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18 November 2015
Word Count: 2,365

How the Nazis Destroyed the Jews of Warsaw

On March 17, 1942, Adam Czerniakow wrote of a rare occurrence in his famous

diary that took place in the Warsaw ghetto of Poland. He wrote of joy in the ghetto and

stated, It is the first time I see the Ghetto smile.1 These people were smiling in reaction

to 151 prisoners being released thanks Czerniakows persistent appeals to the Kommissar.

There were many common occurrences that took place within the walls of the ghetto,

including starvation, severe illness, and death, but happiness was not among these and it

seemed as though the Nazis made sure of this with every chance they were given. Adam

Czerniakow was the chairman of the Jewish Council in the Warsaw Ghetto, and with this

position came great difficulties and responsibilities. The Nazis constantly imposed

outrageous demands upon the Jewish Council and the community at large. During his

years of chairman, Adam Czerniakow fought vigorously to make the lives of the people

living within the ghetto as best as he possibly could under the circumstances that he

faced. In The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, Czerniakow gives

the reader insight to the various ways the Nazis ensured the destruction of Jews through

economic pressures, physical exertion and abuse, and mental degradation. He also wrote

of his tireless attempts to counteract these destructive actions, sometimes proving

successful, but other times resulting in unsatisfactory outcomes and proving disastrous

for the population.

One of the most persistent complications that Czerniakow faced, and was never able to

solve completely, was the implementation of economic destruction of the ghetto by Nazi

1 Adam Czerniakow, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, ed. Raul Hilberg,
Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999), 335.
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officials. This economic devastation not only affected the Jewish Council, but it affected

the population of the ghetto directly as well. The Jewish Council was forced to pay the

expenses of many things, such as the construction of the ghetto walls, as well as the

construction of quarantines and offices within the ghetto, and was even forced to pay

compensation to whoever demanded it when a member of the ghetto acted out against or

offended a non-Jew. The financial crisis of Warsaw went on from before the ghetto was

officially established until its end. In early January of 1940, Czerniakow wrote that Dr.

Schrempf, a known anti-Jewish German doctor and who was in charge of the health

division of Warsaw,2 ordered that Czerniakow build a quarantine facility that would cost

100,000 zlotys.3 Only a few days after this, the Commander of the Police Regiment, Lt.

Col. Daume, forced the Community to pay another 100,000 zlotys because a Jew had

beaten up a woman of German ethnicity, as well as 6,100 zlotys as compensation for

Jews who refused to wear their distinguishing armbands.4 Czerniakow wrote of numerous

amounts of other instances just as these, and the Council never obtained any type of

respite from these ever increasing financial demands of the Nazi state. As a result of the

Council having to pay for all of these extra expenses, it did not have enough money to

pay for things that could possibly have benefited people living within the ghetto, such as

the Jewish workers salaries. On April 16, 1940, Czerniakow wrote that the ghetto was

on the brink of bankruptcy and that it was unable to pay the 120,000 zlotys in salaries

to the Labor Battalion workers, as well as the salaries to the Councils staff. 5 This

2 Czerniakow, 90, note 45.

3 Czerniakow, 106.

4 Czerniakow, January 26, 1940, 111.

5 Czerniakow, 140.
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affected individuals in the community because when they were not paid for their work,

they were less motivated to work efficiently, or at all. This absence of salaries also

prevented Jewish workers from being able to purchase food and contributed to the

increasing starvation and death rate among the Jews.

A variety of different people throughout the Nazi state demanded payment from

Czerniakow, and while he obeyed, he did not always do so passively and did many things

in order to challenge what had been inflicted upon the ghetto. Something that Czerniakow

did often was articulating his dissatisfaction to his superiors, which proved effective at

times but ineffective at others. In order to combat the financial destruction of the ghetto,

he often asked for loans from various organizations. For example, on March 23, 1940

Czerniakow had no money to pay salaries of the workers and in response to this he

requested a loan of 100,000 zlotys from the SS, which they denied.6 Often times when

Czerniakow was granted a loan, it had certain stipulations attached to it. At one point

there was discussion of granting a loan to the Community, but this loan was to come from

the communitys own scarce funds and was to be secured with a mortgage on

Community owned buildings.7 The Nazis never seized to demand payments from the

Jewish Council, as a year later in October 1941, Czerniakow wrote the daily appeals for

money are in vain.8 Nazis, such as the SS or the Gestapo often threatened the killing or

arresting of people from the Jewish community if they were not paid what they

demanded, yet they refused to grant the Council loans so that they could pay them.

6 Czerniakow,131.

7 Czerniakow, October 15, 1940, 207.

8 Czerniakow, 294.
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Through this, one can understand that the Nazis used any excuse available to inflict any

type of destruction upon the Jews.

Along with financial destruction that the Nazis implemented upon the Jewish

Council and the ghetto, they also contributed to and carried out various forms of physical

destruction. Starvation was one of these forms of this physical devastation, and while the

Nazis did not directly inflict this on the Jewish community, they played a large role in

contributing towards it. There are many times in Czerniakows diary when he wrote of

the people starving in the ghetto and he put a large emphasis on the starvation of children

and the poor. In Hilberg and Starons introduction, they mention that Auerswald, the

Kommissariat, was instrumental in aiding to the starvation that swept throughout the

ghetto.9 On May 19, 1941, Czerniakow wrote in his diary that he presented to the

Gestapo that the rations given to the Jewish community were too scarce and in turn,

1,700 men and women had died from starvation in the time span of only fifteen days.10

Food was also tremendously expensive and Czerniakow wrote of the Community

Authority and how they were outraged with the extreme cost of food.11 In response to all

of these atrocities that were caused by the lack of food, Czerniakow tried his best to

appeal to the Nazis and to get better rations for his ghetto but most of these attempts were

made in vain. At one point he asked the authorities if he could be allowed to purchase

food items from the Aryan market that were not rationed out. After he was denied this

9 Raul Hilberg and Stanislaw Staron, introduction to The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to
Doom, ed. Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999), 64.

10 Czerniakow, 237.

11 Czerniakow, May 26, 1941, 242.

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he inquired if he could obtain larger rations for the Jews, and again was denied.12 The

Nazi officials did not deny Czerniakow the right to more food for the Jews because they

could not afford to give it to them, but because they did not care or want to give it to

them. These Germans knew what was happening in the ghetto and were completely

aware that thousands of people were dying due to starvation, yet they did not bother to

help this situation at all.

Starvation was only one of the physical mechanisms of destruction that the Nazis

forced onto the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, and while many Jews died of starvation,

many also died from illness, and in particular from typhus. Germans were terrified of this

disease spreading to their neighborhoods and one of the initial reasons the ghetto walls

were built was to keep typhus within the Jewish population. Germans believed that the

disease was caused by lice that infected Jews, but Czerniakow did not share these beliefs.

He stated that starvation, overcrowding, and the unsanitary conditions inflicted and aided

by the Nazis were the main cause of typhus within the ghetto.13 On August 22, 1941,

Czerniakow brought up the issue of typhus and the destruction of human life to

Auerswald, to which he responded that the ghetto was not efficiently closed off.14

Auerswalds response exemplifies the idea that he was mostly concerned about the

disease escaping the ghetto and seeping into the non-Jewish portions of the city, and that

he only cared about sealing off the disease and keeping it within the walls of the ghetto.

Czerniakow also attempted to improve the trash removal system of the ghetto in April of

12 Raul Hilberg and Stanislaw, 56.

13 Czerniakow, October 23, 1941, 292.

14 Czerniakow, 270.
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1942. He met with Dr. Hagen about this issue and complained that compared to the

Aryan side of the city, the ghetto received sufficiently less garbage disposal services,

and that this needed to be addressed.15 Nazis claimed that lice infestation was the cause of

typhus among Jews and when Czerniakow presented to them the idea that the Nazis were

the reason for the increase of the disease by inflicting terrible conditions upon the Jews of

the ghetto, they did not do anything to improve the conditions. Through this it is clear

that the Nazis did not care about what happened to the Jewish population in the ghetto

because when they were given opportunities to help the situation they either ignored or

refused them.

Along with the financial and physical destruction that the Nazis caused among the

Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, mental destruction of the Jews was also present. One of the

first means of mental degradation that Czerniakow wrote of in his diary was of the law

that forced the Jews to wear distinguishing armbands while in public. Jews were forced

by the Nazis to wear these armbands so they could be easily distinguished before the

ghetto walls were built. These armbands set the Jews apart from the rest of their

community and wearing one meant that one was viewed as subhuman, and every time

that person looked at the band around their arm they are reminded of this. From the first

time that Czerniakow mentioned the mandatory armbands on November 20, 193916 he

fought to get as many people exempted from the requirement as possible. On March 27,

Czerniakow met with the Chief of Population and Welfare in the Interior Main Division

of the Generalgovernment, Dr. Fritz Arlt, and made it clear to him that the armbands

15 Czerniakow, April 18, 1942, 344.

16 Czerniakow , 94.
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marked the Jews as degenerates and made them more susceptible illicit activity on the

streets. He then stated that because there were green armbands exempting [some] Jews

that the Nazi officials were fully aware of the threat that the armbands brought to the

Jewish community.17 These armbands were also a source of humiliation for the Jews

because non-Jews could easily identify them and often times beat or embarrassed the

Jews who wore them. For example, Czerniakow wrote of an incident where a non-Jew

approached a Jew who was wearing an armband and called him General Sir to which

the Jew responded that he was no General, and the non-Jew retorted, Yes you are, there

is your star. 18 The stranger who approached this Jew knew what the star on the his

armband meant, but decided to point it out and make fun of him for it. The Nazis knew

what these armbands were doing to Jews, but to the Nazis, the armbands were an easy

way to ensure both the mental and physical destruction of the Jews.

Another way that the Nazis ensured the mental disintegration of the Jews of

Warsaw, and many other places, was by forcing them to leave their homes as the ghetto

boundaries continued to fluctuate throughout its entire existence. These people who were

forced out of their homes were also forced to leave most of their belongings behind, thus

stripping them of their material life. On September 21, 1940 Czerniakow wrote about a

man by the name of Czernecki who was forced out of his apartment without being able to

take any of his personal items with him.19 It is often stated that materials have little

significance in life, but when one has already been deprived of any type of mental bliss,

17 Czerniakow, 132.

18 Czerniakow, February 4, 1940, 115.

19 Czerniakow, 200.
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they begin to have more meaning than one might imagine. These people were forced to

leave behind mementos and relics that may have reminded them of the lives they once

lived and of family members that they may have lost due to the Nazis terrible

mechanisms of destruction. While Czerniakow could not do much about the evicting of

Jewish residences from their homes, he often asked Auerswald for extensions of the

deadlines for resettlement, which often proved successful. These deadlines may have

made it a little easier for the residents to leave in time to avoid beatings or arrest, but it

was never any easier for them to do so.

Every Jew who lived in the Warsaw ghetto felt the repercussions of the Nazis

various mechanisms of destruction and Czerniakow was not exempt from this. As the

chairman of the Jewish Council in the Warsaw ghetto, he had to deal with the demands of

both the Nazis and the Jewish population. He attempted to make the lives of Jews

residing in the ghetto as best as he possibly could under the conditions that were forced

upon him, and often at his own expense. Czerniakow never drew a salary,20 he rejected a

pass to emigrate to Palestine,21 and even offered himself as a hostage at one point.22

Through each of these acts it is apparent that Czerniakow cared immensely about the

Jews of Warsaw and would do anything in order to help them in any way he could. He

also appealed to his German overseers multiple times to combat the terrible things that

they forced upon the Jews but many times these attempts proved ineffective, and because

of this Czerniakow was often discouraged about his position as chairman. At one point

20 Czerniakow, March 30, 1940, 134.

21 Czerniakow, February 12, 1940, 117.

22 Czerniakow, November 24, 1939, 93.

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not long after he was selected as chairman and after he realized the responsibility that

came with the position, Czerniakow asked the SS to be relieved of his duties, of which

they refused.23 In the end, Czerniakows efforts were not enough to save the Jewish

population, but he played a huge role in making their lives a little bit easier than they

otherwise would have been without his tireless efforts.

23 Czerniakow, January 6, 1940, 111.

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Bibliography

Czerniakow, Adam. The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, Edited
by Raul Hilber, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999.

Hilberg, Raul and Stanislow Staron. Introduction to The Warsaw Diary of Adam
Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, Edited by Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and
Josef Kermisz. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999.