A Forgotten Voice From the Holocaust, Part 1

April 19, 2011 marks the 68th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. On that day in 1943 a few hundred very young Jewish fighters started a hopeless battle against the German army. Choosing to die as soldiers rather than as victims, they became a symbol of heroism and resistance to the Holocaust. The story of the Warsaw Ghetto is, however, not only a story of the uprising. Over the two years of its existence, the largest Nazi ghetto in occupied Poland was a prison for, at one point, over 500,000 people. These were men, women and children; former factory workers, petty merchants as well as world-famous artists and scientists; impoverished refugees and native Varsovians, all trying to lead their daily lives in the hell behind the ghetto walls. This article will tell the story of a small group of them - those known as "assimilated" Jews. They were people who grew up in the Polish environment; graduates of the most elite Polish secondary schools and universities; often veterans of the Polish fight for independence. Many of them faced their Jewish identity for the first time only with the onset of the German occupation of Poland. In October 1940, a year after the beginning of World War II, the occupational authorities announced the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto, referred to in German propaganda as the "Jewish residential quarter in Warsaw". Specifically, this was a walled-in part of today's Wola district, where all those of Jewish ancestry were forced to relocate. The vast majority of assimilated Jews, including some who had never set foot in the traditional Jewish quarter of Warsaw, complied with the German degree. Only a few decided to risk an illegal existence with forged papers outside the ghetto, a crime which with time would put both them and those helping them at risk of the death penalty. Hell on earth: Inhumanely overcrowded, poverty-stricken, ridden with disease and hunger, the Warsaw Ghetto was described in countless testimonies as hell on earth, set up with a clear aim of exterminating those imprisoned there. Due to their pre-war professional position, financial situation, and especially contacts outside the ghetto, members of the assimilated intelligentsia were among the most fortunate of Ghetto inhabitants. The Nazi-induced Jewish Council (the Judenrat), seen by the ghetto society as a "nest of disgusting assimilation," was due to its overblown bureaucratic structure the most prominent job provider for lawyers left without a practice, teachers with no teaching positions, high-level civil servants, university students and employees of pre-war social help institutions, almost all of them with no previous experience in office work. The Judenrat did not pay much, but its employees were at least able to feed themselves and their families and were immune from forced labor, which collected thousands of victims from among the ghetto poor. Former officers from the Polish Army and lawyers became natural recruits to the ghetto police, the Jewish Order Service, who were purported to refer to themselves as the "most intelligent police service in the world". However, for the majority of ghetto inhabitants they were synonymous with bribery and abuses of power. The highest ranks were filled exclusively by converts and highly assimilated Jews. The Jewish Order Service was commanded by Józef Szeryński, a pre-war colonel in the Polish police and one of the 2,000 Christians in the ghetto. Many of these converted Jews were representatives of the professional and social elite of pre-war Warsaw, who almost automatically penetrated the top layers of ghetto life, creating the feeling of a mutually supportive Catholic clique. The symbols of the ghetto Christian community were the Nativity of Blessed Virgin Mary Church on Leszno street and the All Saints at Grzybowski Square (both of which are still standing today), which celebrated widely-attended Sunday masses. The large gardens adjacent to the church at Leszno street, one of very few places of greenery in the ghetto, were a meeting place for the elite of the quarter - professors, engineers, teachers and their families. Many of them sent their children to the parish-run clandestine primary school and for extra-curricular activities, including dance classes held by the famous ballet teacher Irena Prusicka. The adjacent buildings of All Saints housed many prominent converts and offered them living conditions starkly different from those in the rest of the ghetto. They were described by one of the inhabitants as "so quiet and peaceful that you felt like there was no ghetto and no war." Source: The Warsaw Voice