Poland was the heart of the Holocaust. The country had the largest Jewish community in Europe before the war, around 3.3 million people, more than a third of all the Jews on the continent. Around 90 per cent of them were murdered, the highest national death rate of any large Jewish community. The death camps that did most of the killing, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, were all built on Polish soil. The ghettos that held the Jewish population while the death camps were being constructed were located almost without exception in Polish cities. The story of the Holocaust as it is most often told is the Polish story.
The ghettos
The German occupiers established enclosed ghettos across Poland and the western Soviet Union from late 1939 onwards. The largest, Warsaw, held around 460,000 Jews at its peak within a walled district of around 3.4 square kilometres. Łódź held around 200,000. Smaller but substantial ghettos at Kraków, Lublin, Białystok, Vilna, Kaunas, Minsk, and dozens of other cities each held tens of thousands. Around 800,000 to one million Polish Jews died in the ghettos before the deportations to the death camps even began, from starvation, disease, and direct German violence. The mechanics of ghetto life, the Judenrat, the smuggling networks, the internal economies of survival, and the deliberate calibration of rations to produce slow death, are documented in detail in these pages.
The resistance
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April to May 1943 is the most studied act of Jewish armed resistance in the Holocaust. Around 750 fighters of the Jewish Combat Organisation held SS units at bay for nearly a month, in a battle the Germans had expected to last three days. The uprising’s commander Mordecai Anielewicz died in the bunker at 18 Mila Street. General Jürgen Stroop’s report to his superiors, preserved as a Nuremberg document, records in the perpetrators’ own words what it cost the SS to suppress it. The Białystok, Vilna, Minsk, and Kraków resistances each have their own stories, less famous but no less significant. The Sobibor revolt of October 1943, in which prisoners killed eleven SS men and several hundred escaped into the forest, was the most successful single uprising in a death camp. The Treblinka revolt of August 1943 destroyed much of the camp’s infrastructure.
These were not the actions of people who did not understand their situation. They were the actions of people who understood it completely, and chose to die fighting rather than on the ramp. That distinction matters, and the pages in this section document it in full.
Sources
- Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw 1939-1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt, Indiana University Press, 1982
- Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, McGraw-Hill, 1958
- Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd edition, Yale University Press, 2003
- Jürgen Stroop, The Stroop Report, Nuremberg Document PS-1061, 1943
- Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, Indiana University Press, 2007