The Jews of Warsaw

The Jewish community of Warsaw was the largest in Europe and the second-largest in the world after New York. The 1939 census recorded around 375,000 Jews in the city, around 30 per cent of its population. By May 1943, when the Warsaw ghetto uprising ended in the destruction of the ghetto, almost all of them had been murdered. Around 11,500 Warsaw Jews are estimated to have survived the war. The community of Warsaw has not been reconstituted; the city in 2026 has a Jewish community of perhaps 2,000 people.

The Yiddish capital

Warsaw’s Jewish community was the cultural capital of the Yiddish-speaking world. The Polish Jewish community as a whole numbered over three million in 1939, more than any other in Europe; the Warsaw community was its centre. The community had its own daily press in three languages (Yiddish, Polish and Hebrew), with the Haynt, the Moment, and Nasz Przegląd as the most prominent dailies. It had its own theatre, the Vilna Troupe, and its own musical institutions including the chamber orchestra of the Great Synagogue. It supported a network of around 600 synagogues and prayer houses, of which the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street, completed in 1878 with a capacity of 2,400, was the most architecturally distinctive.

The community was religiously, politically and socially complex. The Hasidic dynasties of Ger, Aleksander and Belz had their largest congregations in Warsaw. The Bund, the Jewish socialist party, was strongest in the working-class districts of Muranów and Praga and routinely outpolled the Zionist parties in the inter-war Warsaw Jewish community elections. The Zionist movement in its various streams was nonetheless substantial and produced figures including the Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik (resident in Warsaw before his emigration to Palestine), the leader of the Polish Zionist movement Yitzhak Grünbaum, and the literary critic David Frischmann.

The community’s intellectual life crossed into Polish national culture. The historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the educationalist Janusz Korczak (who ran the Dom Sierot orphanage from 1912), the writer Bruno Schulz (although Schulz lived in Drohobycz), the poets Julian Tuwim and Antoni Słonimski, the philosopher and bibliographer Majer Bałaban, the publisher Mojżesz Bornsztajn: each was central both to Polish Jewish life and to Polish national culture. The Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, born in Leoncin near Warsaw and resident in the city until 1935, would later receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.

The ghetto

The German army occupied Warsaw on 28 September 1939 after a three-week siege. The Warsaw ghetto was sealed on 16 November 1940 and ringed with a brick wall three metres high topped with barbed wire. Around 350,000 Jews from Warsaw and 80,000 to 90,000 from surrounding towns were forced into an area of approximately 3.4 square kilometres in the city’s north-western districts. At its peak in March 1941 the ghetto held around 460,000 people at a density approaching nine per room. Disease, starvation and the typhus epidemic of 1941 to 1942 killed around 100,000 ghetto inhabitants in the first eighteen months.

The community in the ghetto retained its institutional life under conditions of extraordinary deprivation. The Judenrat under Adam Czerniaków administered the ghetto under German control; Czerniaków committed suicide on 23 July 1942 rather than carry out the German order to compile lists for the great deportation, leaving a diary that is now one of the central documents of the period. The Jewish Self-Help organisations ran soup kitchens, clinics and orphanages. The clandestine archive of the ghetto, the Oneg Shabbat group founded by Emanuel Ringelblum, gathered documents, testimonies, posters, ration cards, photographs and statistical surveys throughout the ghetto’s existence; most of the archive was buried in milk cans and metal boxes before the ghetto’s destruction. Two of the three caches were recovered after the war.

The great deportation and the uprising

The great deportation began on 22 July 1942. Over the following two months around 265,000 Warsaw Jews were sent from the Umschlagplatz to Treblinka and murdered. The deportation operation was one of the largest single Holocaust operations and was carried out at a rate of around 6,000 people per day. Treblinka itself, a small camp of around 17 hectares, processed almost the entire Warsaw deportation in two months. Janusz Korczak refused offers of personal rescue and went with the children of his orphanage to Treblinka on 5 or 6 August 1942.

The Warsaw ghetto uprising of April and May 1943 was the largest single act of armed Jewish resistance in occupied Europe. Around 750 fighters of the Jewish Combat Organisation (ŻOB) under Mordechai Anielewicz and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) under Paweł Frenkel held off SS forces under Jürgen Stroop for nearly a month, from 19 April to 16 May 1943. The Stroop report, the German military record of the suppression, documents the burning of the ghetto block by block. Around 13,000 ghetto inhabitants died in the uprising itself; around 50,000 of those who emerged were sent to Treblinka and Majdanek; around 50 fighters escaped through the sewers and joined the partisans.

The Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street was dynamited by the Germans on 16 May 1943 to mark the end of the operation. Stroop’s telegram of that day reported: “The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer.”

Afterwards

Of the approximately 11,500 Warsaw Jews who survived the war, most had survived in hiding on the Aryan side of the city, in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 (the separate Polish national uprising against the Germans), in the partisans, in the Soviet Union, or in the camps. A small number returned to Warsaw after the war but found a city in which most of their community was gone and in which post-war antisemitism, including the Kielce pogrom of July 1946, was substantial. Most emigrated. The 1968 antisemitic campaign of the Gomułka government drove out most who remained.

The Warsaw ghetto sites are marked. The Umschlagplatz monument on Stawki Street stands where the deportation transports left. The Anielewicz monument by Nathan Rapoport, unveiled in 1948, stands on the site of the Mila 18 bunker where the leadership of the uprising died. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, opened in 2013 on the site of the former ghetto, is one of the largest Jewish museums in the world. The Ringelblum Archive, recovered after the war, is held at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 1999.

See also

Sources

  • Israel Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw 1939-1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt, Indiana University Press, 1989
  • Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, McGraw-Hill, 1958 (the principal contemporary chronicle, written by the historian who founded the Oneg Shabbat archive)
  • Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, edited by Raul Hilberg, Stanisław Staron and Josef Kermisz, Stein and Day, 1979
  • Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Indiana University Press, 2007
  • Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, University of California Press, 1993
  • Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, Bookmarks, 1990 (Edelman was the last commander of the ŻOB)
  • Jürgen Stroop, The Stroop Report: The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is No More, the German military record of the suppression, Pantheon, 1979
  • Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, Yale University Press, 2009
  • POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, https://www.polin.pl
  • Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, Ringelblum Archive, https://www.jhi.pl