Home to much of the Polish educated cla.s.ses and to Europe"s largest society of Jews, Warsaw was a metropolis that had no place in the n.a.z.i worldview. As of spring 1942, more than 350,000 Jews were still alive in the Warsaw ghetto.
Warsaw was the largest city in the General Government, but not its administrative center. Hans Frank, the general governor, preferred to rule from Cracow, taking over the ancient Polish royal castle and presenting himself as latter-day racial royalty. In October 1939, he had stymied attempts to resolve the Jewish "problem" by transporting Jews into the Lublin district of the General Government. In December 1941, Frank told his subordinates that they "must get rid of the Jews." He had no idea, even then, how this could be achieved. But by spring 1942, Frank knew. Lublin had something to offer Frank: it was no longer the district that would attract more Jews to the General Government, but the place where Jews who already lived in the General Government could be murdered. This was welcome. Trawniki men arrived in Warsaw in February and April. In summer 1942 Frank ceded control of Jewish employment, and then the ghettos themselves, to the SS.20 The a.s.sa.s.sination of a very prominent SS commander provided the pretext for the next escalation. After Hitler and Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich was the most important architect of the policy to exterminate the Jews. He was also a typical example of the n.a.z.i tendency to entrust several offices to one person: already the head of the Reich Security Main Office, he was placed in charge of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech lands annexed to Germany in 1939. On 27 May 1942, he was injured in an a.s.sa.s.sination attempt by a Czech and a Slovak employed by British intelligence, and died on 4 June. Hitler and Himmler were annoyed with him for travelling without a security detail, which Heydrich believed he did not need because of his popularity among Czechs. In the Czech lands the Germans pursued no repressive policies comparable to those in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union; Heydrich had made a special point of favoring the Czech working cla.s.s.21 Heydrich"s a.s.sa.s.sination meant the loss of a planner of the Final Solution, but the gain of a martyr. Hitler and Himmler met and spoke on June 3rd, 4th, and 5th 1942. Himmler gave the eulogy: "Ours is the holy duty to avenge his death, to take up his labor, and to destroy the enemies of our people without mercy or weakness." One Czech village, Lidice, would be totally destroyed as retribution for the a.s.sa.s.sination of Heydrich. Its men were shot on the spot, its women sent to the German concentration camp at Ravensbruck, and the children ga.s.sed at Chemno.22 The n.a.z.i policy of the complete elimination of Polish Jews in the General Government now took the name "Operation Reinhard," as a tribute to Heydrich. The reference to the a.s.sa.s.sination made victims of the Germans, and allowed the ma.s.s murder of Jews to be presented as retribution. Within the n.a.z.i worldview, the a.s.sa.s.sination of Heydrich in May 1942 played a role similar to that of the American declaration of war in December 1941: it gave rise to a feeling of righteous solidarity among the ostensibly attacked n.a.z.is, and it distracted attention from the true sources of German predicaments and policies. Heydrich became a prominent "victim" of the supposed international Jewish conspiracy that was responsible for the war.23 Jews were killed because Hitler had defined this as an aim of the war. But even after he made his desires known, the timing of their death was conditioned by German perceptions of the war"s course and a.s.sociated economic priorities. Jews were more likely to die when Germans were concerned with food shortages, and less likely to die when Germans were concerned with labor shortages.
Hitler announced his decision to kill all the Jews not long after he had announced his decision that Soviet prisoners of war should be used as labor rather than killed. In early 1942 surviving Soviet prisoners of war were integrated into the labor force in Germany proper, while Hans Frank succeeded in organizing a colonial Polish economy in his General Government. With labor supplies momentarily a.s.sured, food became the primary concern, both in the Reich and in occupied Poland. Goring had to announce cuts in food rations for Germans in the Reich in April 1942, and the average consumption of calories in the Reich did indeed decline considerably that year. Frank, for his part, was concerned with the improvement of food supplies to his Polish working cla.s.s.24 Thus in summer 1942 economic concerns, as understood by the Germans, hastened rather than hindered the plan to murder all of the Polish Jews. When food rather than labor was the primary anxiety, Jews became "useless eaters," and even those working for the benefit of the German economy and the Wehrmacht were in danger. By the end of 1942, Hans Frank again wanted labor more than he wanted food, and thus wanted remaining Jews to be kept alive. By then, most Polish Jews were already dead. The German economy was like a razor tightrope that Jews were forced to walk, barefoot, blindfolded, and without a net. It was all that was between them and death, it was b.l.o.o.d.y and treacherous, it was certain to fail them.25 The death facility at Treblinka was completed on 11 July 1942. Eight days later, on 19 July 1942, Himmler ordered the complete "resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the General Government by 31 December 1942." This meant, before all, Warsaw.26 In Warsaw on 22 July 1942, Globocnik"s "resettlement" specialist Hermann Hofle and his group of SS ghetto clearers briefed the local Security Police in Warsaw, and then paid a visit to Adam Czerniakow, head of the Judenrat. Hofle told Czerniakow that he would have to present five thousand Jews at a transfer point, or Umschlagplatz, the following day. Czerniakow, who knew of the earlier ghetto clearings in the Lublin district, seemed to grasp what was afoot. Rather than accept responsibility for a part in the coordination of the murder of his people, he killed himself. With Czerniakow dead, the Germans then turned to deception, ordering the Jewish police to hang signs promising bread and marmalade to those who would appear at the Umschlagplatz. The first transport of about five thousand Jews departed Warsaw for Treblinka on 23 July. As Bluma Bergman recalled, people who were starving would do anything for a bit of food, "even if you know that you"re going to be killed."27 Thus began the operation in the Warsaw ghetto that the Germans called the "Large Action." Hofle and his crew installed themselves in the ghetto, at elazna 103. As they had done in other cities and towns in the Lublin, Cracow, and Galicia districts of the General Government, they and the local Security Police now turned to coercion. With the help of a few hundred Trawniki men and about two thousand Jewish policemen, the Germans organized roundups in the Warsaw ghetto almost every single day for the next two months. After the very hungry were gone, the Jewish police next took groups who seemed helpless: the orphans, the poor, the homeless, prisoners. The old and the young had no chance whatsoever. Children under the age of fifteen disappeared entirely from the ghetto. The Germans shot very young children, the sick, the handicapped, and the aged on the spot.28 At first, the Jewish police were able to carry out the task with little German supervision. After a few days of deporting the hungry and the helpless, the Germans applied the same technique in Warsaw as elsewhere: the surprise blockade of an apartment building or part of a street, the verification of papers, and the deportation of all Jews not deemed necessary for labor. The Jewish police, supervised by the German police, carried out the first blockade on 29 July 1942. The Germans decided which areas were to be cleared at what times; the Jewish policemen would open at dawn a sealed envelope with instructions about which areas were to be cleared on that day. In general the Germans carried out two actions each day, aiming to fill a quota.29 Selections for labor kept some individuals alive, but undermined any collective spirit of resistance. Although the Germans were far from precise in their observation of the difference between doc.u.mented laborers and others, selection created a crucial social division between those Jews who had papers and those who did not, and brought a general preoccupation with personal security. People tended to believe that they and their families could remain in the ghetto with the right jobs and the right papers. This privatization of hope was doom for the collectivity. Available energy was spent in the hunt for doc.u.ments, rather than in the coordination of resistance. No one tried (as yet) to wrest the monopoly of force within the ghetto from the Germans and the Jewish police. So long as there was no Jewish group willing to resist the Jewish police, the roundups and deportations could continue, with German oversight but quite limited German personnel.30 By August 1942 the Germans required that Jewish policemen each produce five Jews a day for deportation, or else see members of their own families deported. This had the effect of removing those who could not defend themselves. The major orphanages were emptied on 5 August. The famous educator Ja.n.u.sz Korczak led his children to the Umschlagplatz. He held two of them by the hand and walked with his head high. Among the 6,623 people deported that day with him were the educators and caretakers of the ghetto"s orphans: his colleague Stefania Wilczyska and many others. Policemen took the old and the young to Umschlagplatz on carts. Jewish policemen took a small girl from her home when her mother was away running an errand. Her last words before deportation to Treblinka were recorded: "I know that you are a good man, sir. Be so kind as to not take me away. My mama left for just a moment. She"ll be back in just a moment, and I won"t be there, be so kind as to not take me away."31 In the first two months of the Large Action, some 265,040 Jews were taken to the Umschlagplatz, and another 10,380 or so killed in the ghetto itself. Perhaps sixty thousand Jews remained. They were predominantly fit younger males.32 Each stage of the ma.s.s murder of the Warsaw Jews was so dreadful that it gave rise to hopes that the near future might at least be better than the immediate past. Some Jews really did believe that labor in the east would be better than life in the ghetto. Once a.s.sembled at Umschlagplatz, Jews could be forgiven for believing that embarking on trains would be better than indefinite waiting under the hot sun without food, water, and sanitary facilities. The supervision of Umschlagplatz was a.s.signed to the Jewish police, who occasionally freed people they knew, or people who could afford to bribe them. As the historian Emanuel Ringelblum recorded, the Jewish police sometimes demanded, in addition to cash, payment "in kind," which is to say s.e.x with the women whom they saved.33 In the trains, illusions faded. Although a.s.sured that their destination was a labor camp "in the east," some Jews must have suspected that this was false: after all, people with labor certificates were precisely the ones who remained in Warsaw. If work was the goal, then why were the very old and the very young sent first? The trains were accorded the lowest priority in the railway system, and often took days to reach a destination that was in fact rather close to Warsaw-Treblinka was only about a hundred kilometers to the northeast. The Jews were given no food or water, and died in large numbers on many of the transports. Children licked each other"s sweat. Mothers sometimes threw small children from trains, guessing that they would be more likely to survive in the wild than wherever the train was going. Some parents explained to their very small children, born in the ghetto, what could be seen through windows or cracks in doors. The very youngest had never seen fields or forests before. Nor would they again.34 Poles would yell at the trains going by. The gesture of a finger across the throat, remembered with loathing by a few Jewish survivors, was meant to communicate to the Jews that they were going to die-though not necessarily that the Poles wished this upon them. Some Poles called for money; others, perhaps more merciful, perhaps with other needs, asked for children. Yankiel Wiernik remembered his own transport, an early one from Warsaw: "My view took in everyone and everything, yet I could not take in the enormity of the misfortune." No one could.35
Each transport was a.s.sembled from fifty-seven to sixty train cars, or about five to six thousand people. Upon arrival at the rail station nearest Treblinka, the train stopped. Then, sometimes after a wait of hours or even days, another engine pulled up, and moved nineteen or twenty of the cars-1,700 to 2,000 people-to a rail spur inside the Treblinka death factory. The second engine pushed rather than pulled these cars, so that the engineer was going backward, and never himself faced or entered the facility.36 The Jews who were still alive were then forced from each car by Trawniki men brandishing guns and cracking whips. The Jews deported to Treblinka died, almost all of them, in these first few weeks, but not as smoothly as at Beec and Sobibor, and not as the Germans intended. The regular and ma.s.sive transports of Jews had overwhelmed the small gas chambers at Treblinka very quickly, and so the Germans and the Trawniki men had to resort to shooting. This was not the task for which the Trawniki men had been trained. They did it badly, but they did it. By August the rail spur inside the Treblinka death factory was surrounded by piles of corpses.
Oskar Berger, who arrived on a transport of August 22nd, remembered "hundreds of bodies lying around." Yankiel Wiernik recalled his arrival on 24 August: "The camp yard was littered with corpses, some still in their clothes and some naked, their faces distorted with fright and awe, black and swollen, the eyes wide open, with protruding tongues, skulls crushed, bodies mangled." A Jew who had arrived the day before, 23 August, had just avoided joining that pile. He was chosen for labor, which chiefly meant the disposal of human remains. He recalled how the killing was done in those early weeks of Treblinka: "After we left the wagon the Germans and Ukrainians, whips in their hands, drove us into a courtyard, where they ordered us to lie down with our faces to the ground. Then they walked through and shot us in the back of the neck." Adam Krzepicki, who arrived on 25 August, recorded a similar impression: "Corpses of people of different ages, in different positions, with different expressions on their faces the moment they breathed their last. All around, just earth, sky, and corpses!" The next day, 26 August, was remembered by Edward Weinstein: "And I looked out, and I saw h.e.l.l. Bodies, as high as the windows on the cattle car, on the ramp." Franz Stangl, the German (Austrian) police officer who commanded the death factory at Sobibor, was called in to investigate the chaos of Treblinka. He was, presumably, not a man who was easily overwhelmed by death, and unlike the arriving Jews he had some idea of what to expect. Nevertheless he was shocked by what he found: "The smell was indescribable; the hundreds, no, the thousands of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrefying."37 Irmfried Eberl, the German (Austrian) medical doctor who commanded Treblinka, had hoped to prove his worth. He wanted his kill rates to exceed those of the other death facility commanders, the police chiefs at Beec and Sobibor. He continued to accept transports in August 1942 even as the number of people to be killed far exceeded the facility"s capacity to asphyxiate them. Death then radiated outward: from the gas chambers to the waiting area in the courtyard, and from the courtyard to the trains waiting at the station, or on the tracks, or somewhere far away in occupied Poland. The Jews died all the same, almost all of them; but now a few escaped from the trains, which had very rarely happened during earlier transports to Sobibor and Beec.38 Escapees from the trains made their way back to the Warsaw ghetto, often with an idea of what they had been spared. The disorganization also drew the attention of onlookers. Because of all the delays, trains conveying German soldiers to the eastern front were more likely to pa.s.s or to be caught behind one of the death trains; a few onlookers took photographs, others vomited from the stench. Some of these soldiers were on their way to southwestern Soviet Russia to take part in the offensive at Stalingrad. Those German soldiers who saw the Treblinka transports knew, if they wanted to know, just what they were fighting for.39 Eberl was removed from his post for incompetence, and in August 1942 Stangl took command at Treblinka. Stangl, who later said that he regarded the ma.s.s ga.s.sing of Jews as his "profession" and that he "enjoyed it," quickly put Treblinka in order. He called a temporary halt to transports, and had the bodies buried by Jewish laborers. When the death facility was opened again in early September 1942, it functioned much more like the machine that it was designed to be.40 Stangl commanded with the help of a particularly vicious a.s.sistant, Kurt Franz, whom the Jewish laborers called "the Doll" (for his vanity and good looks). Franz liked to watch Jews box, he liked to watch his dog attack Jews, and he liked to watch animals in general: at one point he had the Jewish laborers construct a zoo. The Germans were a.s.sisted by a few dozen Trawniki men, who served as guards, and performed a few essential functions within the facility, such as herding Jews into the gas chambers and releasing the carbon monoxide gas. The rest of the labor was performed by a few hundred Jews, spared from death only in order to carry out tasks a.s.sociated with ma.s.s killing and plunder, and doomed themselves to a quick death if they showed any sign of weakness. Like Beec and Sobibor, Treblinka was designed to function on Jewish labor, such that the Trawniki men had to do little and the Germans next to nothing.41 As rumors of Treblinka spread, the Germans engaged in propaganda. The Polish government, in exile in London, had been pa.s.sing on to its British and American allies reports of the ga.s.sings, along with other German killings of Polish citizens. Throughout the summer it urged the British and the Americans to take retributive actions upon German civilians, to no effect. Officers of the Polish resistance, the Home Army, considered an attack on Treblinka, but did not carry one out. The Germans denied the ga.s.sings. The chief of the Jewish police in Warsaw and the official "resettlement commissioner," Jozef Szerzyski, claimed that he had received postcards from Treblinka. There was indeed a postal service inside the Warsaw ghetto, which functioned even during these weeks. The post-men wore caps with bright orange bills so that they would not be seized in the roundups. But they brought, of course, no news from Treblinka.42 The transports from Warsaw to Treblinka began again on 3 September 1942. The last transport of the Large Action, on 22 September 1942, included the Jewish police and their families. As the Jewish policemen neared the station, they threw from the windows their hats and any other markers of their former mission or social status (Jewish policemen often came from prosperous families). This was prudent behavior, since Jewish policemen could meet a hard reception from fellow Jews in a concentration camp. Yet Treblinka was no camp. It was a death facility, so their actions made no difference. The policemen were ga.s.sed like everyone else.
Within a few months, Stangl had changed the appearance of Treblinka, and thereby increased its lethal functionality. Jews who arrived at Treblinka in late 1942 disembarked not to a simple ramp surrounded by dead bodies but inside a mock train station, painted by a Jewish laborer to resemble a real one. It had a clock, a timetable, and ticket counters. As Jews stepped from the "station," they could hear the sound of music, played by an orchestra led by the Warsaw musician Artur Gold. Those Jews who limped or hobbled or otherwise revealed themselves to be weak at this point were taken to a "clinic." Jewish workers with red armbands helped them to a building marked with a red cross. Behind this building the sick Jews were shot in the back of the neck over a ditch, by Germans dressed as doctors. The chief executioner was August Miete, whom the Jewish laborers called the Angel of Death, Malakh Ha-Mavet Malakh Ha-Mavet. Those Jews who could move themselves took a few steps forward into a kind of courtyard, where the men and the women were separated: men to the right, women to the left, as they were told in German and Yiddish.43 In the courtyard, the Jews were forced to strip naked, on the pretext that they were to be disinfected before a further transport "to the east." Jews had to bundle their clothes neatly and tie their shoes together by the laces. They had to surrender any valuables; women were subjected to cavity searches. At this point a few women, in some of the transports, were selected for rape; and a few men, in some of the transports, were selected for labor. The women then shared the fate of the rest, whereas the men would live for a few more days, weeks, or even months as slave laborers.44 All the women went to the gas chambers without their clothes, and without their hair. Each woman had to sit before a Jewish "barber." Religiously observant women who wore wigs had to surrender them. Even at this very last moment before death, people reacted differently, individually. For some women, the hair-cutting was confirmation of the "disinfection" story; for others it was the proof that they were about to be killed. The women"s hair was to be used to make stockings for German railway workers and to line the slippers worn by German submarine crews.45 Both groups, first the women and then the men, naked, humiliated, and helpless, were forced to run through a tunnel. It was a few meters wide and about a hundred meters long; the Germans called it "the road to Heaven." At its end Jews might see a large Star of David in the gable over the entrance to a dark room. A ceremonial curtain hung with a Hebrew inscription: "This is the gateway to G-d. The righteous shall pa.s.s through." Probably few enough of them noticed these details, as they were forced roughly inside by the two guards posted at the entrance, both of them Trawniki men. One of the Trawniki men held a piece of pipe, the other a sword, and both yelled and beat the Jews. Then one of them closed and locked the door, and called for "Water!"-the very last element of the deception, no longer necessary for this doomed group, now sealed in a gas chamber, but for whoever else might be waiting. A third Trawniki man threw a lever, and a tank engine pumped carbon monoxide into the chamber.46 After twenty minutes or so the Trawniki men opened a rear door of the gas chamber, and Jewish laborers removed the bodies. As a result of feverish struggles and death agonies, the bodies were twisted together, limb through limb, and sometimes very fragile. As the Treblinka laborer Chil Rajchman recalled, they underwent "an atrocious metamorphosis." Their corpses were covered, as was the chamber itself, with blood, feces, and urine. The Jewish laborers had to clean the chamber, so that the next group would not disbelieve the disinfection lie and panic upon entering. Then they had to separate the bodies and lay them face up on the earth so that a crew of Jewish "dentists" could do their work: removing gold teeth. Sometimes the faces were entirely black, as if burned, and the jaws clenched so tightly that the "dentists" could barely open them. Once the gold teeth were removed, the Jewish laborers dragged the bodies to pits to be buried. The entire process, from disembarkation of live Jews to the disposal of their bodies, took no more than two hours.47 In the winter of 1942-1943, the Germans began to separate the Jews not into two but into three groups: the men, the older women, and the young women. They sent the young women into the gas last, because they liked to look at their naked bodies in the cold. By then the corpses were burned rather than buried. The pyres were huge grills made from railway rails laid upon concrete pillars, some thirty meters across. By spring 1943, fires burned at Treblinka day and night, sometimes consuming the corpses of decomposed bodies exhumed from the earth by Jewish laborers, sometimes the bodies of those who had just been asphyxiated. Women, with more fatty tissue, burned better than men; so the laborers learned to put them on the bottom of the pile. The bellies of pregnant women would tend to burst, such that the fetus could be seen inside. In the cold nights of spring 1943, the Germans would stand by the flame, and drink, and warm themselves. Once again, human beings were reduced to calories, units of warmth. The burning was to remove any evidence of the crime, but the Jewish laborers made sure that this was not achieved. They left whole skeletons intact, and buried messages in bottles for others to find.48 It was very difficult for the victims to leave any other sort of trace. Chil Rajchman had come to Treblinka with his sister. As soon as he saw the facility, he put their suitcases down. His sister did not understand why. "It"s no use" were his last words to her. He was chosen to be a laborer. Sorting through clothing, he "came upon the dress that my sister was wearing. I paused, I took the dress, I held it in my hands, contemplated it." Then it had to go and he had to go on. Tamara and Itta Willenberg left their bundles of clothes next to each other. Their brother Samuel, a Jewish laborer, chanced to find the clothes clinging together "as if in a sister"s embrace." Because the women had their hair cut, they had a last few moments in which they could speak to fellow Jews, who might, just possibly, survive them and remember their words. Ruth Dorfmann was able to accept from her barber the consolation that her death would be quick, and to cry with him. Hanna Levinson told her barber to escape and to tell the world what was happening at Treblinka.49 Only with much forethought could Jews control their possessions, even in such small ways. In general, their instinct was to keep their portable wealth (if they had any) on their persons, in the hopes of later bartering or bribing. Sometimes Jews, when they grasped what awaited them, threw their money and valuables from the train, so that they would not enrich their persecutors. Usually this was near Treblinka. Within the death factory, it was the job of Jewish laborers to seek valuables, and of course they pocketed some. They gave these to the Trawniki men, who had the right to come and go, in exchange for food from nearby villages. The Trawniki men gave the valuables to local women and to prost.i.tutes, who apparently came from as far away as Warsaw. Having thereby contracted venereal diseases, the Trawniki men consulted Jewish doctors among the laborers. Thus the special closed circle of the local economy, which one witness recalled as a bejeweled and degraded "Europe."50 Through such connections, Jewish laborers alive in 1943 knew something of the outside world and the course of the war. Trawniki men could usually read Russian, and managed to get their hands on Soviet propaganda and the Soviet press. They were among the millions of Soviet citizens laboring for the Germans in one capacity or another, and so heard gossip. They knew, and so Jewish laborers learned, about the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943. The laborers could see for themselves that the transports slowed in 1943, and feared, quite rightly, that their own reason for being was coming to an end. By then the tremendous majority of Polish Jews were already dead. Guessing that their facility was soon to be closed, some of the Jewish workers rebelled on 2 August 1943, seizing weapons and setting parts of the facility on fire. A few hundred laborers ran through a hole in the fence; a few dozen survived the war. Chil Rajchman and the other laborers who wrote memoirs of Treblinka were among them.51 The facility was indeed closed on 17 November 1943. Its last victims were thirty remaining Jewish laborers who did the work of dismantling it. At the very end, they were shot in groups of five, with the remaining Jews cremating each group. Trawniki men cremated the final group of five. At about the same time, the Germans undertook a ma.s.s shooting action against other Jewish laborers, those still at work in concentration camps in the General Government. Some forty-two thousand Jews were killed in this operation, known as "Harvest Festival."52
One of the fifty or so Treblinka survivors, Saul Kuperhand, understood that at Treblinka "numbers ruled." The 265,040 Warsaw Jews deported in the Large Action were carefully counted. In some fourteen weeks, between 4 August and mid-November, at least 310,000 Jews of the Radom district of the General Government were ga.s.sed at Treblinka. In sum, about 780,863 people were killed at Treblinka, the vast majority of them Polish Jews from the General Government. Most of the Jews of the General Government who were not ga.s.sed at Beec or Sobibor were ga.s.sed at Treblinka. In all, Operation Reinhard claimed the lives of some 1.3 million Polish Jews.53 The purpose of Treblinka was ever clearer as the war continued: to rid a shrinking racial empire of its Jewish population, and so to claim a thin victory and its grisly fruits. A body can be burned for warmth, or it can feed the microorganisms that make soil fertile. Even human ash fertilizes. After Treblinka had been dismantled, the Germans used the bricks of the gas chambers to make a farmhouse, and turned the killing fields into a farm. A couple of the Trawniki men agreed to stay on as farmers. In this lay a darkly literal rendering of the n.a.z.i fantasy of redeeming the land by destroying the Jew. The corpses and ashes of Jews were to fertilize the soil for crops to be eaten by Germans. Yet no harvest ever came.54 Once Treblinka was no longer functioning, the center of the Holocaust shifted west, to a very special facility in the annexed territories of Poland added to the Reich, at Auschwitz. This was a camp established in 1940 in a territory that Germany had annexed from Poland. Auschwitz was in operation as a concentration camp almost a year before Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and more than a year before Hitler had clarified just what the Final Solution would mean. Unlike the death factories at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Beec, which were established for the single purpose of killing the Jews of Poland, the complex at Auschwitz evolved as German policies toward Jews and others changed. The development of the Auschwitz facility ill.u.s.trates the transformation of a dream of eastern colonization into a program of Jewish extermination.
The German camp established at Auschwitz in 1940 was meant to intimidate the Polish population. After the attack on the Soviet Union in summer 1941, Soviet prisoners of war joined Poles, and the camp was used as an execution site for both. Himmler wished for Auschwitz to become an example of the SS colonial economy, in which the captured lands of an enemy nation could be given to a German firm, which would exploit slave labor to manufacture goods needed for the German war economy. Because Auschwitz was well supplied with water and well connected by rail, Himmler saw it, as did the upper management of IG Farben, as an ideal site for the production of artificial rubber. Himmler sought Jewish laborers in Slovakia, whose leaders were happy to be rid of them. Himmler made the case in October 1941; within a year Slovakia had deported 57,628 of its Jewish citizens. Almost all of them would die.55 In 1942 a second major facility was added, and Auschwitz became a death factory as well as a concentration camp and execution site. Rudolf Hoss, its commander, was a veteran of the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald, not of the killing facilities of the "euthanasia" program. Under his command Auschwitz became a special sort of hybrid, a labor facility with a death factory attached. Non-Jewish laborers continued to arrive, and to work in awful conditions. Jews were now selected for labor when they arrived at Auschwitz, with those deemed unusable (the substantial majority) immediately ga.s.sed. In 1942, the approximately 140,146 Jews not selected for labor were ga.s.sed in chambers known as Bunker 1 and Bunker 2 in Auschwitz. After February 1943 most of the murdered Jews were killed in new gas chambers constructed in nearby Birkenau, and their bodies burned in attached crematoria. In the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers, pellets of Zyklon B would sublimate on contact with air, producing a gas that would kill at a ratio of one milligram per kilogram of body weight. Cyanide kills at the cellular level, interfering with the ability of the mitochondria in cells to produce the energy that sustains life.56 Like the other five death factories, Auschwitz was located in occupied Poland. It served, however, as the main extermination site for Jewish populations from beyond beyond Poland. Though some Jews from beyond Poland were killed in the five other death factories, the vast majority of their victims were Polish Jews. Auschwitz was the only death factory of the six where Polish Jews were not the majority of the victims. It became a killing facility at about the same time that German exterminatory policies moved beyond occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union, to embrace other populations of European Jews. Within the Reich Security Main Office, Adolf Eichmann and the men in his Jewish section organized deportations from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands in 1942. In 1943 Eichmann organized the transport of Jews from Greece and from occupied Italy. Fascist Italy had not sent its Jews to Hitler so long as Mussolini was in power and Germany and Italy were allies. But after the Americans, British, Canadians, and Poles landed in southern Italy and the Italians capitulated, the Germans occupied the northern part of the country, and deported Jews themselves. In 1943, some 220,000 Jews were ga.s.sed at Auschwitz. Poland. Though some Jews from beyond Poland were killed in the five other death factories, the vast majority of their victims were Polish Jews. Auschwitz was the only death factory of the six where Polish Jews were not the majority of the victims. It became a killing facility at about the same time that German exterminatory policies moved beyond occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union, to embrace other populations of European Jews. Within the Reich Security Main Office, Adolf Eichmann and the men in his Jewish section organized deportations from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands in 1942. In 1943 Eichmann organized the transport of Jews from Greece and from occupied Italy. Fascist Italy had not sent its Jews to Hitler so long as Mussolini was in power and Germany and Italy were allies. But after the Americans, British, Canadians, and Poles landed in southern Italy and the Italians capitulated, the Germans occupied the northern part of the country, and deported Jews themselves. In 1943, some 220,000 Jews were ga.s.sed at Auschwitz.57 In 1944, shooting Soviet Jews was no longer possible because the Germans had been driven from the Soviet Union, and the Reinhard facilities were closed due to the approach of the Red Army; that year, Auschwitz became the site of the Final Solution. Almost all of the six hundred thousand or so Jews killed by the Germans in 1944 died at Auschwitz. Most of them were Hungarian Jews. Hungary, like Italy, had not sent its Jews to the death facilities so long as it was a sovereign country and a German ally. (As a rule, Jews fared less badly in countries allied with Germany than in countries occupied by Germany.) After the Hungarian leadership attempted to switch sides in the war in March 1944, the Germans installed their own government. A new Hungarian fascist regime began in May to deport its Jews. About 437,000 Hungarian Jews arrived at Auschwitz in eight weeks. About 110,000 of them were selected for labor, many of whom survived; at the very least, 327,000 of them were ga.s.sed. Over the course of the war, about 300,000 Polish Jews were shipped to Auschwitz, of whom some 200,000 were killed. Taken together, Hungarian and Polish Jews account for the majority of the Jewish victims of Auschwitz.58 Auschwitz was the climax of the Holocaust, reached at a moment when most Soviet and Polish Jews under German rule were already dead. Of the million or so Soviet Jews killed in the Holocaust, fewer than one percent died at Auschwitz. Of the three million or so Polish Jews killed in the Holocaust, only about seven percent perished at Auschwitz. Nearly 1.3 million Polish Jews were killed, usually shot, east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. Another 1.3 million or so Polish Jews were ga.s.sed in Operation Reinhard in the General Government (more than 700,000 at Treblinka, roughly 400,000 at Beec, 150,000 at Sobibor, and 50,000 at Majdanek). Another 350,000 more were ga.s.sed in the lands annexed to the Reich (besides the 200,000 at Auschwitz, about 150,000 at Chemno). Most of the remaining Polish-Jewish victims were shot during the ghetto clearings (about 100,000) or in Operation Harvest Festival (42,000), or during the many smaller actions and in individual executions. Many more died of hunger or disease in the ghettos or as laborers in concentration camps.59 A considerable number of the mortal victims of Auschwitz, more than 200,000, were not Jews. Some 74,000 non-Jewish Poles and some 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war also died at Auschwitz: either executed or worked to death. With the exception of the Soviet prisoners of war who were experimentally ga.s.sed, these people were not sent to the gas chambers. But Roma and Sinti were.
Though never pursued with the same energy as the Jews, the Roma and Sinti ("gypsies") were subjected to a killing policy wherever German power extended. They were shot by Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union (about 8,000 doc.u.mented cases); included in the killing orders for reprisal actions in Belarus; shot by police in occupied Poland; shot in reprisal actions along with Jews in Serbia; killed in a concentration camp of Germany"s puppet ally Croatia (about 15,000); ethnically cleansed from territories conquered by Germany"s ally Romania; and ga.s.sed at Chemno in January 1942 (about 4,400) and then at Auschwitz in May 1943 (about 1,700) and August 1944 (about 2,900, after many more had died of hunger, disease, or mistreatment). At least a hundred thousand Roma and Sinti, and more likely two or three times that number, were killed by the Germans.60 Although no one survived the gas chambers of Auschwitz, more than a hundred thousand people survived the concentration camp known by the same name. That name would be remembered after the war, a dark shadow behind an iron curtain, a hint of the greater darkness to the east. Fewer than one hundred Jewish laborers saw the inside of a Reinhard death factory and survived. Yet even Treblinka left a few traces in the air.
Prisoners sang at Treblinka, at German orders, but also for themselves. "El male rachamim" was chanted for the Jews killed each day. SS men would stand outside and listen. Trawniki men brought with them from the east, as one of the Jewish laborers recognized, a "strange gift" for "wonderful song." It was less elevated music, popular Polish songs, that reminded Treblinka laborers of life outside the camp, and helped give them the courage to prepare their escape. Those songs recalled love and foolishness, and so life and freedom. A few weddings were celebrated at Treblinka, between laborers and the women who handled domestic ch.o.r.es for the Germans.61 The Jewish barbers, who cut the hair of thousands of women, remembered the beautiful ones.
CHAPTER 9.
RESISTANCE AND INCINERATION.
The night of 21 June 1944 belonged to the Soviet partisans of Belarus. Three years earlier the Wehrmacht had quickly overrun Belarus on its way to Moscow-which it never quite reached. The Soviets were now advancing toward the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, and onward toward Warsaw and Berlin. Army Group Center of the Wehrmacht was back in Belarus, but in retreat. Red Army commanders had planned a ma.s.sive summer offensive, beginning on the third anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, timed to remind the Germans of their own disastrous ambitions. The Soviet partisans had laid thousands of explosive charges on rail lines in Belarus. When Soviet soldiers attacked, German troops could not be reinforced, nor could they quickly retreat. So the day of 22 June 1944 belonged to the soldiers of the First, Second, and Third Belarusian Fronts of the Red Army. They and two other army groups a.s.sembled well over a million troops, more than twice as many as the Wehrmacht"s Army Group Center could muster. The offensive, Operation Bagration, delivered one of the most important Soviet victories in the war.1 Two weeks earlier, the Americans had joined the battle for Europe. Having gained mastery over the j.a.panese fleet in the Pacific, the United States opened a major European front in the war on 6 June 1944. The US Army landed (along with the British and other western Allies) 160,000 men on the beaches of Normandy. Yet American power was also on display in the depths of Belarus, where motorized Soviet units, equipped with American trucks and jeeps, encircled hapless German forces. German encirclement tactics had been mastered, accelerated, and turned against the Germans themselves. The Soviet breakthrough in Belarus was more dramatic than the American advance through France. German soldiers were outnumbered and its officers outsmarted. German commanders had expected the Soviet offensive to pa.s.s through Ukraine rather than Belarus. The Germans lost some four hundred thousand missing, wounded, or killed. Army Group Center was smashed. The way to Poland was open.2 Quickly the Red Army crossed the Molotov-Ribbentrop line and entered the region that had been the Lublin district of the General Government. Vasily Grossman, a Soviet writer following the Red Army as a journalist, contemplated what the Germans had left behind. The Red Army discovered the camp at Majdanek on 24 July 1944. In early August, Grossman found a still greater horror, one that might have defied a poorer imagination. Coming upon Treblinka, he realized quickly just what had happened: the Jews of Poland had been murdered in gas chambers, their bodies burned, their ashes and bones buried in fields. He walked upon "earth that is as unsteady as the sea," and found the remnants: photographs of children in Warsaw and Vienna; a bit of Ukrainian embroidery; a sack of hair, blonde and black.3 By this time, Polish lands had been under German occupation for nearly four years. For the Jews of Warsaw, or almost all of them, Operation Bagration was the liberation that never came. The remains of more than a quarter-million Warsaw Jews were among the ashes and bones that Grossman found at Treblinka.
In 1939, the occupiers of Poland had been two, German and Soviet. For the non-Jewish Poles in Warsaw who were conspiring to resist German rule, Operation Bagration portended the arrival of a very questionable ally. It meant the second incursion of the Red Army into Polish territory during the Second World War.
This was the difference between Polish and Polish-Jewish experiences of the war. Non-Jewish Poles suffered horribly from both German and Soviet occupations, but comparably from each. Non-Jewish Poles who wished to resist could sometimes make choices: about which occupier to resist, and in what circ.u.mstances.
Surviving Polish Jews had every reason to prefer the Soviets to the Germans, and to see the Red Army as liberators. Many of those sixty thousand or so Jews who were still alive in the Warsaw ghetto after the Large Action of summer 1942 did choose to resist. But they could not choose the time and the place of their resistance. All they could do was fight.
Warsaw was the center of urban resistance to n.a.z.i rule in occupied Europe. In the two years between September 1942, by which time Treblinka had taken the lives of most of the Jews of Warsaw, and September 1944, when its workings were described by Grossman in his article "Treblinka h.e.l.l," both Poles and Jews led uprisings against the German occupation, separately but also together, in uprisings of April 1943 and August 1944.
The consequences of Jewish and Polish resistance in Warsaw were much the same: destruction. By the time the Red Army (and Grossman) arrived in the city in January 1945, it was rubble and ash. Half of the population was dead, and the survivors were gone. Grossman reached for a literary reference that his readers would have known: the last remaining people, Jews and Poles he found living together in the remains of one building, were Warsaw "Robinsons": like Robinson Crusoe, the hero of the novel by Daniel Defoe, left on an island by himself for years, lost to civilization. The Polish poet Czesaw Miosz, who lived during the war in Warsaw, spent some of his time writing literary criticism of the same novel. For him, Robinson Crusoe Robinson Crusoe was the "legend of the island," the idea that moral flaws come from experience, that if we were left alone we might be good. In this essay, and in his poetry about Poles and Jews in Warsaw, he suggested the contrary, that the only hope for ethics was that each remember the solitude of the other. was the "legend of the island," the idea that moral flaws come from experience, that if we were left alone we might be good. In this essay, and in his poetry about Poles and Jews in Warsaw, he suggested the contrary, that the only hope for ethics was that each remember the solitude of the other.4 In Warsaw during the Second World War, Poles and Jews were alone in some of the same ways, beyond help from the outside world, even from those whom they regarded as friends and allies. They were also alone in different ways, confronting different fates in the same war. They shared a city that had been the center of both Polish and Jewish civilizations. That city is now gone; what remains of it is legend, or rather two legends, one Polish, one Jewish, between solidarity and solitude, each aware of the other but alone in the postwar world.
Polish and Jewish conspiracies against German rule, distinct but connected, had begun much earlier, with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939.
On 7 September 1939, in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a bank, eight men and women, most of them Free Masons, began the conspiracy that would become the Polish underground army. Known at first as the Servants of the Victory of Poland, it was led by a general with orders to organize a national underground. By 1940, when the Polish government had established itself in exile in France, the armed underground at home was given the name Union of Armed Struggle. In 1940 and 1941, its main task was to unify the hundreds of smaller resistance groups that had formed in Poland, and to collect intelligence for the Polish government and its allies. The Union of Armed Struggle was active in the German zone of occupation; attempts to create a network under Soviet occupation were thwarted by the NKVD. After the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Polish resistance was able to operate in all of the territories of occupied Poland.5 In early 1942 the Union of Armed Struggle was transformed into a Home Army. The Home Army was meant to be the counterpart of the Polish Army fighting abroad with allies on the western front. Like the Polish government, by now in exile in London, the Home Army was to represent all political and social forces in the country. It was to fight for the restoration of Poland within its prewar boundaries, as a democratic republic with equal rights for all citizens. Most Poles who chose resistance did find their way to the Home Army, although the extreme communist left and the extreme nationalist right founded their own partisan forces. The communists organized a People"s Guard, later known as the People"s Army, which was closely connected to the Soviet Union and the NKVD. The nationalists, who regarded the communists and the Soviets as a greater enemy than the Germans, fought within the ranks of the National Armed Forces.6 Jewish resistance in Warsaw followed a different path, even though this was not clear at first. In the early months of the German occupation of Poland, in 1939, Jewish resistance as such seemed to make little sense. It was not evident, at first, that the fate of Polish Jews was to be much different from that of non-Jews. Many of the Warsaw Jews who felt most threatened by the German invasion fled to the Soviet occupation zone of Poland, whence many of them were deported to Kazakhstan. The establishment of the ghettos in 1940 did not necessarily convey to Polish Jews that their fate was worse than that of non-Jewish Poles, who were at the time being shot and sent to concentration camps in large numbers. In 1940 Poles from beyond the ghetto were sent to Auschwitz, whereas Jews were generally not. But the ghettos did mean that any Jewish resistance would have to be a response to particularly Jewish predicaments. When the Germans forcibly separated Jews from non-Jewish Poles in Warsaw in October 1940, they were creating a new social reality, creating categories that would define different fates.7 The ghetto did not, however, bring agreement to Jews about how and whether to take action against the Germans. Polish Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had prior political commitments, arising from the vibrant intra-Jewish political life of interwar Poland. Jews had taken part in local and national elections in Poland, as well as in their own communal elections. Parties were legion and party loyalties ran deep. At the far right of the spectrum were the Revisionist Zionists, who had been preparing themselves before the war for armed resistance against the British in Palestine. They were among the first to believe that armed struggle against the Germans was necessary and possible in the conditions of the ghetto. Revisionists and members of their youth organization Betar learned from party comrades as early as summer 1941 of the killings of Jews in Vilnius. They also heard, more or less as it happened, about the liquidation of the ghetto in Lublin in spring 1942. They had some sense of the spread of the Final Solution, from east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line to west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, from bullets to gas.8 It took the Large Action in Warsaw of July-September 1942 to prompt the Revisionists to form a Jewish Military Union. Its military commander was Pawe Frenkel; the members of its political committee were Micha Strykowski, Leon Rodal, and Dawid Wdowiski. It was anch.o.r.ed in prewar traditions of cooperation with the Polish state, which might explain why it was well armed. In the late 1930s, the Polish regime had hoped to export much of its Jewish population to the Near East. Polish leaders thus developed close relationships with the Revisionist Zionists, who hoped to lead much of the Polish-Jewish population to Palestine. The Revisionists were willing to use violence to create a Jewish state, an approach with which Polish authorities sympathized. Before the war, the Revisionist Zionist youths of Betar had been preparing themselves in prewar Poland to fight for Palestine. Like the young men of Irgun, the resistance organization in Palestine that some of them joined, they were sometimes trained by the Polish Army. Inside the ghetto in 1942, the Revisionists also collected money, and robbed rich Jews, to purchase arms from outside the ghetto.9
Whereas the history of the Jewish Military Union is one of a militarist right-wing political party adapting itself to conditions even harsher than those it had ever antic.i.p.ated, the history of the other resistance group in the Warsaw ghetto, the Jewish Combat Organization, is one of multiple centrist and left-wing political parties deciding that only military action could serve Jews.
Like the right-wing Jewish Military Union, the Jewish Combat Organization arose as a result of the Large Action. The very old and the very young were almost all deported and dead. It seems likely that the deportations, although they touched all groups, eliminated what had been the conservative center of Jewish politics: the religiously Orthodox and politically accommodationist Agudas Israel. Its platform before the war had been cooperation with the Polish government in exchange for communal and religious autonomy. This compromising approach had been tested by anti-Semitic violence and anti-Semitic legislation in Poland in the late 1930s, but it had remained popular among the older generations of Warsaw Jewish believers-who by now were almost all dead at Treblinka. Nothing in Poland had prepared Agudas for the n.a.z.is, who repaid compromises with murder.10 After September 1942, the Warsaw ghetto was essentially a Jewish labor camp inhabited predominantly by young men. Fathers who might earlier have feared to endanger their families no longer had that reason for restraint. Left-wing politics came to the fore. The Jewish Left in prewar Poland had been divided over a number of fundamental issues: whether to leave for Palestine or stay in Poland, whether to trust or distrust the Soviet Union, whether to agitate in Yiddish or Polish or Hebrew, and so on. The most radical form of left-wing politics, communism, reappeared among Warsaw Jews at this time. Stalin, who had dissolved the Communist Party of Poland in 1938, permitted its reconst.i.tution as the Polish Workers" Party in January 1942. Some of its Polish-Jewish activists then smuggled themselves into into the Warsaw ghetto, where they urged armed resistance. The largest Jewish socialist party, the Bund, was much less inclined to use violence. In general, these organizations continued their work as distinct ent.i.ties. In the three months after the Large Action, general accord about the need for armed resistance was reached. The Jewish Combat Organization was established in December 1942. As a group of politicians with little or no military background and no weapons to speak of, its first need was arms. Its first action was to ask for them, from the Home Army. the Warsaw ghetto, where they urged armed resistance. The largest Jewish socialist party, the Bund, was much less inclined to use violence. In general, these organizations continued their work as distinct ent.i.ties. In the three months after the Large Action, general accord about the need for armed resistance was reached. The Jewish Combat Organization was established in December 1942. As a group of politicians with little or no military background and no weapons to speak of, its first need was arms. Its first action was to ask for them, from the Home Army.11 Beyond the ghetto, the Large Action forced the Home Army to undertake a Jewish policy. The Polish resistance had already taken some clear stands in 1941, condemning for instance guard duty at concentration camps as "national treason." But the Home Army, before summer 1942, tended to treat the plight of Poland and that of Poles as one and the same. Prompted by the ma.s.s shootings of Polish Jews in the east, the Home Army created a Jewish section in February 1942. It collected evidence of the killings that was transmitted to the Allies and the BBC in April 1942. The deportations of summer 1942 prompted Catholic Poles to organize a rescue organization, which by December was sponsored by the Polish government under the cryptonym egota. (Poles were subject to the death penalty for a.s.sisting Jews.) Some Home Army officers took part. Home Army intelligence officers supplied identification doc.u.ments for Jews in hiding beyond ghetto walls. When the Jewish Combat Organization requested weapons in December 1942, the Home Army offered to help Jews escape from the ghetto, perhaps to fight later on. This offer was declined by the Jewish Combat Organization. Its leaders wanted to fight, and so denied themselves an exit strategy.12 Warsaw Home Army commanders had strategic concerns that militated against giving the Jews any weapons at all. Although the Home Army was moving in the direction of partisan action, it feared that a rebellion in the ghetto would provoke a general uprising in the city, which the Germans would crush. The Home Army was not ready for such a fight in late 1942. Home Army commanders saw a premature uprising as a communist temptation to be avoided. They knew that the Soviets, and thus the Polish communists, were urging the local population to take up arms immediately against the Germans. The Soviets wanted to provoke partisan warfare in Poland in order to weaken the Germans-but also to hinder any future Polish resistance to their own rule when it came. The Red Army"s task would be easier if German troops were killed by partisan warfare, as would the NKVD"s if Polish elites were killed for resisting Germans. The Jewish Combat Organization included the communists, who were following the Soviet line, and believed that Poland should be subordinated to the Soviet Union. As the Home Army command could not forget, the Second World War had begun when both both the Germans the Germans and and the Soviets had invaded Poland. Half of Poland had spent half of the war inside the Soviet Union. The Soviets wanted eastern Poland back, and perhaps even more. From the perspective of the Home Army, rule by the Soviets was little better than rule by the n.a.z.is. Its goal was independence. There were hardly any circ.u.mstances that would seem to justify a Polish independence organization arming communists inside Poland. the Soviets had invaded Poland. Half of Poland had spent half of the war inside the Soviet Union. The Soviets wanted eastern Poland back, and perhaps even more. From the perspective of the Home Army, rule by the Soviets was little better than rule by the n.a.z.is. Its goal was independence. There were hardly any circ.u.mstances that would seem to justify a Polish independence organization arming communists inside Poland.13 Despite these reservations, the Home Army did give the Jewish Combat Organization a few pistols in December 1942. The Jewish Combat Organization used these to win authority and power in the ghetto. To resist the Judenrat and a Jewish police force armed only with clubs, pistols and audacity were enough. By killing (or trying to kill) Jewish policemen and Gestapo informers in late 1942 and early 1943, the Jewish Combat Organization created the sense that a new moral order was arising in the ghetto. Jozef Szerzyski, the Jewish police chief, was shot in the neck, although he failed to die. The Jewish Combat Organization did a.s.sa.s.sinate Jakub Lejkin, who led the police during the major deportation action, and later Mieczysaw Brzeziski, who had driven his fellow Jews onto the trains at Umschlagplatz. The Jewish Combat Organization printed leaflets, explaining that collaboration with the enemy was a crime punishable by death. The Jewish Combat Organization thus supplanted the Judenrat, whose head was forced to admit that he no longer had "authority in the ghetto, here there is another authority." Without an effective Jewish administrative and coercive apparatus, the Germans could no longer do as they pleased in the ghetto.14
German decisions about the fate of the ghetto and its remaining inhabitants were influenced by considerations that Jews could not possibly have understood. For the Germans, the Warsaw ghetto had first been a transit point for envisioned deportations to the Lublin district, Madagascar, or the Soviet Union; then a temporary labor camp; and then a transit point for deportations to Treblinka. In late 1942 and early 1943 it was again a labor camp, provisional and reduced in size, whose workers were those who had been selected for labor during the Large Action. Though Himmler never wavered in his determination to kill the Jews under German rule, other authorities wished, at this point at least, to keep some Jewish laborers alive. Hans Frank was worried about labor shortages in his General Government. Many Poles were working in Germany, so Jewish labor had become more important in occupied Poland. The Jews were working for the German war economy, so the Wehrmacht, too, had an interest in their remaining alive.15 Himmler was capable of making compromises. In early 1943 he meant to allow most of the surviving Jews of the Warsaw ghetto to live a bit longer, but also to eliminate the ghetto itself, which he saw as a center of political resistance, disorder, and disease. Himmler intended to kill the Jews who were living illegally in the ghetto without labor doc.u.ments. Then he wanted to deport the remaining Jews as laborers to other concentration camps, where they would continue to work. Visiting Warsaw, Himmler ordered on 9 January 1943 that the ghetto be dissolved. The eight thousand or so Jews who were there illegally were to be shipped to Treblinka and ga.s.sed, and the rest, about fifty thousand, were to be sent to concentration camps. But when the Germans entered the ghetto nine days later to carry out Himmler"s orders, Jews hid or resisted. A few Jews fired on the first Germans to enter the ghetto, surprising them and leading to panic. The Germans killed some 1,170 Jews on the streets and deported perhaps five thousand. After four days the Germans had to withdraw and reconsider. Home Army commanders in Warsaw were impressed. The arms that they had given the Jewish Combat Organization had been put to good use.16 This was not the first instance of Jews resisting Germans in Poland. There were a large number of people of Jewish origin within the Home Army itself. Although this was a fact known to Home Army commanders, it was almost never discussed. Many of the people of Jewish origin in the Home Army regarded themselves as Poles rather than as Jews. Others kept their Jewish ident.i.ties secret, on the grounds that it was best in wartime Warsaw not to spread the news of one"s Jewishness. Although anti-Semites in the Home Army were a minority, just one betrayal could mean death. What was new in January 1943 was that Jews had used arms against the Germans as Jews, in an open act of Jewish Jewish resistance. This worked powerfully against the anti-Semitic stereotype, present in the Home Army and in Polish society, that Jews would not fight. Now the Warsaw command of the Home Army gave the Jewish Combat Organization a substantial proportion of its own modest arms cache: guns, ammunition, explosives. resistance. This worked powerfully against the anti-Semitic stereotype, present in the Home Army and in Polish society, that Jews would not fight. Now the Warsaw command of the Home Army gave the Jewish Combat Organization a substantial proportion of its own modest arms cache: guns, ammunition, explosives.17 In Berlin, Himmler was furious. On 16 February 1943 he decided that the ghetto must be destroyed not only as a society but as a physical place. That neighborhood of Warsaw was of no value to the racial masters, since houses that had been (as Himmler put it) "used by subhumans" could never be suitable for Germans. The Germans planned an a.s.sault on the ghetto for 19 April. Again, its immediate purpose was not to kill all the Jews but, rather, to redirect their labor power to concentration camps, and then to destroy the ghetto. Himmler had no doubt that this would work. He was thinking ahead to the uses of the site: in the long term it would become a park, in the meantime a concentration camp until the war was won. Jewish laborers from Warsaw would be worked to death at other sites.18 Right before the planned a.s.sault on the Warsaw ghetto, German propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels made his own special contribution. In April 1943, the Germans had discovered Katyn, one of the sites where the NKVD had murdered Polish prisoners of war in 1940. "Katyn," declared Goebbels, "is my victory." He chose 18 April 1943 to announce the discovery of the corpses of Polish officers. Katyn could be used to create problems between Soviets and Poles, and between Poles and Jews. Goebbels expected, and quite rightly, that the evidence that the Soviet secret police had shot thousands of Polish officers would make cooperation between the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile more problematic. The two were uneasy allies at best, and the Polish government had never gotten a satisfactory reply from the Soviets about those missing officers. Goebbels also wished to use Katyn to display the anti-Polish policies of the supposedly Jewish leadership of the Soviet Union, and thus to alienate Poles from