In the Honor Court of the Central Committee of Polish Jews
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
chapter 21 The Politics of Retribution in Postwar Warsaw: In the Honor Court of the Central Committee of Polish Jews Gabriel N. Finder The question of the guilt and accountability of Jews who in one way or another collaborated with the Germans has created heartache enough in all circles of the Jewish community.—Shaye Shechatov, former judge in the Honor Court of the Central Committee of Polish Jews1 Fresh from their conquest of Poland, the German occupation authorities ordered Adam Czerniaków to present a list of twenty-four candidates for the Warsaw Jewish Council (Judenrat), which was to replace the prewar denomi- national Commune Council. Czerniaków had been a member of the Commune Council’s board since 1937 and had been appointed its president by the mayor of Warsaw, Stefan Starzyński, on 22 September 1939, after the board’s head, Maurycy Mayzel, had left Poland in the first days of the war. The occupation authorities accepted Czerniaków’s list on 13 October, 1939. It included promi- nent and well-respected members of the Jewish community, complemented by representatives of various political viewpoints. Officially established in the General Government (Generalgouvernement) by decree of the governor– general, Hans Frank, on 28 November 1939, the function of Jewish councils (Judenräte), which represented local Jewish communities in their relations with the occupation authorities, was to execute German orders and direc- tives. Despite their veneer of independence, the Jewish councils worked under extreme pressure, distress, and threats of violence both to their members and their communities.2 The prevailing opinion in the Warsaw Ghetto of the Judenrat and its chair- man, Czerniaków, was negative. The Judenrat’s onerous and unfair tax policy, 1 Shaye Shechatov, Yorn fun kamf un gerangl (Ramat Gan: Lior, 1973), 72. The chapter in which this citation appears is called “Kolaboratsye bay yidn” (Collaboration of Jews) and was first published separately in the Mexican Jewish periodical Faroys (1 September 1955): 8–12. 2 Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1996 [orig. 1972]). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�9�8��_0�3 540 Finder of which the poor bore the brunt, its conscription of overwhelmingly poor residents into forced labor contingents, and its tolerance of corruption within the ranks of the Jewish Order Service (Służba Porządkowa), the Jewish police force in the ghetto, which operated under its auspices, all elicited antipathy in the ghetto. The disdain of the ghetto’s inhabitants was magnified by inflated and unrealistic expectations of the Judenrat’s ability to improve the lot of Warsaw’s Jews when, in fact, its freedom of action was severely restricted by the Germans. The Ghetto residents’ unfavorable encounters with the Judenrat’s officials and personnel only served to further tarnish its reputation. For his part, Czerniaków evoked contempt for his emotional distance from the Jewish masses, his appointment of the assimilated and rich to posts in the Judenrat, and his perceived conciliatory approach to the Germans. His suicide on the second day of the great deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto, on 23 July 1942, which signified his refusal to comply with German orders to cooperate in the deportation of his fellow Jews to their certain deaths, softened the opinions of some, but certainly not all, of his detractors.3 The Germans ordered the Judenrat to establish the Order Service when they decided to create a ghetto in Warsaw. The superintendent of the Jewish police force was Józef Szeryński (Szynkman), who before the war had been a colonel in the Polish police. He was a Jew who had converted to Catholicism and had no ties to the Jewish community. According to historian Barbara Engelking, “Szeryński was an effective and experienced civil servant; however, he could not resist the temptation of what on the surface seemed like power.”4 The pri- mary duties of the Order Service were to maintain order in the ghetto and pro- vide auxiliary units of the German police. Initial reactions in the ghetto to the Jewish police formation, which comprised roughly 2,500 men in July 1942, were favorable. But, with the passage of time, its reputation deteriorated as a result of its Mafia-like methods (for example, providing protection to businesses for bribes and expelling residents from their apartments during so-called disin- fection procedures unless they purchased disinfection certificates), its heavy- handed use of force, and its perceived hostility to the community. Perceptions 3 Ibid., 261; Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 153–59, 160–61, 164–65; Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 94–95, 111; Yitzhak Zuckerman (“Antek”), A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, trans. and ed. Barbara Harshav (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 194–96. 4 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 190..