The wall is shutting off the Saxony Gardens and the Great Tlomatskie Synagogue. We are even denied the squalid Krasinski Gardens. I do not believe there will be a single tree in the ghetto.
For eleven crooked, reasonless miles. Who planned this? In some places the wall cuts right down the middle of the street, putting half of the houses in the ghetto and half outside. On Leszno Street it slices right through the middle of the courthouse. Chlodna Street is a finger of land on the Aryan side, splitting the ghetto into two parts. The big ghetto is on the north. A smaller ghetto is to the south, and this holds the elite—members of the Civil Authority, Militia, wealthy, German and Austrian deportees. A bridge covered with barbed wire crosses Chlodna Street, connecting the two ghettos. It has been named the “Polish corridor.”
Seven, eight, nine, ten feet. The wall is connected in all parts. Tens of thousands of jagged pieces of glass have been cemented on top to rip off the hand of anyone who tries to scale it. A triple strand of barbed wire is on top of the glass.
There are thirteen gates. Never has the unfortunate number had a more sinister use. There are guards at each gate. A few of the Reinhard Corps bossing the unarmed Polish Blue Police. There is a rumor that a Jewish police force will be formed inside the ghetto.
Irony. One Catholic church on Leszno has been included in the ghetto. The Catholics have put it to work. Franciscan Father Jakub has been sent in to take care of Jewish converts who are forced to live as Jews now but still carry on Catholic ritual.
Statistics? The ghetto is a thousand acres, or one hundred square blocks, or fifteen hundred buildings. Any way you cut it, it’s pretty rough to find places for a half million people.
On November 7, 1940, the Big Seven had completed the wall and the ghetto was declared. In a fell swoop tens of thousands who were working at jobs outside the quarantine area were jobless.
Sieghold Stutze’s Reinhard Corps had the task of ghetto security. True to early rumor, a Jewish Militia was formed. On paper it was under the direction of the Jewish Civil Authority, a guise in keeping with the German policy of trying to create the illusion that the Jews were imposing this upon each other. Stutze was the ruler of the Jewish Militia.
He chose as his chief a former sub-warden of the Pawiak Prison named Piotr Warsinski, who had a long-time reputation of brutality to prisoners, especially Jewish prisoners.
Piotr Warsinski was squat, bald, and sported an immense mustache. A tormented youth filled with fear of a brutal father had left him impotent and seething with hatred. Warsinski blamed his demented soul on being a Jew. He converted. Conversion left him with an unreasonable hatred of Judaism. Now the Germans forced him to be a Jew again and it intensified his hate.
Warsinski gathered about him the dregs of Jewish society. Men and women with limited mentality, criminal records, without conscience. They were given truncheons, special armbands, blue caps, and they were issued black boots, the symbol of power. They were given preferential rations and quarters for themselves and their families.
There was one condition. Warsinski made it utterly clear that their personal survival depended upon complete obedience.
As 1940 closed, a half million people in the Warsaw ghetto formed the largest human stockyard the world had ever known. They were at the complete mercy of the greatest military power ever experienced by man. The Germans had craftily carried out their master plan by forcing Jew to rule Jew through the impotent Jewish Civil Authority backed by the potent Jewish Militia under the sadist Warsinski. To augment their problems, the Big Seven continued their legalized swindles.
All that was left to protect this swell of humanity was a thin line of Zionists, Socialists, and the Orphans and Self-Help Society with American Aid.
Chapter Nineteen
Journal Entry
I THINK THAT SUSAN Geller will die of a broken heart. The Germans have ordered her to abandon our orphanage (and pride and joy) in Powazki and move inside the ghetto. Their directives order Susan to leave all equipment attached to the floors and walls, and that constitutes some of our most expensive things. Even the Orphans and Self-Help Society has a hard time renting property these days. Space is at a premium. We were able to find Susan a building on Niska Street, which she must completely convert. It is hardly comparable to the place in Powazki.
Thank the Lord for my dear Sylvia and for Deborah Bronski. Between the two of them, they kept Susan from a breakdown on moving day. It is so strange how different Deborah and Paul Bronski are. Yesterday I had to argue for three solid hours to convince Paul Bronski to petition the Germans to allow us to keep our farm in Wework running. You never know how the Germans will react. Paul just phoned me that the farm will be allowed to operate. Tolek Alterman will be overjoyed.
I am sending my son Wolf out to the farm in Wework. It will be good for him out there.
We have received our first group of Dutch Jews. The trip to Poland was very hard. They were jammed in cattle cars.
Where can we put them? I don’t know. The ghetto has over five hundred fifty thousand people in it now.
Mila 19 has been divided up by the Bathyran Council. On the first floor we have the ghetto administrative offices of the Orphans and Self-Help. We have a soup kitchen that can be entered from the back alley (Orphans and Self-Help now runs sixty soup kitchens), and we have a dispensary for minor ailments and a delousing shed as demanded by our German friends.
Second story. Bathyran families. Our rule is one family to a single room, regardless of the size of the family. The kitchen for the entire house is also on the second floor.
Twenty-one families ... sixty-two occupants, including Sylvia, me, and baby Moses (now that Wolf is gone).
Third floor. Walls have been broken through. Our dormitory for single girls. We have thirty. Divided right down the middle; fifteen work in the dispensary and soup kitchen and fifteen are hired out as domestics in the small ghetto on the southern end. I cheat by supplying our domestics with green armbands denoting a Self-Help employee in order to allow them to move about unmolested by Warsinski’s overeager Jewish Militia.
Fourth floor. Fifty of our boys have a dormitory. Twenty of them work in Mila 19. Thirty work at various jobs around the ghetto, mostly as bicycle porters and riksha drivers.
The problem is shaping up. Of our eighty “kids,” most have left families to live with us in the communal. How many members of their families can we take in—the aged, the ill? This is going to become serious.
In the attic we have cut up a dozen cubicles for the married couples. They are living on the second floor, mostly more than two to a room, so they must have a place where they can duck off for a few hours to have privacy. There are preset signals on the doors to advise whether the cubicles are in use or not. Sylvia and I are fortunate. With Wolf gone and the baby still an infant, we manage very well in our room.
The unmarried who wish privacy have to work it out for themselves. We neither officially encourage nor discourage it. Off the record, the unmarried know that the basement is available to them.
Irony. David Zemba, who wins more and more respect from me all the time, went in to see Schreiker and demanded that American Aid be allowed to open an office in the ghetto. So, he gets it. The dollars he receives from American Jews are our main support, but we can’t keep up with the flood of refugees, mass fines, and confiscations.