Col#299- 10/8/26
THE WARSAW GHETTO
By
Richard Davis
The view from our hotel room in Warsaw, Poland overlooks some of the remaining pieces of the brick walls from the Warsaw ghetto. As I grow closer to the end than to the beginning of my life, I have become more curious about where I have come from than where I am going. I don’t know if it is a universal phenomenon, but the feeling has been compelling for me.
As a second-generation American Jew I know that I should be more aware of where my family came from. Sadly, when I had the chance to talk to living relatives and hear their history, I never asked questions. It turns out that my cousins were equally as ignorant, and now the generation that lived our history have all passed on.
The best I can do is to try to do some genealogy research and make some educated guesses. My wife’s family came from Ukraine and Poland and my family came from Poland and Lithuania. We have not heard stories of any direct relatives dying in the Holocaust, but I am sure there are descendants that may have met their end in concentration camps.
We figured that the best we could do now is to travel to some of the places where we know our roots are and try to get a sense of the world we came from. The physical structures may not remain, but the spirit lives on in many ways.
In 1940 the Nazis herded 460,000 Jews into an area of 3.4 km2 (1.3 sq mi) and according to Wikipedia, “…with an average of 9.2 persons per room, barely subsisting on meager food rations. Jews were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Nazi concentration camps and mass-killing centers. In the summer of 1942, at least 254,000 ghetto residents were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp during Großaktion Warschau under the guise of “resettlement in the East” over the course of the summer.”
On April 19, 1943 the Jews remaining in the ghetto, realizing they were all doomed to death, began an uprising that ended on May 16, 1943. The hope was that some of the allied countries would come to help the Jews fight an impossible battle against an invading force. That did not happen and the Jews fought as hard as they could, but in the end, they were defeated and the Germans completely destroyed the ghetto.
After spending an afternoon at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Museum it became clear that the uprising was not a spontaneous event. The core of the uprising “soldiers” did a lot of preparation and their organization, communication and collaboration were all done at an impossibly high level.
Seven thousand Jews died fighting in the uprising and those who survived either went into hiding or were deported to concentration camps. Some of those who hid and survived have told their stories and there are books and movies that demand to be read and seen.
According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, “After the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the SS and police deported approximately 42,000 Jews to forced-labor camps and to the Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp. Most of these people were murdered in November 1943 in a two-day shooting operation known as Operation Harvest Festival (Erntefest).
The horrors are unimaginable. Bravery is not the right word for what they did during the uprising, I don’t know if there is an English word to properly describe their efforts. As my wife and I walked along the cobblestones streets of the former ghetto it all seemed so neat and proper among fairly new buildings bustling with the new life in Warsaw.
I can’t describe the feeling I had knowing what had happened there, but the memory of that second-hand history is now firmly part of my psyche.
