by The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol. 1-3 (Third Edition) Yale University Press (2003) (pdf)
producing war materiel for the German army, and concluded by asking
the Gestapo to stop this “time-consuming“ correspondence.”* On April
19, 1943, Biebow wrote to Oberbürgermeister Ventzki that the food
supply to the ghetto could no longer guarantee the continuation of
production. For months the Jews had received no butter, no margarine,
and no milk. In the soup kitchens, vegetables of B- and C- quality had
been cooked in water with a little oil. No fat and no potatoes had been
added to the soup. The total expenditure for food had now dropped to 277 278
277. This description of the L6di food controls is taken from the article by Bendet
Hershkovitch, “The Ghetto in Litzmannstadt (Lodz),” VIVO Annual of Jewish Social
Science, 5 (1950): 86-87, 104-5. Incoming food parcels were consumed by the ghetto
police. Food smuggling and parcel-post packages were not tolerated, because the Eldest
of the Jews, Rumkowski. wanted his Jews to depend entirely on his rations. Ibid., p. 96.
278. Biebow to Gestapo Office L6di (att. Kommissar Fuchs), March 4,1942, Doku-
meniy i maieriaty, vol. 3, pp. 243-45.
263
CONCENTRATION
30pfennige(12cents)per person per day. No Jewish labor camp and no
prison had hitherto managed with so little."’
By the beginning of 1944, the L6di ghetto was obtaining even less.
Staples arrived irregularly. Along with shipments of flour, some cooking
oil,
margarine,
salt,
carrots,
turnips,
or
“vegetable
salad,"
the
ghetto might receive some shoe polish and coffee mixture, but no
potatoes. In stark language the official Jewish chronicler of the council
noted on January 12, 1944: “The ghetto is hungry.” During the following two weeks the situation became worse. The vegetable salad was not delivered, the gas was shut off in the council’s kitchens, and the
curfew was changed from the evening to the daytime hours, forcing
people to shop after work at night."0
In the free economy of the Warsaw ghetto, the amount of food
people ate depended on the money they could spend. Czemiak6w
estimated in December 1941 that the ghetto had about 10,000 inhabitants with capital, 250,000 who could .support themselves, and 150,000
who were destitute."1 Only “capitalists" could afford to sustain themselves on a steady diet of smuggled foods at the following black market prices (figures listed are price per pound in June I941):ai
Potatoes.................... ____ 3 zloty
Rye bread................. ......... 8 zloty
Horse meat................------- 9 zloty
Groats................................ 11 zloty
Com bread......................... 13 zloty
Beans...................... .......... 14 zloty
Sugar................................. 16 zloty
Lard........................ .......... 35 zloty
Employed groups and those with some savings could buy the
rationed products: bread, sugar, and typical ghetto vegetables such as
potatoes, carrots, and turnips. At the beginning of 1942, the basic 279 280 * 282
279. Biebow to Ventzki, April 19, 1943, ibid., pp. 245-48. When 1,000 eggs were
delivered at the end of 1942, the anonymous chroniclers of the Jewish Council referred to
them as a food that had become “unknown." Entry of December 17, 1942, in Danuta
Dabrowska and Lucjan Dobroszycki, eds., Kronika Celia Lddzkiego (L6dt, 1966), vol.
2, pp. 588-89.
280. Entries for January 12, 14, 15, and 16, and February 26, 1944. Typewritten
manuscript through the courtesy of Dr. Dobroszycki.
28t. Czemiakbw's entry of December 6, 1941. in Hilberg, Staron. and Kermisz,
eds., Warsaw Diary, p. 305.
282.
From Isaiah Trunk, “Epidemics in the Warsaw Ghetto," YIVO Annual of
Jewish Social Science 8 (1953): 94. Think's statistics are taken from Ringelblum Archives No. 1193; other black-market prices in Berg. Warsaw Gheito, pp. 59-60,86, 116, 130-31.
264
POLAND
individual allotment of bread was about 4'/2 pounds (2 kilograms) a
month. For laborers in armament and important export firms, and for
council employees and other usefully occupied persons, in all 31,000,
the bread ration was doubled, and for the two thousand men of the
Order Service it was quintupled.“5 For one tolerably well situated family subsisting on rationed and (for higher prices) black market food, a monthly budget around the end of 1941 consisted of the following:55*
Income (Actual)
Expenses (Actual)
Father’s salary
235 zloty
Rent
70 zloty
Son's salary
120 zloty
Bread
328 zloty
Public assistance
—
Potatoes
115 zloty
Side income
80 zloty
Fats
56 zloty
435 zloty
Allotments
80 zloty
Fees
11 zloty
Electricity, candles
28 zloty
Fuel
65 zloty
Drugs
45 zloty
Soap
9 zloty
Miscellaneous
3 zloty
810 zloty
That month this particular family balanced its budget by selling a
clothes closet, its last dispensable item of furniture, for 400 zloty.
The poorest 150,000 persons, though exempted from paying the
bread tax,“5 could barely afford the meager allotments. For indigents,
refugees, and poverty stricken children, there were soup kitchens that
in January 1942 handed out fewer than 70,000 daily midday meals.556
The food pyramid in the Warsaw ghetto was in fact an array of the
population in the order of their vulnerability to debilitation and death.
Auerswald himself recognized the implications of this inequality when
he observed in an official report that allotted rations were grossly
insufficient (bei weitem nicht ausreichend) and that smuggled food was
reaching
only
the
Jews
with
means.“’
This
state
of
affairs
was
confirmed in a study of food consumption made by Jewish ghetto doctors at the end of 1941. At that time council employees averaged 1,665
calories per day; artisans 1,407, shopworkers 1,225, and the “general 283 284 285 286 287
283. Report by Czemiakiw for March 1942, Zentrale Stelle Ludwigsburg, Akten
Auerswald, Polen 36$e. pp. $88-603.
284. From the diary of Stanistaw Rozycki. in Faschismus-Geiro-Massenmord,
pp. 152-56.
285. Entry by Czemiakdw, January 6, 1942, in Hilberg, Staron, and Kermisz, eds.,
Warsaw Diary, p. 312.
286. Report by Czemiak6w for January 1942, Polen 365e. pp. 546-59.
287. Auerswaid's report of September 26, 1941, Yad Vashem microfilm JM 1112.
265
CONCENTRATION
population” 1,125.“* Beggars and refugees might have been able to
subsist
for
several
months
on
ghetto
&nb
sp; soup
amounting
to
600-800
calories.“9 In Czemiakdw’s words, written as early as May 8, 1941:
“Children starving to death.””0
SICKNESS AND DEATH IN THE GHETTOS
The incarceration of the Jews was an act of total spoliation. The enfeebled ghetto Jews, without significant capital or valuables, had been rendered helpless. The German agencies continued to take what they
could—furs,
bed
sheets,
musical
instruments—and
they
encouraged
the creation of a Jewish work force that might produce new values for
German enrichment. They had to make some shipments of their own,
however, if only to maintain the ghetto system and to keep alive its
laborers. In the main, they regarded their deliveries of food, coal, or
soap as a sacrifice, and they thought about these supplies often enough
to conjure up an image of themselves not as willing spoliators of the
Jewish community but as unwilling contributors to its welfare. They
did not hesitate to reduce the contribution to levels clearly below the
bare essentials, and they made these decisions without inquiring into
the consequences. Soon enough the effects were clearly visible.
Disease was one manifestation of the constrictions. On October 18,
1941, the director of Subdivision Health in the Radom district. Dr.
Waisenegger, noted that typhus (Fleckfieber) was virtually confined to
the Jews. The reasons, he said, were insufficient coal and soap, excessive room density resulting in the multiplication of lice, and lack of food lowering resistance to disease in toto.a' In the Warthegau the
summer epidemics of 1941 took on such proportions that Bürgermeister and Landräte clamored for the dissolution of the ghettos and the transfer of 100,000 inmates to the overcrowded L6di ghetto. The chief
of the Gettoverwaltung in L6di, Biebow, vigorously opposed this suggestion and warned that the “frivolous” transfer of such masses of people into his ghetto would be devastating.2,1 On July 24, 1941, Regierungspräsident Uebelhoer prohibited the transfer of any sick Jews 288 289 290 291 292
288. Think, Judenrat, pp. 356, 382; Ysrael Gutman, The Jews of Worstin' (Bloomington, Ind.. 1982), p. 436.
289. Leonard TUshnet, Die Uses of Adversity (New York, 1966). p. 62 ff. The
author was an American physician, and his book is a study of medical aspects of the
Warsaw ghetto.
290. Hilberg, Staron. and Kermisz. eds.. Warsaw Diary, p. 232.
291. Waisenegger’s remarks In Generalgouvernement conference of October 18,
1941, in Präg and Jacobmeyer, eds., Diensttagebuch, pp. 432-34.
292. Memorandum by Biebow, June 3, 1941, Dokumenry i malertaty, vol. 3, p. 184.
266
POLAND
from the small Warthegau ghettos into L6d£.”’ On August 16, 1941,
Uebelhoer ordered drastic measures in the stricken Warthegau ghettos:
the victims of the epidemic were to be completely isolated; entire
houses were to be evacuated and filled with sick Jews.254
The situation in the Warsaw ghetto also deteriorated. The Warsaw
epidemics started in the synagogues and other institutional buildings,
which housed thousands of homeless people."5 During the winter of
1941-42, the sewage pipes froze. The toilets could no longer be used,
and human excrement was dumped with garbage into the streets.”6 To
combat the typhus epidemic the Warsaw Judenrat organized disinfection brigades, subjected people to “steaming action” (parowka); set up quarantine
stations, hospitalized serious cases, and as a last resort
instituted “house blockades," imprisoning in their homes the sick and
the healthy alike.”7 The one useful article, serum, was almost unavailable. A single tube of antityphus medicine cost several thousand zloty.”*
Although typhus was the ghetto disease par excellence, it was not
the only one. A L6dl ghetto chronicler, writing early in 1944, saw
disease as unending: intestinal typhus in the summer, tuberculosis in
the fall, influenza in the winter. His “superficial statistic”: about forty
percent of the ghetto was ill.1”
The second rising curve in the ghettos was that of mortality. As
ghetto hunger raged unchecked, a primitive struggle for survival began.
On March 21, 1942, the Propaganda Division of the Warsaw district
reported laconically:
The death figure in the ghetto still hovers around 5,000 per month. A
few days ago, the first case of hunger cannibalism was recorded. In a
Jewish family the man and his three children died within a few days. From
the flesh of the child who died last—a twelve-year-old boy—the mother
ate a piece. To be sure, this could not save her either, and she herself died
two days later.'06
293. Dr. Marder (Office of the Oberbürgermeister) to Gettoverwaltung. July 26,
1941. ibid-, p. 186.
294. Uebelhoer to Landräte, Oberbürgermeister in Kalisz, and Polizeipräsident in
L6dl, August 16, 1941, ibid., p. 187.
295. Goldstein, The Start Bear Witness, p. 73.
296. Berg, Warsaw Ghetto, p. 117.
297. Trunk, "Epidemics in the Warsaw Ghetto,” pp. 107-12. In June 1941 the number of blockaded houses in the ghetto was 179. Think, citing Ringelblum Archives No.
223, p. 107.
298. Berg, Warsaw Ghetto, p. 85.
299. Entry of January 13, 1944. Manuscript in the collection of Dr. Dobroszycki.
300. Generalgouvemement/Main Division Propaganda consolidated weekly reports
by the district propaganda divisions for March 1942 (marked "Top Secret—to be destroyed immediately"), report by the Warsaw Division, March 21, 1942, Occ E 2-2. See also reports by a survivor and the Polish underground in Philip Friedman, ed.. Martyrs
and Fighters (New York, 1954), pp. 59,62-63.
267
CONCENTRATION
The ghetto Jews were fighting for life with their last ounce of
strength. Hungry beggars snatched food from the hands of shoppers.“1
Yet, after persistent undernourishment, the victim was no longer able
to digest his bread normally. His heart, kidneys, liver, and spleen
shrank in size, his weight dropped, and his skin withered. “Active,
busy, energetic people,” wrote a ghetto physician, “are changed into
apathetic, sleepy beings, always in bed, hardly able to get up to eat or
go to the toilet. Passage from life to death is slow and gradual, like
death from physiological old age. There is nothing violent, no dyspnea,
no pain, no obvious changes in breathing or circulation. Vital functions
subside simultaneously. Pulse rate and respiratory rate get slower and
it becomes more and more difficult to reach the patient’s awareness,
until life is gone. People fall asleep in bed or on the street and are dead
in the morning. They die during physical effort, such as searching for
food, and sometimes even with a piece of bread in their hands.”5®
Indeed, a common sight in the ghetto was the corpses lying on the
sidewalk, covered with newspapers, pending the arrival of cemetery
carts.“5
The
bodies,
said
Gouverneur
Fischer
to
Czerniak6w,
were
creating a bad impression.“*
The Je
wish community of Poland was dying. In the last prewar
year, 1938, the monthly average death rate of L6d£ was 0.09 percent. In
1941, the rate jumped to 0.63 percent, and during the first six months
of 1942 it was 1.49.5,5 The same pattern, compressed into a single year,
may be noted for the Warsaw ghetto, where the monthly death rate
during the first half of 1941 was 0.63, and in the second half 1.47.5“ In
their rise to this plateau, the two cities were almost alike, even though
L6di was a hermetically closed ghetto, which had its own cun-ency and
in which the black market was essentially the product of internal barter, whereas Warsaw was engaged in extensive smuggling “quietly tol- 301 302 303 304 305 306
301. Friedman. Martyrs and Fighters, pp. 56-57.
302. The quote is from Dr. Julian Fliederbaum, “Clinical Aspects of Hunger Disease in Adults." in Myron Winlck, ed., Hunger Disease (New York, 1979), pp. 11-36, at p. 36. Additional descriptions by other ghetto physicians in Warsaw during 1942 are
contained in the same volume.
303. Goldstein, The Stars Bear Witness, p. 74.
304. Czemiakdw's entry of May 21, 1941, in Hilberg, Staron, and Kermisz, eds.,
Warsaw Diary, p. 239.
305. Statistics from L6di Ghetto Collection, No. 58, p. 23.
306. Monthly statistics for 1941 in report by Czemiakdw to Auerswald, February
12. 1942, in Zentraie Stelle Ludwigsburg, Akten Auerswald, Polen 365e. pp. 560-71, at
p. 563. The annual death rate was 10.44 percent. During January-June 1942, before the
onset of deportations, the monthly average was 1.2 percent. Data for that period, in
absolute figures per month only, in Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord. p. 138.
POLAND
erated” by the Germans.*” The birthrates in both cities were extremely
low: Lt5d2 had one birth for every twenty deaths,” while in Warsaw at
the beginning of 1942 the ratio was 1:45.” The implication of these
figures is quite clear. A population with a net loss of one percent a
month shrinks to less than five percent of its original size in just
twenty-four years.
In absolute figures the long lasting Lddi ghetto, with a cumulative
population (including new arrivals and births) of about 200,000, had
more than 45,000 dead.510 The Warsaw Ghetto, with around 470,000
inhabitants over the period from the end of 1940 to the end of the mass
deportations in September 1942, buried 83,000 people.3" The two ghettos contained less than a fourth of the Polish Jews, and although there were communities with attrition rates lower than those of L6dt and