of the Jewish sections of the Government Delegacy and the High Command of the Home Army provided the Directorate of Civil Resistance with up-to-date information on the developments.
Unfortunately, the first dispatches--including the information that the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto was begun on July 22, 1942--were disbelieved in London, where they were taken for exaggerated anti-German propaganda. Only when the British intelligence service confirmed this information some months later was the proper use made of dispatches of the Directorate of Civil Resistance.
Samples of the more important messages from the chief of the Directorate of Civil Resistance, Stefan Korbonski (pseudonym Nowak), are given below; the first pertains to the little known incident--the first armed encounter in the Warsaw ghetto, three months before the outbreak of the Ghetto Uprising:
January 29, 1943. In recent days, Jews in the Warsaw ghetto defended themselves arms in hand and killed a few Germans. The Jewish National Committee requests that this information be passed on to the Histadrut in Palestine.
March 18, 1943. Remnants of Jews in Radomsk, Ujazd, Sobolew, Radzymin, and Szczerzec near Lwow have been liquidated.
March 23, 1943. Tests with sterilization of women are being conducted in Auschwitz. New crematoria have a capacity of 3,000 persons per day, mostly Jews.
March 30, 1943. On March 13, 14 and 15, trucks loaded with Jews left the Krakow ghetto en route to Auschwitz. About 1,000 people were killed in the ghetto. Jews from Lodz are being taken in the direction of Ozorkow and exterminated there.
June 10, 1943. In Auschwitz, Bloc X scheduled to become experimental station of the Central Institute of Hygiene from Berlin. Castration, sterilization and artificial insemination. At present, there are 200 Jewish men and 25 Jewish women there.
June 3, 1943. Broadcast repeatedly instructions of the Directorate of Civil Resistance on helping Jews in hiding.
July 28, 1943. In Lwow, there are still about 4,000 Jews, gathered in the labor camp at Janowskie. During the roll call each morning, two rabbis are forced to fox-trot before the inmates assembled, to the tune of a Jewish band.
August 31, 1943. Liquidation of Jews in Bedzin started at the beginning of this month. About 7,000 were taken to Auschwitz. The young are liquidated first. As of July 1 of this year, the total number of Jews in Poland--including those in the camps, in the ghettos, and in hiding--is 250-300 thousand. Of these, 15,000 are in Warsaw; 80,000 in Lodz; 30,000 in Bedzin; 12,000 in Wilno; 20,000 in Bialystok; 8,000 in Krakow; 4,000 in Lublin; 5,000 in Lwow.
September 23, 1943. The Bedzin ghetto has been liquidated. The Germans murdered 30,000 people.
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November 19, 1943. Slaughter of Jews in Trawniki goes on. Massacres also in Poniatowa and Lwow.
June 20, 1944. Beginning May 15, mass murders are carried out in Auschwitz. Jews are taken first, then the Soviet prisoners of war, and the so-called sick. Mass transports of Hungarian Jews arrive. Thirteen trains per day, 40-50 cars each. Victims convinced they'll be exchanged for POWs or resettled in the east. Gas chambers working round the clock. Corpses are burned in crematoria and out in the open. Over l00,000 people gassed up till now.
July 19, 1944. Murder of Jews in Auschwitz is directed by camp's commander Hoess--read Hess--and his aide, Grabner.
5. Mission of Emissary Jan Karski
The Government Delegate also sounded the alarm repeatedly, sending dispatches on the extermination of Jews and transmitting to London messages from Dr. Feiner and Dr. Berman, addressed to Rabbi Stephen Wise and Rabbi Nachum Goldman in the United States, and to the two Jewish members of the National Council in London--Dr. Ignacy Schwartzbart, a Zionist, and Szmul Zygielbojm, member of BUND. What was even more important, however, was that an eyewitness, emissary Jan Karski, was sent to London. Dressed as an Estonian guard, Karski bribed his way right into the Belzec death camp for Jews and saw everything with his own eyes. Before leaving Poland, he had lengthy interviews with Dr. Feiner and Dr. Berman, who gave him the following instructions:
"We want you to tell the Polish government, the allied governments and allied leaders that we are helpless against the German criminals. We cannot defend ourselves, and no one in Poland can possibly defend us. The Polish underground authorities can save some of us, but they cannot save the masses. The Germans do not try to enslave us, the way they do other peoples. We are being systematically murdered . . . all Jews in Poland will perish. It is possible that some few will be saved. But three millions of Polish Jews are doomed to extinction.
"There is no power in Poland able to forestall this fact; neither the Polish, nor the Jewish underground can do it. You have to place the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the Allies. No leader of the United Nations should ever be able to say that he did not know that we were being murdered in Poland and that only outside assistance could help us."
Overcoming tremendous obstacles, Karski reached London in November 1942. He not only informed the Polish government-in-exile and its Premier, General Sikorski, about the genocide in Poland, but also saw personally the following: Foreign Secretary
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Anthony Eden; leader of the Labour Party Arthur Greenwood; Lord Selbourne; Lord Cranborne; the Chairman of the Board of Trade, Hugh Dalton; Member of the House of Commons, Ellen Wilkinson; British Ambassador to the government-in-exile O'Malley; American Ambassador to the government-in-exile, Anthony Drexel Biddle; and Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Richard Law. Karski also testified regarding the extermination of Jews before the UN War Crimes Commission, chaired by Sir Cecil Hurst. Finally, he gave numerous interviews to the British press and also briefed other members of Parliament and organizations of British writers and intellectuals.
Leaving for thc United States, Karski then personally told the story of Jews in Poland to Undersecretary of State Adolf Berle, Attorney General Biddle, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Archbishops Mooney and Stritch, and American-Jewish leaders such as Stephen Wise, Nachum Goldman and Waldman. Karski was also received by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who kept on asking specific questions about the extermination of Jews in Poland long past the time allotted for Karski's audience.
The Polish underground emissary accomplished his mission and passed on to allied leaders the message about the fate of Jews in Poland. But, to all practical purposes, his mission produced no results.(3)
6. Demands for Retaliation
As far as the Polish circles were concerned, one result of Karski's mission was the resolution, passed by the National Council on November 27, 1942, appealing to all allied nations to undertake a joint action against the extermination of Jews in Poland. Also, on December 10, 1942, the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs addressed a note to the allied governments, in which he presented the chronology of specific stages of extermination of Jews in Poland and appealed to allied governments to "devise effective measures likely to restrain the Germans from further mass extermination." Seven days later, on December 17, 1942, twelve allied governments issued a joint communique, announcing that persons responsible for the extermination of Jews would be punished. No other action was taken, however, despite the fact that the Government Delegate in Poland and the High Command of the Home Army demanded retaliatory bombing of German cities, accompanied by an announcement that the bombing raids were carried out in retaliation for the extermination of Jews. Underground leaders reasoned that British bombardment of German cities was already underway to a certain extent anyway, in accordance with Churchill's statement of 1940, announcing retaliation for the bombardment of British cities. The only
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difference would have consisted in scattering appropriate leaflets over the target cities and broadcasting announcements of a general nature, i.e., without naming the cities to be bombed. The Polish underground leaders also requested regular bombing missions to destroy all railroad lines leading to extermination camps in order to prevent further transports from the ghettos. The two Jewish representatives, Dr. Feiner and Dr. Berman, made similar demands in their dispatches to London. An anti-Nazi SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, recommended the same course of action in his conversation with Swedish diplomat von Otter aboard the Berlin Express. In his dispatch to the government, dated June 17, 1943, the chief of the Directorate of Civil Resistance Korbonski summed up the demands for retaliation as follows:
"Public opinion here demands that the attention of the Anglo-Saxon world turn to Poland and calls for retaliations against the Reich, in line with the postulate reiterated over the past year, of listing the crimes responsible for the bombardments of Germany .... I beg and urge that appropriate declarations be made simultaneously with bombing raids over the Reich that these are in retaliation for the latest German bestialities."
No such action was undertaken, however, supposedly because of technical impossibility of such long-distance flights. And yet, Sir Arthur Harris, chief of the British Bomber Command, considered the bombing of Auschwitz, for instance, technically feasible if carried out from bases in Italy. Captain Leonard Cheshire, V.C., held a similar opinion. Moreover, since bombing raids could have been made on factories around Auschwitz, nothing should have prevented the bombardment of railroad lines bringing fodder for the gas chambers of the largest of German death camps.
7. Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto
Beginning with January 1943, officers of the Home Army and representatives of the Jewish Fighting Organization held meetings to plan for a joint action on both sides of the ghetto walls at the outbreak of the uprising. Three Polish units led by Captain Jozef Pszenny (pseudonym: Chwacki), were to break through the ghetto walls, attack the Germans on the Aryan side and blow up the walls with explosives. Since it was assumed from the start that the Ghetto Uprising must inevitably end in disaster, this action was planned only to open the way for the retreat of the Jewish fighters.
At this time the Home Army delivered to the Jewish Fighting Organization 1 light machine gun, 2 submachine guns, 50 handguns (all with magazines and ammunition), 10 rifles, 600 hand grenades with
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detonators, 30 kilograms of explosives (plastic, received from the air drops), 120 kilograms of explosives of its own production, 400 detonators for bombs and grenades, 30 kilograms of potassium to make the incendiary "Molotov cocktails," and, finally, great quantities of saltpeter, needed to manufacture gun powder. The Jewish Fighting Organization also received instructions on how to manufacture bombs, hand grenades and incendiary bottles; how to build strong-holds; and where to get rails and cement for their construction.
On April 19, 1943--the first day of uprising in the Warsaw ghetto--three Home Army units, commanded by Captain Jozef Pszenny, took up their posts near the ghetto walls on Bonifraterska Street and attempted to blow up the wall with mines. Detected prematurely, they attacked the Germans, while four sappers tried to get to the wall. Unfortunately, two of them were killed on the spot--Eugeniusz Morawski and Jozef Wilk--while a third sustained wounds in both legs. Captain Pszenny ordered his men to retreat and withdrew, taking along four wounded men and detonating the mines on the street; the explosion tore to shreds the bodies of Morawski and Wilk. Several Germans were killed during the engagement, but the attempt to blow up the wall ended in failure.
The next day, a unit of the People's Guard of the Polish Workers Party, led by Franciszek Bartoszek, attacked the German machine-gun post near the ghetto wall on Nowiniarska Street. Two SS-men were killed.
On April 22, a detachment of the Home Army, commanded by Wieckowski, routed a unit of the Lithuanian auxiliary police near the ghetto walls.
On Good Friday, April 23, a Home Army unit led by Lt. Jerzy Skupienski attacked the gate in the ghetto wall at Pawia Street. They had orders to blow up the gate. Two German sentries were killed at the gate, but--under the heavy barrage of fire from Germans converging from all sides--the Home Army soldiers had to withdraw, killing on the way four SS and police officers whose car happened to cross their path of retreat.
In harassing actions ordered by Colonel Antoni Chrusciel (pseudonym: Monter), the Home Army Commander of Warsaw, German sentries on Leszno and Orla streets were shot by Home Army soldiers led by Cadet Officer Zbigniew Stalkowski; another unit of the Home Army, led by Tadeusz Kern-Jedrychowski, killed SS sentries on Zakroczymska Street.
There was also fighting in the area of the Powazki Cemetery (under the command of Wladyslaw Andrzejczak) and near the Jewish
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cemetery (under Leszek Raabe, commander of the Socialist Fighting Organization). Raabe's deputy, Wlodzimierz Kaczanowski, organized the escape of the Jewish members of the Polish Socialist Party from the ghetto.
On Good Friday, April 23, the Jewish Fighting Organization issued an appeal to the Polish population, declaring that the struggle in the ghetto upheld the time-honored Polish motto: "For your freedom and ours," and stressing that the Jews and the Poles had become brothers in arms.
A particularly daring action was undertaken by a unit of the Corps for Security, under the command of Captain Henryk Iwanski. From the very first days of the Warsaw ghetto's existence Captain Iwanski's brother, Waclaw, and his two sons Zbigniew and Roman maintained regular contact with the Jewish Military Union, providing them with arms, ammunition, and instructional materials smuggled through the sewers or in carts that brought lime and cement into the ghetto. When the uprising began, a unit of the Jewish Military Union occupied positions on Muranowski Square, which was to become the scene of bloodiest fighting. On the first day of the uprising, a Polish and a Jewish flag were raised over this sector. They were clearly visible from the Aryan side, and created a deep impression on the Polish population of Warsaw. The commander of the Jewish unit on Muranowski Square, Dawid Moryc Apfelbaum, sent a message to Captain Iwanski informing him that he had been wounded, and asking for arms and ammunition. The next day, Iwanski and 18 of his men (among them, his brother Waclaw and his two sons, Roman and Zbigniew) made their way into the ghetto by way of a tunnel dug from the cellar of a house at 6 Muranowska Street to the cellar of a house at 7 Muranowska Street, on the opposite side and behind the ghetto wall which, at this point, ran in the middle of Muranowska Street. They brought with them arms, ammunition and food for Apfelbaum's men and, seeing the utter exhaustion of the Jewish fighters, relieved them at their posts amid the ruins on Muranowski Square and Nalewki Street, repelling repeated German attacks. The same tunnel was used without delay to evacuate the Jewish wounded to the Aryan side. Later on, Iwanski's brother and both his sons were killed during the fighting, and Iwanski himself was seriously wounded. After the collapse of the uprising, Iwanski's men carried their wounded commander back through the tunnel, taking along also 34 Jewish fighters, fully armed.
After the war, Henryk Iwanski and his wife Wiktoria (who provided shelter and hiding places for the Jews throughout the war)
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were decorated--along with 10 other people--by the Israeli Ambassador in Warsaw, Dov Satoath, with the medal of Yad Vashem.(4)
This was not an isolated instance of the Jews and the Poles fighting together. According to the underground paper "Glos Warszawy" (April 23, 1943), when the uprising began, "there were Poles in the ghetto, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Jews in the streets of the ghetto against the Germans."
In his 100-page report, SS- and Police General Jurgen Stroop, commander of the German forces fighting in the ghetto, confirmed the fact of Polish diversionary operations and Polish participation in the fighting both within and outside of the ghetto. He wrote that his soldiers were "constantly under fire from outside of the ghetto, i.e., from the Aryan side"; and described Iwanski's action as follows: "The main Jewish group, with some Polish bandits mixed in, retreated to the so-called Muranowski Square already in the course of the first or the second day of fighting. It was reinforced there by several more Polish bandits."
A little over a year later, during the Warsaw Rising, a detachment of the Jewish Fighting Organization joined the ranks of the Home Army in the struggle against the Germans. The Jewish fighters were commanded by Icek Cukierman--once deputy and contact man on the Aryan side--and Mordecai Anielewicz, commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization.
It was during the Warsaw Uprising, too, that the Grey Ranks, composed of boy scouts and led by Lt. Colonel Jan Mazurkiewicz (pseudonym Radoslaw), seized, in what once had been the ghetto, the labor camp still maintained by the Germans for Jews (whose lives had been spared so they could work at tearing down whatever remained of the burned ghetto, but who were also doomed to die). They freed 358 Jews who joined Radoslaw's units enthusiastically. Later, most of them were killed, together with those who had freed them. Radoslaw was wounded in both legs, but still continued in command. It was the Jews who carried his stretcher, often through the underground passages in the city sewers.
A question arises: should the Home Army have helped the Jews with more than arms, diversionary actions and efforts to open up escape routes for the Jewish fighters? The answer must be negative. Not even the entire strength of the Home Army in Warsaw could have saved the ghetto or brought victory. There was considerable concentration of German army, SS, and
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gendarmerie forces in Warsaw and vicinity that would have been sent into action immediately, with but only one possible outcome--a crushing defeat of both the Jewish Fighting Organization and the Home Army. An uprising in the ghetto could have been more than a heroic and tragic gesture of protest and self-defense only if the Soviet army could have come to the rescue in time to win victory. The only other alternative would have been a total disarray of the German armies. But in April 1943, the Soviets were hundreds of miles away from Warsaw and the German armies showed no signs of decay, fighting doggedly on all war fronts.
Throughout the Ghetto Uprising, daily reports on the course of the fighting were transmitted by the chief of the Directorate of Civil Resistance Korbonski to the radio station SWIT, which based its broadcasts on their contents. Below are some samples of these messages:
April 20, 1943. Yesterday the Germans began the liquidation of 35,000 in our ghetto. The Jews are defending themselves. We can hear shots and explosions of grenades. The Germans are using tanks and armored cars. They have losses. There are fires in several places. Speak to the ghetto today.
April 21, 1943. The fighting in the ghetto continues. Throughout the night we could hear shots, explosions and fires.
April 28, 1943. Fighting continues in the ghetto. The Germans are burning houses systematically, one after another.
May 7, 1943. Rzeczpospolita of May 6 contains a statement of the Government Delegate denouncing German crimes in the ghetto. He pays homage to the Jewish fighters, voices our solidarity, and calls on all Poles to help those who escape from the ghetto.
May 15, 1943. The horrible massacre of the remnants of the Warsaw ghetto has been going on for three weeks now. Led by the Jewish Fighting Organization, the Jews defended themselves heroically, arms in hand. The Germans used artillery and armored cars. Over 300 Germans have been killed by the Jewish fighters, some 1,000 Germans have been wounded. Tens of thousands of Jews have been deported, murdered or burned alive by the Germans.
May 22, 1943. A rumor circulates among the Germans that the Gestapo chief in Warsaw, Dr. von Sammern, who had been recalled, was sentenced to death for the disgrace suffered by the Germans because of the armed resistance in the ghetto.
June 9, 1943. The underground Economic Bulletin reports on May 15 that 100,000 living units, 2,000 industrial locations, 3,000 commercial establishments and several factories have been burned or blown up in the Warsaw ghetto. In September 1939 only 78,000 living units were destroyed in the entire city of Warsaw.
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June 29, 1943. All inhabitants of the ghettos in Stanislawow, Lukow, Wegrow and Zolkiew have been murdered. In Warsaw, some 2,000 Jews are breathing their last in cellars and ruins. There is still some fighting during the nights. At Sobibor, German bands playing at the station greet Jews arriving from abroad.
In his letter to Cukierman, dated April 23, 1943, Mordecai Anielewicz refers to the first of the above dispatches, on which the SWIT broadcast was based:
The fact that .... the radio station SWIT broadcast a beautiful program about our struggle (which we heard on our set here), was the source of great satisfaction. It gives us courage in our fight to know that we are not forgotten on the other side of the ghetto wall.(5) Government Delegate Jankowski also sent urgent dispatches to the Polish government in London, beginning on April 21, 1943. Meanwhile in London, Szmul Zygielbojm, a member of the Polish National Council, committed suicide on May 13, 1943 in protest against the indifference of the Allies to the sufferings of the Warsaw ghetto; he explained the reason for his action in letters addressed to the President of the Polish Republic, Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz, and to the Premier of the government-in-exile, General Wladyslaw Sikorski
Topic: JEWS UNDER OCCUPATION (Read 2386 times)