto uprising.

We fought on. The weapons and uniforms we took off the bodies of German soldiers came in very handy. Humiliated, the Germans replaced their commanding general with the tough, battle-hardened General Jurgen Stroop.

Stroop promised to give Hitler the annihilation of Warsaw’s Jews as a birthday present. He brought in heavy guns, tanks and flame-throwers. With what little we had, we knew we could not resist the superior German firepower much longer.

I was sent over to the Aryan side to try to get some supplies and deliver messages, and was still there when the Germans began burning the ghetto. The Poles gathered around the ghetto and brought their children to see the destruction of the Jews inside. Their mood was festive, as though they were on a picnic or watching a parade.

While the Poles watched and made merry, the Germans threw firebombs at the houses they’d sprayed with gasoline. The ghetto was exploding in flames. The few who survived the inferno were killed or caught while trying to escape through underground passages and city sewers.

There was no longer any place for me to go back to. I hoped to somehow find a place on the Aryan side. I arranged to meet with a non-Jewish friend who offered to help me, but he never showed up.

Instead I was caught by the Gestapo, beaten severely and shipped off, first to Maidanek and then to a labor camp in Skarzysko. After one year in Skarzysko I was moved to Buchenwald.

Somehow, through much suffering and with my faith in Hashem intact, I survived. I survived the ghetto and the camps. I survived the Germans. I survived the Poles and the Lithuanians and the Latvians and the Ukrainians. I survived them all.

Zechariah Schwarzberg, z”l, was a cantor in France, Switzerland and the U.S. He passed away in June 2000.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 and is filed under history. You can leave a response.