Bloodlands

by Timothy Snyder

  Stroop decided that the only way to clear the bunkers and houses was to burn them. Since Himmler had already ordered the physical destruction of the ghetto, burning down its residences was no loss. Indeed, since Himmler had not known just how the demolition was to be accomplished, the fires solved two Nazi problems at once. On 23 April 1943, Stroop’s men began to burn down the buildings of the ghetto, block by block. The Wehrmacht played little role in the combat, but its engineers and flamethrowers were used in the destruction of the residences and bunkers. Edelman recalled “enormous firestorms that closed whole streets.” Suffocating Jews had no choice but to flee their bunkers. As one survivor remembered: “we wanted to get killed by shooting rather than by burning.” Jews trapped on the upper floors of buildings had to jump. The Germans took many prisoners with broken legs. These people were interrogated and then shot. The only way that Jews could escape the arson was to flee from one bunker to another during the day, or from one house to another during the night. For several days the SS would not feel safe moving through the streets of the ghetto in darkness, so Jewish fighters and civilians could use the dark hours to move and regroup. But so long as they could not stop the burning, their days were numbered.26

  The Germans had attacked the ghetto on 19 April 1943, the eve of Passover. Easter fell on the following Sunday, the 25th. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz recorded the Christian holiday from the other side of the ghetto walls, recalling in his poem “Campo di Fiori” that people rode the carousel at Krasiński Square, just beyond the ghetto wall, as the Jews fought and died. “I thought then,” wrote Miłosz, “of the loneliness of the dying.” The merry-go-round ran every day, throughout the uprising. It became the symbol of Jewish isolation: Jews died in their own city, as Poles beyond the walls of the ghetto lived and laughed. Many Poles did not care what happened to the Jews in the ghetto. Yet others were concerned, and some tried to help, and a few died trying.27

  A full year before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began, the Home Army had alerted the British and the Americans to the gassing of Polish Jews. The Home Army had passed on reports of the death facility at Chełmno, and Polish authorities had seen to it that they reached the British press. The western Allies took no action of any consequence. In 1942 the Home Army had informed London and Washington of the deportations from the Warsaw ghetto and the mass murder of Warsaw Jews at Treblinka. To be sure, these events were always presented by the Polish government as an element in the larger tragedy of the citizens of Poland. The key information, however, was communicated. Poles and Jews alike had believed, wrongly, that publicizing the deportations would bring them to a halt. The Polish government had also urged the Allies to respond to the mass killing of Polish citizens (including Jews) by killing German civilians. Again, Britain and the United States did not act. The Polish president and the Polish ambassador to the Vatican urged the pope to speak out about the mass murder of Jews, to no effect.28

  Among the western Allies, only Polish authorities took direct action to halt the killing of Jews. By spring 1943 Żegota was assisting about four thousand Jews in hiding. The Home Army announced that it would shoot Poles who blackmailed Jews. On 4 May, as the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto fought on, Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski issued an appeal: “I call on my countrymen to give all help and shelter to those being murdered, and at the same time, before all humanity, which has for too long been silent, I condemn these crimes.” As Jews and Poles alike understood, the Warsaw command of the Home Army could not have saved the ghetto, even if it had devoted all of its troops and weapons to that purpose. It had, at that point, almost no combat experience itself. Nevertheless, seven of the first eight armed operations carried out by the Home Army in Warsaw were in support of the ghetto fighters. Two Poles died at the very beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, trying to breach the ghetto walls. Several further attempts to breach the walls of the ghetto failed. All in all, the Home Army made some eleven attempts to help the Jews. Soviet propagandists, seeing an opportunity, claimed that the Home Army denied aid to the fighting ghetto.29

  Aryeh Wilner, whom the Poles of the Home Army knew as Jurek, was an important liaison between the Jewish Combat Organization and the Home Army. He was killed during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but not before passing on an important message, almost a legend in itself, to his Polish contacts. It was he who spread the description of Jewish resistance that the Home Army would approve and itself publish: that the Ghetto Uprising was not about preserving Jewish life but about rescuing human dignity. This was understood in Polish Romantic terms: that deeds should be judged by their intentions rather than their outcomes, that sacrifice ennobles and sacrifice of life ennobles eternally. Often overlooked or forgotten was the essence of Wilner’s point: Jewish resistance in Warsaw was not only about the dignity of the Jews but about the dignity of humanity as such, including those of the Poles, the British, the Americans, the Soviets: of everyone who could have done more, and instead did less.30

  Shmuel Zygielbojm, the representative of the Bund to the Polish government-in-exile in London, knew that the ghetto was going up in flames. He had a clear idea of the general course of the Holocaust from Jan Karski, a Home Army courier who had brought news of the mass murder to Allied leaders in 1942. Zygielbojm would not have known the details, but he grasped the general course of events, and made an effort to define it for the rest of the world. In a careful suicide note of 12 May 1943, addressed to the Polish president and prime minister but intended to be shared with other Allied leaders, he wrote: “Though the responsibility for the crime of the murder of the entire Jewish nation rests above all upon the perpetrators, indirect blame must be borne by humanity itself.” The next day he burned himself alive in front of the British parliament, joining in, as he wrote, the fate of his fellow Jews in Warsaw.31

  The Jews of Warsaw fought on, without hope. By May 1943 Stroop’s reports to his superiors had become calm and methodical, a matter of numbers. An unknown number of Jews had burned to death or committed suicide in bunkers; about 56,065 had been captured, of whom about 7,000 were shot on the spot; 6,929 more were sent to Treblinka, and the rest, the large majority, assigned to labor duty at camps such as Majdanek. On 15 May Stroop declared victory in the Warsaw ghetto by dynamiting the Tłomackie Synagogue. Now the Germans began to destroy what was left of the ghetto, as Himmler had ordered. All the remaining buildings were brought down, the cellars and sewers filled. On 1 June 1943, Himmler gave the order to build a new concentration camp, on the ghetto’s smoldering ruins.32

  Some Jews did survive the ghetto uprising, but found a hard welcome beyond the ghetto. In 1943 the Home Army was even more concerned about communism than it had been in 1942. As a result of an arrest and a plane crash in summer 1943, a more sympathetic Polish commander and prime minister were replaced by less sympathetic ones. Despite its promises to do so, the Home Army never organized a Jewish unit from veterans of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Over the course of 1943, units of the Home Army sometimes shot armed Jews in the countryside as bandits. In a few cases, Home Army soldiers killed Jews in order to steal their property. On the other hand, the Home Army did execute Poles who turned in Jews or tried to blackmail them.33

  The same German labor campaign that provoked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising also reoriented the Polish resistance. During the same January 1943 visit to Warsaw when he had first demanded the liquidation of the ghetto, Himmler had also ordered massive roundups of Poles for labor. The random hunts for workers that followed were massively disruptive to Polish society, as women and children suddenly found themselves without husbands and fathers. In the first three months of 1943, about three thousand Poles from Warsaw were sent to Majdanek. They were joined there that May by thousands of Warsaw Jews, transported from the Warsaw ghetto after the defeat of the uprising. Warsaw Poles and Jews, separated by ghetto walls in 1941 and 1942, found themselves enclosed within the same barbed wire in 1943. Majdanek was by then a labor camp with a gassing facility attached, like Auschwitz a
lthough on a far smaller scale. About fifty thousand Polish Jews died there, along with perhaps ten thousand non-Jewish Poles.34

  Knowledge of deportations to places like Majdanek inclined men and women to join the Home Army. Since they could be seized as laborers and sent to a concentration camp at any moment, life underground could seem safer than open life in Warsaw. The underground also offered camaraderie as an antidote to fear, and revenge as a salve to helplessness. The Germans had tried to prevent organized resistance to their labor roundups by killing the Polish educated classes, in the tens of thousands at the time of the 1939 invasion, and then in the thousands in the AB Aktion of 1940. The planners of those actions had in mind precisely the problem that they experienced now: treating Poland as a pool of mindless labor would bring resistance if anyone was alive who could lead Poles against Germans. Yet the Polish educated classes were far larger than the Germans had assumed, and in conditions of oppression there was no shortage of people willing to take command.

  Home Army commanders preferred to remain underground, organize, gather men and arms, and await the best moment for a general uprising. Such patience and calculation were increasingly difficult in 1943. The Soviets in their radio and printed propaganda were urging Poles to begin an uprising as soon as possible. Poles, aware of the fate of the Jews in their country, were afraid that they too could be exterminated should German rule continue. A particular shock was the implementation of Generalplan Ost in part of the Lublin district of the General Government. Though that massive German colonization plan had generally been deferred, Odilo Globocnik carried it out. Beginning in November 1942 and continuing through the first half of 1943, the Germans emptied three hundred Polish villages around Zamość in order to re-create the area as a racially German colony. About one hundred thousand Poles were deported in this Zamość Action, many to Majdanek and Auschwitz. Because the Zamość Action began just as Operation Reinhard was concluding, and in the same district where Operation Reinhard had begun, many Poles saw it as the beginning of a Final Solution to the Polish problem. This was not quite correct, since Generalplan Ost envisioned the destruction of most but not all Poles; but it was a logical conclusion in the circumstances.35

  So as German labor policies shifted, and Warsaw Jews rebelled, many Poles in Warsaw and elsewhere also shifted toward a more decisive form of resistance. Whereas Jews in the ghetto saw no choice but to throw themselves into an all-or-nothing struggle, non-Jewish Poles had some ability to modulate their resistance along a certain scale between underground conspiracy and open battle. In March 1943 the Home Army emerged from the shadows, and turned to assassinations and partisan warfare. Its attempts to aid the ghetto fighters were among its earliest, and still quite amateurish, public acts of armed resistance. With time the operations became more effective. German policemen were shot, as were Polish citizens who collaborated with the Gestapo. During the month of August 1943 the Germans recorded 942 instances of partisan resistance in the Warsaw district of the General Government, and 6,214 such incidents in the General Government as a whole.36

  The Home Army’s shift to armed resistance was bound to provoke a German response. A cycle of terror and counterterror continued for the next year. On 13 October 1943 the Germans began to apply the technique of blockades, perfected in the Warsaw ghetto during the Large Action of summer 1942, to neighborhoods in the rest of Warsaw. Men were seized at random for public reprisal shootings, designed to cow the population and quell the growing resistance. At a time and place announced in advance, those arrested were taken in groups of five or ten, blindfolded, and executed by firing squad. The men tended to call out “Long live Poland!” before they were shot; and so then the Germans gagged them, or put sacks over their heads, or plastered their mouths shut. Poles did indeed gather to watch the shootings, but it was not at all clear that they were learning the lessons that the Germans wished for them to learn. After the shootings, women would gather earth soaked with blood, place it in jars, and take it with them to church.37

  The Germans accepted the propaganda failure, but continued to kill Poles in Warsaw in large numbers: sometimes people who were involved with resistance, sometimes random hostages. They moved their execution site to the terrain of the former ghetto, where the shootings would not be seen. The major prison where Poles were held was also within the walls of the former ghetto. A large number of Poles would be shot on most days of autumn 1943 in the former ghetto along with a few Jews discovered in the ruins. On 9 December 1943, for example, 139 Poles were shot along with sixteen Jewish women and a Jewish child. On 13 January 1944, more than three hundred Poles were shot. These shootings in the ghetto were still technically “public,” although no one was actually allowed to watch them. The families were informed of the fate of their loved ones. After 15 February 1944 Poles simply disappeared from their homes or their streets, and were shot in the ghetto, with no public record of the event. Some 9,500 people were shot in the ghetto ruins from October 1943 through July 1944, some of them Jewish survivors, the majority non-Jewish Poles.38

  Blindfolded and bound, these Poles could not have known that they had been delivered for death to Himmler’s newest concentration camp. Opened on 19 July 1943 within the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto, Concentration Camp Warsaw was one of the ghastliest creations of Nazi rule.39

  First the Germans had forced Jews to live in a defined area of Warsaw and called it a ghetto. Then they had ordered deportations from neighboring regions to the overcrowded ghetto, ensuring tens of thousands of deaths by starvation and disease. Then they had deported more than a quarter of a million Jews from the ghetto to the gas chambers of Treblinka, shooting some seventeen thousand more during these deportations. Then they had liquidated the ghetto, their own creation. They suppressed the resistance that this brought, shooting some fourteen thousand more Jews. Then they had burned down the buildings of the Warsaw ghetto. Finally they built a new camp within this nonplace.

  This was Concentration Camp Warsaw. It was an island of very conditional life located within an urban zone of death. All around were blocks and blocks of burned buildings, with human remains rotting within. Encircled broadly by the walls of the former ghetto, Concentration Camp Warsaw was encircled narrowly by barbed wire and watchtowers. The inmates were a few hundred Poles and a few hundred Jews. These were not, for the most part, Polish Jews but, rather, Jews from other parts of Europe. They had been deported from their home countries to Auschwitz, selected for labor there rather than gassed, and then sent to Concentration Camp Warsaw. They came from Greece, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and in 1944 from Hungary. The conditions that they found in Concentration Camp Warsaw were so appalling that some of them asked to be sent back to Auschwitz and gassed.40

  The Jewish laborers of Concentration Camp Warsaw were to perform three major tasks in the ruins: destroy the buildings in the former ghetto that still stood after the arson of April and May 1943; search for valuables that Jews might have left behind; and bait Jews still in hiding to come and surrender themselves. Some of the Jewish laborers were also sent, in their striped uniforms and wooden shoes, to labor beyond the walls of the former ghetto. Friendships grew up between these foreign Jews and Poles in Warsaw, despite barriers of language. One of these laborers remembered a scene beyond the ghetto walls: “A Polish boy, maybe fourteen years old, badly dressed, was standing just next to us with a little basket, in which there were a few small apples. He looked at us, thought for a moment, and then grabbed his little basket and threw it to us. Then he ran to the other boys selling food, and suddenly bread and fruit rained down on us from all sides. At first the SS-men guarding us didn’t know what to do, they were so surprised by this unexpected expression of solidarity. Then they began to scream at the boys and point their machine guns at them, and to beat us for accepting the food. But that didn’t hurt us, we paid no attention. We waved our thanks to those boys.”41

  After October 1943, the Jews of Concentration Camp Warsaw were forced t
o perform yet another task: the disposal of the bodies of Poles taken from Warsaw and executed in the ruins of the ghetto. Poles were brought in trucks in groups of fifty or sixty to the terrain of the former ghetto, where they were executed in or near Concentration Camp Warsaw by machine gunners of the local SS and another police unit. Jewish prisoners then had to form a Death Commando that would eliminate the traces of the execution. They would build a pyre from wood taken from the ruins of the ghetto, and then stack bodies and wood in layers. Then the Jews poured gasoline on the pyres and lit them. Yet this was a Death Commando in more than the usual sense. Once the bodies of the Poles were burning, the SS-men shot the Jewish laborers who had built the pyre, and tossed their bodies into the flames.42

  Miłosz’s poem “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” written in 1943, speaks of an unearthly power able to undo the grey of rubble and soot and distinguish “the ash of each man.” No earthly agent could sort the Jewish ashes from the Polish ones.

  In summer 1944 in such a city, resistance was all but inevitable. Its form and its direction were not. The commanders of the Home Army, and the Polish government in London, had a very difficult decision to make. Their people suffered more than those of any Allied capital, but they faced an unforgiving strategic position. Poles had to consider the present German occupation in light of the threat of a future Soviet occupation. After the success of the Red Army’s Operation Bagration in late June, German soldiers could be seen streaming through Warsaw in July. It seemed as if the Germans were about to be defeated, which was good news; it also seemed that the Soviets would soon replace them in Warsaw, which was not. If the Home Army fought the Germans openly, and succeeded, they might greet the arriving Red Army as masters of their own house. If they fought the Germans openly, and failed, they would be prone and powerless when the Soviets arrived. If they did nothing, they would have no bargaining position with the Soviets—or with their western Allies.43