Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter

Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter Kazik (Simha Rotem) Translated from the Hebrew and edited by Barbara Harshav Yale University Press New Haven and London Copyright © 1994 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by review ers for the public press), without written permis sion from the publishers. Set in Trump type by Rainsford Type, Danbury, Connecticut. Printed in the United States of America by Vail Ballou Press, Binghamton, New York. ISBN 0-300-09376-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) Library of Congress Control Number: 2001094275 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 Contents Photographs followpage 21 Introduction vii Preface xi 1 Before: Son of a Warsaw Family 1 2 In the Ranks of the ZOB 22 3 To the Sewers: Rescue of the Remnant 43 4 On the Aryan Side 59 5 Clandestine Apartments 73 6 Underground Operations 112 7 The Polish Uprising 118 8 The ZOB Back in Action 135 9 Conclusions: Mission to Lublin 143 Appendix: Journal of a Fighter 155 References 171 Index 173 Introduction In September 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland and started World War IT, there were some 360,000 Jews in War saw, about 30 percent of the total population of the capital. The interwar period had been marked by an increase in po litical activity among Jews, resulting in a proliferation of par ties and movements, ranging from assimilationists to Zionists (of various kinds) to socialists (of various stripes) to the entire gamut of religious orthodoxy; and the capital with its large Jewish population naturally became the center for these groups.In addition, Warsaw spawned an active Jewish cultural life, comprising schools, theaters, journalism, and the arts. In short, despite an upsurge in home-grown Polish anti-Semitism in the 1930s, Jewish life in Warsaw was flour ishing when the Nazi invasion and subsequent occupation put an end to that civilization. Although the actual Ghetto was not officially established until September 1940, Jews had already been excluded from the life of the city and deprived of their livelihoods and busi nesses. Theywere subject to brutal roundups for forced labor, their food rations were cut, and they were prey to the periodic violence of both Poles and Nazi Germans. Conditions be came even worse after the Ghetto was sealed off with a ten foot wall on November 15, 1940. This area of 3.5 square miles (2.4 percent of the area of Warsaw) initially contained one-third of the city's inhabi tants. The Ghetto population was further increased by refu gees from the surrounding area, reaching a peak of 445,000 in March 1941. With scant food, heating materials, and med ical facilities and supplies, the mortality rate in the Ghetto soared. Between January 1941 and May 1942, some 66,000 people died of starvation and the diseases associated with it, vii Introduction viii as well as under the harsh conditions of deportation and labor camps. But even this high rate of attrition did not satisfy the Na zis. On January 20, 1942, at the Wannsee Conference in Ber lin, the "Final Solution" was officially adopted. In July and August of that year, 300,000 Warsaw Jews were rounded up and deported, primarily to the death camp of Treblinka, where most of them were murdered. It was during this so-called Great Aktsia that the Jewish Fighting Organization (known by its Polish initials, ZOB) was established; its objective was to mount an armed resis tance against the Nazi death machine. To appreciate the magnitude of this undertaking, it is necessary to recall that the organization consisted almost entirely of young men and women (the oldest were in their late twenties; most were between 18 and 21) who had virtually no weapons, no influ ence, no money, and no experience in warfare. All they had were a remarkable strength of will, tremendous reserves of intelligence and courage, and amazing talents for initiative and innovation. Armed with these qualities and little else, the young Jew ish fighters fiercely resisted the Nazi attempt to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto, first on January 18 and later on April 19, 1943. The Germans had planned to complete the operation in three days, but the five hundred members of the ZOB forces-fightingwith a few pistols and rifles, and homemade Molotov cocktails and bombs-managed to hold out for al most a month. In the end, when the battle was lost, most of the remaining fighters committed suicide in the famous command bunker at Mila 18. A handful survived and were led through the sewers to the "Aryan side" of the city by the nineteen-year-old Kazik. This dramatic episode was re counted by Kazik many years later and forms the conclusion of Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah. Now a new stage of operations began for the ZOB. Even Introduction ix though Warsaw was officially fudenrein ("cleansed" of its Jews), perhaps 20,000 Jews remained in hiding in the city and its environs. Instead of preparing for armed conflict with the Nazis, the Fighting Organization now shifted to a rescue and support force. It received monies from Jewish organizations through the Polish underground, with which it maintained some 3,000 Jews.' This enormous effort required a network of couriers to findapartments for the Jews, to filltheir various requirements, such as providing doctors, and to bring them money and other material assistance. Just as preparing for armed resistance in the Ghetto had demanded extraordinary courage and intelligence and en tailed grave dangers, so did the rescue operation on the Aryan side. Except for Kazik, all the couriers were women (who could not be identified as easily as the Jewish men). Most of them were young, looked " good"-that is, like Aryan Poles and spoke perfect Polish. And they put their lives at constant risk. Finally, in August 1944, when the Polish Uprising erupted in Warsaw, the ZOB once again entered the fighting, this time in a special unit (led by Zuckerman) within the Polish forces. That uprising, too, failed spectacularly, and the Nazis exacted a severe punishment; estimates of those killed are as high as 150,000, and much of the city was destroyed as well.2 When the liberation finally came, it was accompanied by a sense of desolation and confusion among those Jews who had survived. Learningof the almost total destruction of their people, they had little inclination to rejoice at their freedom. Moreover, even after the war the Jews in Poland continued I. According to Yitzhak Zuckerman, who was then the leader of ZOB, the organization took responsibility for about 3,000 of the roughly 20,000 Jews hiding in and around Warsaw (Zuckerman 1993: 449). 2. See Zuckerman 1993: 525. Introduction x to suffer persecution, this time at the hands of the Poles. The most dramatic example was the pogrom in Kielce in 1946, where forty-two Jews were killed and several others wounded. For some of the former fighters, like Yitzhak Zuckerman, the only answer to the plight of the remnant of European Jewry was immediate immigration to Palestine. Another group, led by Abba Kovner, commander of the Vilna parti sans, wanted to remain temporarily in Europe to wreak ven geance on the Germans for the murder of the Jews. Kazik joined the vengeance group, whose story has yet to be told. In June 1946 he immigrated illegally to Palestine, where he settled into private life-unlike many of his former comrades in arms, who led more public careers. Forty years after the events, Sirnha Rotem/Kazik wrote these memoirs. -Barbara Harshav Editor's Note Except for note 80, I have supplied all the annotations, draw ing from the works listed in the References as well as from the Encylopaedia Judaica. Preface In the spring of 1944 a small group of Jewish Fighting Organ ization (ZOB) members gathered in an apartment hideout on the Aryan side of Warsaw, at Panska Street 5, to record our experiences during the war since 1939.1 Some had been in permanent hiding in the apartment; oth ers, who had come from "outside," were surviving leaders of the organization and former Jew�sh leaders in Poland. At that time-between the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April-May 1943) and the Polish Uprising (August 1944)-one of the most important activities of the ZOB was documentation. Its lead ers had a strong sense of history and felt they were the last remaining Jews. Hence they assumed the responsibility to preserve, and to tell, the story of Polish Jewry in the "days of destruction and revolt.112 Many accounts were written in that ZOB apartment; Yitzhak Zuckerman, alias "Antek," was the group's life force, devoted to collating the accounts.3 I was eight or nine years younger than Antek, with whom I worked on the Aryan side. When you're in your twenties, that's a big age difference. I didn't share his political contacts and ties with the various movements, but I did participate in 1. The Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB), or Jewish Fighting Organization, was founded in the Warsaw Ghetto in August 1942. The "Aryan side" of Warsaw was the part of the city outside of the Ghetto reserved for the non-Jewish population. By 1944 the Ghetto had been destroyed. 2. This is the title of Zivia Lubetkin's memoirs (Lubetkin 1981).

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