Warsaw, 29 January 1946. Judge K. Szwarc interviewed as a witness Stanisław Adler, the son of Beniamin and Cecylia, née Sztykold, born on 8 February 1901 in Warsaw, a lawyer, no criminal record, domiciled in Warsaw at Ząbkowska Street 39, flat no. 23, who, having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations, testified as follows:
I belong to a group of very few Jewish survivors, out of almost half a million Polish Jews who were crammed by the Nazis into one of the parts of Warsaw’s Śródmieście [City Centre], separated from the rest of the city by walls which they ordered to be erected especially for that purpose. Being subjected to elaborate moral and physical abuse, these people were partly starved, partly exposed to a deadly epidemic, partly murdered in Warsaw itself, or deported and burnt in the crematoria of Treblinka, Majdanek and other extermination camps. Those who managed to escape the Nazi Hell owe it to extraordinary fortune.
The Nazis started their abuse of Jews immediately after they captured Warsaw in 1939, when they issued a number of orders whose obvious purpose was to prepare the grounds for the subsequent extermination of Jews, which they prepared in a precise and elaborate manner. It is characteristic that the series of orders aimed against Jews was started by Governor General Hans Frank’s decree prohibiting ritual slaughter. At the beginning of the decree was a portentous statement that, in the territories remaining under German control, it was unacceptable to ill-treat animals in any manner. Simultaneously, the German “legislator” decreed that Jews aged from 12 to 60 were obliged to perform forced labor. This obligation was only partly fulfilled in one’s place of residence through round- ups, the victims of which were beaten, maltreated and forced to lift excessively heavy objects, after which they returned home physically and spiritually broken. At the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1940, the locations infamous as places of such mistreatment were Dynasy, the Warsaw University buildings, and the Falenty manor near Warsaw. Those who had not been exploited on the spot were sent by the Germans to so-called labor camps, where Jewish laborers were hired out by the SS to German businessmen, who, at that time, constructed strategic roads or conducted other kinds of military work (mainly drainage). These businessmen were clearly not responsible for keeping Jewish labourers alive; either they did not give them anything to eat or they gave them such tiny portions of the lousiest food imaginable that after only a few weeks the laborers looked like shadows and were dying off fast.
In the spring of 1941, I saw several dozen camp prisoners who managed to return alive from forced labor and who were in a transit camp, so-called Dulag, at Leszno Street 109 (outside the Ghetto). I interviewed them on behalf of the Judenrat. I could see marks on all of their bodies, many were wounded; many of them also had dislocated jaws, and dislocated joints in their arms and legs. Most of them lay as if delirious, with their eyes full of terror. They spoke with one voice that they had been constantly maltreated and deliberately starved. One usually had to go out to work between a double file of SS-men or Ukrainians assigned for this purpose, who, equipped with clubs or bull whips, bashed the prisoners who were running by. The smallest or sometimes even an imaginary offence resulted in such punishments as dragging a prisoner along a road behind a cart with his or her head hitting the cobblestones and legs tied up to the cart, hanging, submerging in liquid manure, or dousing with cold water immediately after work when the weather was freezing.
Among other things, in order to implement the system of “forced labor,” and, above all to be able to put into action their subsequent, even more terrifying, ideas, the Germans introduced many preparatory measures. As such, in the spring of 1939, Frank decreed that all Jews, male and female, who were over ten years of age, should wear, on their right arms, white cloth bands, 10 centimeters wide, with a blue Star of David embroidered on them. My friend, Stanisław Tymbor, a lawyer and Doctor of Philosophy, the author of numerous legal publications, when caught committing the crime of not wearing an armband, got away with a lenient sentence of nine months in prison, which he suffered in full. Over time, the sentences for such crimes became more severe. In fact, because of Frank, Jews were prohibited from using public transport and from changing their places of residence. At the same time, Frank froze all Jewish accounts, obliged them to submit full registers of their domestic and foreign property and assets, and then confiscated, for the Third Reich or alternatively for the General Government, all Jewish wealth, commercial establishments and entitlements. Jews were prohibited from doing almost all jobs and were expelled from all positions in the civil service. Ignoring the protests of Bar Councils, which showed no fear of the occupier’s pressure, Jewish lawyers were removed from lawyer lists, while Jewish doctors were restricted in their medical practice to only Jewish patients. Simultaneously, there continued a systematic looting of Jewish flats. For a short time this took place in the form of requisition, with requisition slips being issued by the Germans; later, the Germans, especially SS-men, although German regular army soldiers, railwaymen and civilians would also do it, simply visited flats and houses inhabited by Jews and took everything they could lay their hands on. If a German took a liking to a Jew’s flat, he simply threw the Jew out, keeping all movables, and moved into a furnished flat. This is how my brother and parents were removed from their flats, and some other distant relatives, too.
I must stress here that the “definition of a Jew” in the General Government corresponded more or less with how it was understood in the Nuremberg Laws, with some concessions for people of so-called mixed parentage. From the very first, Jews were kept in constant terror by the Nazi occupiers, which intensified month by month; they were constantly uncertain of their life, their future. The German occupiers liked to apply the principle of collective responsibility. So, for example, when in January 1940, a man called Kot, a trainee lawyer of Jewish origin, shot a German gendarme in Warsaw; in retaliation, several hundred people were arrested from among the Jewish intelligentsia, mainly lawyers [with surnames starting] with the starting letters of the alphabet. I myself was being looked for by the Gestapo, who visited my flat twice when I was out. After a few months, the Nazis sent to the Judenrat a list of dead Jews from among those who had been arrested “in retaliation for Kot.” The rest of the arrested Jews whose names were not on the list were never heard of again.
In Governor General Frank’s legislation, in addition to being bearers of obligations, those Jews who were still alive were also treated as objects, being subject to property ownership rights. As such bearers of obligations, for example, they had to pay social contributions; however, they were stripped of their rights to any benefits. A Jew could be killed with impunity, and individual Germans frequently took advantage of this possibility. For example, a giant gendarme with a hideous appearance nicknamed “Frankenstein” was the terror of Jews in 1941. Every few days he entered an area inhabited by isolated Jews, shot into the crowd, and after killing a few people, walked away as if nothing had happened. All interventions made by the Judenrat with the German authorities regarding the issue, and generally other matters, were ineffectual.
To make Jews appear repulsive in the eyes of the outside world and to completely separate them socially, Nowy Kurier Warszawski – published by the Germans in Polish, and Warschauer Zeitung, published in German, continually and ferociously tried to turn people against the Jews. Among other things, these publications persistently endorsed the theories put forward by Nazi scholars, according to which Jews were dangerous to those around them, spreading typhus, to which they were allegedly immune, and which they used to infect the “Aryan” people around them. Jews were prohibited from travelling on some trams or from crossing some streets and squares. Neighbourhoods inhabited by a fairly large number of Jews were equipped with notices with inscriptions Seuchenge-fahrgebiet, and the Judenrat was told to erect walls across the streets in selected places to seal the areas off. When the construction was completed, Jews were told to move into the area sealed off by the newly-erected walls, while the so-called “Aryan” residents were to move out of that area. All that peregrination took a few days and came to an end on 15 November 1940 with Jews being imprisoned within the walls of this peculiar concentration camp. The number of passes issued was always between 100 and 200. Moreover, every day, in close-order columns under German escort, a few thousand Jewish workers went out to work in factories outside the camp. The area that had been sealed off was the most poorly developed part of the city. Its boundaries had been maliciously planned in such a way so as to exclude all tree-covered parts of the city or fairly big garden squares. In fact, it consisted of two parts, larger and smaller, which, after the Germans, were called the large and small ghettos. These two parts (the small ghetto was inhabited by around 100,000 people and it was where the Jewish quarter’s administration was located) were connected by only one passage (at the junction of Chłodna Street and Żelazna Street); Jews were obliged to run across this area. If somebody slowed down, even a little, he or she was lashed by German gendarmes, had to crawl around in the mud, or “do physical exercise” lasting about a quarter of an hour. The exercises consisted of doing deep knee bends while holding bricks, with one’s arms stretched out in front.
A Jew had to take his or her hat off while passing a German. It was characteristic that Warschauer Zeitung announced that Jews took off their caps spontaneously when they saw a German but that the German Army did not wish them to do so. However, a Jew who treated this announcement seriously and did not take his hat off, or did not hide out prudently in order to avoid taking his hat off, was in serious trouble indeed. Several times, I myself witnessed a Jew being beaten for not taking his hat off or not stepping off the pavement onto the street at the sight of a German, which was clearly ordered by the occupation authorities under threat of severe punishment.
The confinement of Jews in the ghetto on 15 November 1940 was a direct action of the Governor of the Warsaw District, Fischer, and the city commandant of Warsaw, Leist. On behalf of the Sicherheitpolizei, these actions were supervised by Oberscharführer Mende and Untersturmführer Brandt, who were experts on Jewish matters in the Warsaw Gestapo. Diversionary activities among Jews were run in the Warsaw Gestapo by Dr Stabenow, and partly by Brandt, mentioned above. I base my information concerning Mende and Brandt on the words of Czerniaków, an engineer and the chairman of the Judenrat, Lieutenant Colonel Szeryński, the commander of the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst, and the Judenrat counsellors and lawyers Rosensztat, Zundelewicz and Grodzieński. I base my information regarding Stabenow partly on what the above-mentioned members of the Judenrat told me; I also partly obtained it from occasional conversations with Dr Herbert Stahrer, a Jew from Gdańsk, whose role in the Ghetto was ambiguous.
I worked in the Judenrat from November 1940 until my escape from the Jewish quarter in 1943, and I was in close touch with the Judenrat lawyers and counsellors.
The confinement of Jews behind the walls caused starvation and high prices in the Jewish quarter. There were extremely cramped living conditions there. In April 1942, as the then Director of the Accommodation Department of the closed quarter, on behalf of the Judenrat, I ordered a list of inhabitants and flats to be prepared. It turned out that there were some buildings in our quarter that had an average residential density of over 10 people per room. This resulted not only from the fact that the Jewish people had been cramped in a very small area, but also from the fact that the Nazis would constantly herd into the quarter new masses of people from nearby and distant areas around Warsaw, closing down similar closed quarters there and simultaneously reducing the size of our Ghetto.
The movement of people in such conditions must have led to the typhus epidemic, which broke out with great intensity during the winter at the end of 1940 and the beginning of 1941. The epidemic intensified not only because people were herded in from different places, or because of the cramped living conditions or extreme starvation resulting from the impossibility of regular provision of food, but also because, despite continual requests submitted by the Judenrat, the Germans did not permit the disposal of rubbish and household waste. Month by month, in each courtyard, more and more piles of decomposing waste grew. The burning of rubbish or its transport into burnt-out buildings was a palliative which did not solve the problem at all. This situation did not change until the middle of 1941, when the Nazis eventually permitted waste disposal from the quarter.
Food rations for an inhabitant of the Jewish quarter consisted of one kilogram of wholemeal bread per week, and about a quarter kilogram of fruit preserve per month, and from 1941, a quarter kilogram of artificial honey, which was made from molasses. Approximately once every half year, each inhabitant received an egg, and sometimes some salt was allotted to the inhabitants of the quarter. Directly before the outbreak of the war in the East in 1941, apparently in order to maintain order at the rear of the army, the Germans allotted a certain amount of oats, and the Judenrat, after the oats had been ground in the quarter, distributed a plateful of porridge per day to the starving masses. Furthermore, from the second half of 1941, the laborers from the factories working for the Wehrmacht, and the 1,700 members of the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst, received extra rations of bread, fruit preserve and artificial honey.
Apart from this, the Ghetto did not receive anything else legally and was condemned to smuggling foodstuffs, whose prices were obviously very high as a result of the difficulties and risks involved in delivery. Only a very few people could afford to purchase the smuggled things, only those that still kept some valuables or a fairly large amount of clothes, which could be delivered outside the walls to be bartered for food. The Jewish Social Self-Help had to face unsolvable problems.
It was the re-settled people who suffered the worst conditions, especially those who had no relatives in Warsaw and lived in shelters, so-called transit camps. In July, 1941, as the then Inspector of the Complaints Department of the Judenrat, I carried out an inspection of a large transit camp at Dzika Street 9, inhabited by 1,500 people. I discovered that the monthly death rate was 10 percent among adults and 25 percent among children.
This was after Frank had managed to “clarify” the quarter’s legal status, which had taken place as early as April, 1941. At that time, Frank established the position of Commissar for the Jewish quarter. He was to administer the quarter with: 1) a public-law institution called Transferstelle, which regulated the economic contacts of the Jewish quarter with the “outside world”; 2) the chairman of the Judenrat, who, inside that concentration camp for Jews, was granted the duties of mayor. Also, the Governor of the Warsaw District, Dr Fischer, appointed Auerswald, a lawyer from Berlin, as the Commissary for the Jewish quarter. Apparently, Auerswald chose as his goal the complete starvation of the quarter. Immediately after his appointment, Goldfeder, a member of Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst – he told me this immediately – saw Auerswald drawing, on the map of the quarter, his own planned changes to its boundaries. The planned changes consisted of decreasing the size of the quarter and erecting boundary walls in the middle of the streets, whereas until then they had run along the rears of buildings and at the ends and beginnings of streets.
A period of intense construction works began: the Jewish quarter was surrounded by a wall which was more than three meters high. These walls were strictly guarded, both inside and outside. The number of entrance gates was reduced. The smugglers where shot at mercilessly by gendarmes. The moving of the boundaries, which took place in stages, as each subsequent part was being completed, lasted from the autumn of 1941 to June, 1942. In the meantime, there were fairly small or large relocations of people inside the Ghetto. Some of them affected several dozen thousand people.
During the first half of 1942, every month, from 4,000 to 12,000 people were relocated monthly. Obviously, these changes even further reduced the sanitary conditions of the quarter, which caused the epidemics to intensify tremendously. For instance, in January and February, 1942, according to the statistics published by the Judenrat, more than 5,000 people died in the quarter every month. Funeral homes could not keep up with the demand for burials. There were human corpses lying on the pavement every several dozen footsteps. Auerswald took substantial bribes to suspend the relocation for a short time. There were special collections for such a purpose organized on Sienna Street. Bribe were paid in gold. The Economic Department of the Judenrat was kept occupied almost exclusively by providing Auerswald and other Germans with bribes in money, valuables and other objects. In the middle of December, 1941, Auerswald ordered that, under pain of death, Jews were obliged to hand over all the fur coats they possessed. The poor wretched inhabitants of the quarter, already deprived of fuel provisions, were now robbed of warm clothes. On 1 March 1942, Auerswald arrived to inspect the Accommodation Department of the Judenrat, which was located at Nowolipie Street 80, just a stone’s throw from the boundary wall. At that moment, a sack of food was being thrown over the wall. A member of Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst, Kotek, who was standing in front of the gate, did not notice Auerswald arriving and did not react to the smuggling of the food over the wall. Auerswald got out of his car, ran up to Kotek, personally knocked him down and kicked him till he bled; then, he took away his service number and had him delivered to the Gestapo HQ. This time, it was possible to rescue Kotek with a bribe.
The Nazi group to which Auerswald belonged obviously decided to finish off the Jewish population of Warsaw with epidemics and starvation, and before this happened, to exploit the Jewish labour force as much as possible for German military purposes. In 1942, the Gestapo in Warsaw also believed this the proper way to proceed, doubting as they did the technical feasibility of transporting Jews away to be burnt, because of the enormousness of such an undertaking.
During the cleaning of the administrative office of the so-called Befehlsstelle, at Żelazna Street 103, in October 1942, a piece of the copy of the memorandum regarding this matter was found. I held this document in my hand. The Warsaw Gestapo stated in it that 1942 was not a good time to liquidate the Ghetto and that the preparations for such an act were still underway. The Transferstelle undoubtedly knew as early as in May 1942 that some kind of action against the Jews in the Ghetto was being prepared. I realized that on the basis of the allusions made by a man called Perle, a sales representative from Giesen and an office worker in the Transferstelle at that time, who was looking for space for German businesses in the Ghetto. Steering the conversation in the right way, I came to the conclusion that the fate of the so-called small Ghetto had been sealed, but the fate of the other part still hang in the balance. At that time, my understanding was that the people from the small Ghetto would be relocated to the large Ghetto, or alternatively that the whole Jewish population would be moved to the huts whose construction near Warsaw had just been signalled.
In June 1942, numerous uniformed cameramen appeared in the Ghetto. Among other things, they rounded up men and women for a ritual bath, made them take their clothes off and took a photo of them having a bath together. The Chairman of the Judenrat, Czerniaków, was told to dance at a ball, which was staged in an ad hoc manner, and to which they had rounded up fairly well-dressed people from the streets. However, engineer Czerniaków was able to successfully resist the demand. The cameramen stopped fairly good-looking passers-by in the streets, took away their identity cards and told them to come to the address indicated in order to take part in the filming of a feast. At the address indicated, tables were groaning under the weight of gourmet food. The scene in which these delicacies were ravenously consumed was naturally filmed by the Nazis.
After the filming of the Ghetto had been finished, at the beginning of July, the Warsaw Gestapo carried out a raid on the quarter and murdered several dozen people from different spheres and of different trades and professions. They were most probably people about whom the Gestapo had received confidential information that they were involved in political activity. Alfred Nossig, a sculptor and columnist, and former advisor to Wilhelm II, assigned by Brandt to draw up reports on the political climate in the Jewish quarter, at that time an aged greybeard, was to inform the Gestapo whether the Jews of Warsaw believed in the spreading rumors concerning the existence of the extermination camps in Bełżec and Chełmno, which I know from his secretary. In general people did not believe that this information was true, as it was beyond the imagination of a normal person.
When at the end of June 1942 a group of Gypsies was herded into the Ghetto, led by Kwiek, their king, and transports of Jews from Germany, mainly from Berlin, and from the Czech territory, started to arrive, people’s thoughts were absorbed by immediate housing problems. Because of lack of other places, I requisitioned fairly large non-residential establishments and put the people who arrived from abroad up there. For instance, I requisitioned the schools and houses of worship (which had been waiting in vain) that had not been occupied by newcomers; schools, apart from vocational schools which had opened in 1941, were closed as a result of the occupier’s ban; houses of worship had also been closed because Jews were forbidden to practise Judaism openly.
On 22 July 1942, the so-called resettlement of Jews from Warsaw began. In order to carry out this task, a Gestapo unit from Lublin arrived, specially trained in the extermination of Jews, commanded by Sturmbannführer Hoffle and his assistant Michalsen. Those two men issued all orders concerning the deportation of Jews and are responsible for it. The prelude to the-above mentioned deportation action was the arrest of a considerable number of Judenrat counsellors, several department directors and several dozen notables. All of them were put in Pawiak prison as hostages. At the same time, the Ghetto wall was tightly surrounded from the outside by some Rumanians or Latvians in SS uniforms; there were guards standing approximately every 25 meters.
Gestapo men visited the Judenrat, dictated an order, which was immediately posted by the Judenrat, specifying that all Jews were subject to resettlement from Warsaw to the East, as far as I can remember, in order “to work” or “to settle.” In accordance with the order, one could take 15 kilograms of luggage, as well as gold and valuables. The members of Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst, laborers from the factories working for the Wehrmacht, the Judenrat and Jewish Social Self-Help officials, and members of some other groups specified in the order were exempt from [the requirement of] resettlement. Directly before the resettlement, many German factories, so-called “workshops,” opened in the quarter, where a substantial number of Jews found work. People felt that something dangerous was in the air and even if one was not looking for a job with a German employer, one wanted to hide out at least. Since the overwhelming majority of the Jews was employed, chairman Czerniaków expected, something he expressed during his conversations with Rozenstat, a counsellor and lawyer, and which I know from the latter, that the resettlement would affect only about 30,000-40,000 people, mainly the residents of transit camps for newcomers, where they died off month by month, as well as the recent newcomers from Germany and the Czech territory, and those who were permanently unemployed. According to the order issued by the SS, 6,000 people were to be transported away daily. However, when after two days, Hoffle and Michalsen increased the number of the resettled up to 7,000, engineer Czerniaków realized that the Germans did not intend to resettle the unemployed, but that they were deceiving the Jews, and that behind the resettlement was a plan to exterminate these people. With this realization, the chairman of the Judenrat committed suicide by taking potassium cyanide.
Those who were in charge of the deportation action ordered it be announced that people who volunteered to be resettled would receive three kilograms of bread and three kilograms of fruit preserve. It is necessary to explain that after the resettlement had been ordered, utter starvation had set in the quarter. All the distribution of rations and smuggling had come to an end. It was out of the question to purchase bread. There was complete pandemonium outside bakers’ shops. Thousands of starving people were lured by promises made by the above-mentioned order. Long lines of volunteers stood at the shipment square waiting to be resettled for the price of the articles mentioned above. The deadlines for the volunteers’ appearance at the square set initially were extended, with the bonus having been reduced to one kilogram of bread and one of fruit preserve. Simultaneously, letters, written allegedly by people who had already been resettled, started to arrive. The letters usually said that the writer felt well, lived in proper housing conditions and only lacked money. The letters (I read two myself) were delivered to the Judenrat and raised some hopes.
However, when the contingent of volunteers and people with no permits dwindled away to nothing, SS-men started resettling those who were “exempt” from resettlement. They surrounded a street and rounded up everybody who was in it. Those who were hiding out were killed on the spot. Any documents stating that the holder was not subject to displacement were usually torn up by the SS-men, and the person was put in a transport wagon.
Gradually, the number of resettled people increased to 10,000 daily. With this, in order not to reduce the pace of the operation, and at the same time to secure manpower for the German workshops, the Nazis implemented the following system. Single buildings, blocks of buildings or whole streets of buildings were assigned to individual workshops. Workshop buildings were surrounded with fences, separating them from the streets and the Jewish labourers became prisoners of their workshops.
Considerable sums of money amounting to several dozen thousand zloty were paid to get a job in a workshop as a prisoner-labourer. German manufacturers were provided with machinery and even with completely equipped factories. The most ruthless workshop owner was W.C. Tobbens from Bremen, a member of the SA, who employed around 30,000 people, a substantial number of whom were admitted thanks to bribes.
Over time, as the deportation operation was gaining momentum, Gestapo men started to reduce the number of workshops. Tobbens was in charge of this operation personally. He collected enormous sums of money for exempting people from deportations. He soon became a plenipotentiary for the whole deportation operation and towards the end was personally in charge of it.
Going back to the system of workshop buildings, it should be pointed out that because it was implemented during the most terrifying moment of the deportation operation, people ran around the quarter like madmen, carrying the remains of their possessions; some were leaving buildings now occupied by workshops, while others were moving in. Since the assignment of buildings to workshops changed over time, there was no end to people’s removals. This chaos was to the advantage of the Nazi butchers, who caught all of the mad and duped victims. In the conditions described above, laborers moved into factories, and office workers moved into their offices, and they stayed there night and day. While during the first days of the deportation operation, the hired family head “hid” his remaining family members, gradually the scope for hiding was narrowed down. One by one, parents, spouses and children were excluded from hiding. Eventually, old, feeble and disabled laborers started to be deported. Old people began shaving off their heads to hide grey hair from the sight of their butchers. A father voluntarily followed a child that was caught for transport, daughters exempted on some basis gave up staying and left together with their “resettled” mother.
In Stawki Street in a former school building and in a building housing a Customs Bureau there was hell on earth, with victims of the deportation operation there, with no food or water. Maltreatment and beating of the transported people had already started there. SS beasts, holding whips, kept “order” in the crowds of imprisoned people. On the first days of the deportation operation, to enable them to assign accommodation to those who had been removed from buildings intended for workshop laborers, my office workers were given special arm bands with numbers on them and were to be exempt from deportations. However, when it turned out that inspectors wearing such arm bands were being deported, I suspended all operations of my bureau. This was so because, regardless of the fact that I did not want to expose my employees to further direct danger, I had found hundreds of flats of already deported people empty in the quarter, and anyway, it was not certain that the already assigned accommodation would not become a trap for the residents who had just moved in. Simultaneously, I reduced the number of my personnel on my own in such a way that I had first seen to it that the redundant people be employed in different workshops.
After a few days, Germans ordered the number of office workers in the Judenrat to be reduced by half, and it was the department directors who were to select people for the reductions. Thanks to that fact that I had put my personnel in workshops, I did not have to carry out any reductions. However, when, after a few days of absence, I returned to my bureau, I realized with horror that, apart from a handful of people who had hidden out in advance, all my personnel had been deported. Those who had been deported included the bureau supervisor on behalf of the Judenrat, a lawyer, many times a member of the Bar Council, Baumber, and my own brother Mieczysław, director of the Dr Rattner joint stock company. Day by day, the operation was becoming more and more ruthless. The reductions in Schultz’s and Tobbens’ workshops lowered the number of personnel from 30,000 to 15,000 people. Most workshops were completely closed down. Those who were hiding out, if found, were shot to death on the spot. There was blood and gore everywhere. One day, while the deportation operation was on, when I ran out onto the stairs, I had to wade ankle deep through blood. I will never forget a lock of hair with a piece of brain stuck to a wall. Despite this, the only kind of defence that held any promise was a hide-out and this form of passive defence was universally adopted.
During the first days of September 1942, the intensity of the operation started to decrease. Those who had survived took heart and gained faith that they would survive. On Saturday night, 5 September, I heard some noises in the street. I saw some people transporting belongings with handcarts. At dawn, I went out to catch up on the latest news and I learnt that the Germans had issued an order specifying that at 10 a.m. all the people that had survived should go to a designated area (north of Gęsia and Franciszkańska streets) for selection, bringing food for two days. People who did not follow the order were to be executed. A vast swarm of people gathered in the designated area. Some 30,000 people of those who gathered received numbers, which were life cards entitling them to stay in the Ghetto, whereas most of those who did not go through the selection successfully, i.e. some 60,000 people, were murdered by the Nazis, or alternatively deported to Treblinka and burnt there, it seems. My parents were also killed at that time. On the day following the ending of the selection, the Germans calculated that they had issued several hundred numbers too many for the Judenrat office workers. So, the right number of people was caught and deported so as to bring the number of people alive to the specified norm. Despite this, at least 20,000 people without life cards succeeded in hiding out in the basements and hiding places in the quarter. This is how the “great resettlement” of Jews from Warsaw to the East ended.
Soon, those who remained in the Ghetto learnt the details from fugitives from Treblinka about how their relatives had been murdered in this death camp, immediately after the railway transport arrived at that place of slaughter. The fugitives, mainly people who had been responsible for sorting out clothes in Treblinka, told us about the Germans delivering speeches to those who arrived, announcing the beginning of a new era: from now on they would be employed working productively on the land; then, they would receive their own farms. At the beginning, they were to take off all their clothes and have a bath; then, they would receive new clothes for the continuation of the journey. The alleged bath was a gas chamber, in which the victims of that atrocity would die in torment after 15 minutes. Terror descended upon the quarter.
After the “great resettlement” had finished, Brandt made an assurance that the Jews who were kept alive could peacefully work in the quarter from then on, and that they would stay there until the end of the war. Of course, nobody took that seriously and while some continued their efforts to break out of the quarter, others built hiding places in its ruins. After the great resettlement, entire residential blocks were completely deserted and in utter ruin. There were huge piles of furniture and household items in the streets where people still lived, which reached almost the first floor. People who had survived were hiding out in the most incredible hiding places. A foray outside one’s home was extremely dangerous. Between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. it was forbidden to go out at all. At other times, people who stayed outside could be in danger of being killed or at least beaten up by a German. Klostenmayer, an SS-man, rode his bike around the quarter and shot at any passers-by he came across. On a single day, at only one place, he mowed three Jews down, laughing. Another German, Dirks, a gendarme, was often at his post in Zamenhofa Street. It was impossible to cross the street then. If a Jew came into his view, Dirks shot at him or her without mercy. At that time, Germans, SS-men, organized the so-called Werteerfassung. Its purpose was to collect and transport away the movables that the murdered Jews had left. About 5,000 Jewish laborers were set to work on the collection of the remaining personal possessions in the quarter. Furniture and other objects were sorted and repaired, and things that looked fairly good were transported away to Germany, whereas shabbier objects were sold to people outside the Ghetto. The selling place was the main synagogue on Tłomackie Street.
At the beginning of November 1942, we received news that Frank had declared an amnesty for the Jews caught outside the Ghetto. Previously, if a Jew had been caught outside the Ghetto, he or she was shot to death on the spot (without any trial or proceedings), while now Jews caught in the “Aryan” quarter were taken to the Ghetto. The whole Jewish population of the General Government was concentrated in a few camps. People from smaller camps started to be rounded up in the Warsaw Ghetto again. Simultaneously, the provision of food improved considerably in the Jewish quarter. The shipment square, where Germans kept anybody who had been caught committing any offence, was emptied and the prisoners were released. Some reassuring news started to spread persistently; the establishment of new workshops was announced. I want to emphasize that immediately after the great resettlement, the SS issued an order in accordance with which Jewish laborers were to earn 5 zlotys daily regardless of the kind of work they did. Out of this sum, a German businessman was to deposit 3 zlotys in the SS bank account and should use the rest to feed his laborer. It is easy to guess what the feeding looked like. More often than not, it came down to a plateful of soup a day.
As early as in November 1942, after the Jewish population of Lublin had been murdered, the Gestapo ordered a transport of 3,000 Jewish tailors from Warsaw to Lublin for forced labor.
Naturally, there were no volunteers for this journey. There were round-ups in the largest workshops owned by Schultz and Tobbens in order to collect the specified contingent of tailors. Since labourers dispersed in all directions, the Germans caught emergency doctors, bakers directly from bakeries, little children etc., and sent them to Lublin as tailors. When this operation had finished, the Germans announced once again that it had all been a mistake. From December onward, panic set in and spread among the imprisoned Jews, and on 18 January 1943, before 7 a.m., the Gestapo carried out an unexpected raid on the quarter and for four days in a row they caught anybody who they were able to find, except for the members of the Werteerfassung. First, they caught and deported almost the entire Board of the Judenrat, except for its chairman, deputy chairmen, and a few counsellors. Whereas on the first day of the operation, thanks to the element of surprise, the Germans managed to catch several thousand people, on the following days, despite throwing grenades into basements and blowing up places in which they had expected to find some people hiding out, the results of the round-ups were disappointing.
Already during this operation, the Jewish Self-Defence started to be active, but its operations were limited due to lack of firearms. Its actions started when – in the autumn of 1942, a few Jews, suspected of contacts with Germans, – were killed. From November, 1942, strategic points started to be regularly secured by marksmen. For that purpose, at the request of the leaders of the Self-Defence Organization, I assigned them flats that had windows with the right field of fire. However, only young people were given guns. In the hiding place which I had built in Smocza Street, near Miła Street, in which 300 people were saved in January 1943, there was not even a single gun. During the January operation, some of those who had been caught were shot to death on the spot, whereas others were deported.
As I know from stories told by several people, including the caretaker of the building where I was living at that time, Alter, who escaped by jumping out of a moving train, in several cases gas was released inside wagons and the prisoners were killed on their way to the camp. When it turned out that the operation was not yielding good results, the Germans announced its end, simultaneously ordering the Judenrat to relocate Jews into a completely narrow area between two streets. Since I did not want to be involved in a campaign of throwing people out of their hiding places, I escaped from the Ghetto. The facts presented above may be confirmed, as well as information regarding the remaining period until the liquidation of the Ghetto, ordered in April 1943, and conducted after the Jewish uprising in such a way that all the buildings of the Ghetto were demolished or blown up, may be provided by the following people:
Mieczysław Maślanko, a lawyer, Szeroka Street 31, flat no. 42, Warsaw
Zygmunt Warman, a lawyer, the former secretary-general of the Judenrat in Warsaw.
The witness interview report was read out.
Lawyer Adler informs about a change of address and that he currently lives in Warsaw, at Polna Street 38, flat no. 9.