Timeline of the Warsaw Ghetto

Events shown or mentioned in the film are in bold.

N.B. The Nazis forbade the use of the term ‘ghetto’, preferring to call it the “separate Jewish quarter” or the “Jewish residential district”.

1939
September / Germany invades Poland; Warsaw bombed
Sept 27 / Poland surrenders
Oct / Hitler reviews his troops in Warsaw
All Jews to serve two years in a labour camp; all Jewish males between 14 and 60 must register.
Oct 31 / All Jews must wear blue Star of David
Nov / Jews are forbidden to buy from or sell to Aryans; or to bake bread.
Dec 11 / Curfew – no Jews allowed out between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m.
Dec / One hundred Jewish intellectuals – teachers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, musicians – shot
1940
Jan 26 / Jews forbidden to travel by train without special permission
Large numbers of Jews transported to Warsaw by train – three days jammed in cattle trucks without water, food or warm clothes in the middle of winter; about half were dead on arrival.
Jews forbidden to enter German shops.
Jews must raise their hats and bow to all German soldiers
August / The city is divided into three zones: German, Polish and Jewish
Sept 1 / All Jewish cafés and then chemist shops transferred to German ownership
Transportation to labour camps begins
Oct 12 / Establishment of ghetto announced
Oct 31 / All Jews forced into the ghetto. 130,000 Jews and 113,000 Poles dispossessed of their homes and forced to move.
Nov 16 / The ghetto is sealed in
1941
winter / Jews forbidden to burn fuel for heating
March / Between 2,000 and 10,000 new arrivals daily
April / Young men rounded up for labour camps (Henryk among them) – but those who went were those who could not afford to buy their way out
June / After the invasion of USSR, the comprehensive and systematic destruction of the Jews begins
Oct 15 / Death penalty announced for leaving the ghetto, for helping someone leave, for sheltering Jews
Dec / Jew forbidden electricity, then gas
Dec 26 / All fur – coats, hats etc – confiscated. In return, the Jews are given a receipt for which they have to pay 2 zlotys
1942
March 15 / Small ghetto closed
July 22 – Sept 2 / Deportations to Treblinka begin. The Chairman of the Jewish Council commits suicide.
August / 400,000 Jews from all over German-occupied Europe sent to death camps
Aug 4 / 13,000 sent to Treblinka from Warsaw in one day
August 16 / Szpilman family deported
Sept 21 / Most of the Jewish police are deported. From the end of Sept, there is a 4 month hiatus.

Dec 31

/ Szpilman’s work group is attacked by Nazi officers
1943
January / SS tries to clear out ghetto and is repulsed
Jan 18 / 5,000 rounded up; another 600 murdered
February / Szpilman escapes the ghetto
April 14 / Second attempt to clear out the ghetto - Jewish uprising
May 6 / The last Jews surrender; 7000 are executed; rest sent to death camps
1944
June 6 / Normandy Landing
August 1 / Warsaw uprising

The Warsaw Ghetto – some Facts

An official German document from 1941 states:

The Jewish residential district covers an area of 403 hectares (995 acres). The Judenrat [Jewish Council], which claims to have conducted a census, estimates the population of this area to be approximately 410,000 Jews, while our own observations and calculations point to between around 470,000 and 590,000 Jews. Adopting the statistical figures of the Judenrat and subtracting empty lots and cemeteries, the population density equals 1,108 persons per hectare of built-up territory, or 110,800 per sq. km (247 acres). The corresponding figures for the city of Warsaw as a whole are 14,000 persons per square km of the total metropolitan district and 38,000 persons per square km of built-up and habitable space. The Jewish residential district comprises around 27,000 apartments with an average of two and a half rooms each. Consequently, the average occupancy can be put at 15 persons per apartment and six to seven persons per room. The Jewish quarter is separated from the rest of the walled-in streets, windows, doors and empty lots, fire and partition walls having been incorporated. The walls are 3 metres high; another metre is added by a parapet of barbed wire. In addition, surveillance is provided by police patrols on horseback and in motor vehicles.

This chilling description is largely accurate, except that it underestimates the overcrowding which characterised the ghetto. According to post-war calculations, population density was 128,000 per sq. km and the number of people concentrated in each room was 9.2. The area was thus neither 'Jewish residential district' nor a 'ghetto' but a combination of the largest Jewish 'prison city' in Europe and a forced labour camp. This was clearly understood by its inhabitants. According to Emanuel Ringelblum, one of the most important diarists of the ghetto and the main organizer of underground historical activity there: “Any comparison with the ghetto of the past is inappropriate because the ghetto then was the product of historical processes and corresponded to the general significance of such developments. But the ghetto today is a concentration camp whose inmates must support themselves.” [Lewin, p.2]

· The wall was built, according to the Nazis, to prevent “typhus and other Jewish diseases” spreading into the rest of the city.

· The ghetto housed not just Warsaw’s Jews but Jews from other parts of Europe, including Germany. At its largest, 500,000 lived within its walls, many starving to death.

· The official German figures for the transportation were 310,322 deported: 254,000 to Treblinka, where they were gassed with carbon monoxide; 5,000 murdered on the way; 11,000 to labour camps.

· The starving Jews were bribed to volunteer for transportation with offers of bread and marmalade.

· About 70,000 remained behind: 35,000 kept as slave labourers; 20-25,000 in hiding

· The Werterfassung, the German Department responsible for looting Jewish property, by Jan-April 1942, had £2 million ($4 million) worth of confiscated goods.

· Before the Nazis destroyed it, Warsaw had one of the most vibrant and vigorous Jewish communities in Europe; the arts, music, theatre, education, literature all flourished. Many Jews, however, like Szpilman himself, thought of themselves simply as Poles.

Of the 3.5 million Jews who lived in Poland before the war, only 240,000 survived the Nazis. It is well known that Polish anti-Semitism aided the Nazi extermination plans.

What is not so well known is that no other nation hid so many Jews from the Nazis.

If you hid a Jew in France, the penalty was prison or a concentration camp; in Germany, it cost you your life. In Poland it cost the lives of your entire family, yet nearly 400,000 Poles risked their lives and their families to save Jews. Of the 16,000 Aryans remembered in Yad Vashem, the central Jewish place of remembrance in Jerusalem, one third are Polish.

Life in the Warsaw Ghetto

· In July, 1942, it is estimated that only 70,000 ghetto inhabitants were employed (60th men, 10th women) which left as many as 200,000 with no means of supporting themselves.

· The makeup of the ghetto population was a social elite of about 20-30,000; another 200,000 who make do; and 250,000 beggars and destitute.

· The Szpilmans were in the second group. Only Wladek earned anything; he was paid by the day and it all went to feed the family. The rest taught music or English – but obviously earned little.

· Szpilman says he worried about survival – he felt responsible for keeping his family fed and alive. They were more phlegmatic – just got on with living.

· By 1941, the daily food ration in Warsaw was 2613 calories for a German, 669 for a Pole, and 184 for a Jew. Hunger and malnutrition were widespread; between January 1941 and July 1942, nearly 61 thousand died of starvation.

· Soup kitchens financed by American Jews stopped after US entered the war.

· Although smuggling officially carried the death penalty, it was the only way the ghetto stayed alive. Eighty percent of the food needed was smuggled in, mostly past bribed German and Polish guards.

· After the war, it was suggested that a memorial to “the unknown smuggler” should be erected in Warsaw.

· In November, 1940, there were 22 gates into the ghetto; by July, 1942, there were only 4.

· Most dwellings had no heating.

· Disease, especially typhus, and the lice which carried it, were rife

Value of Money

· Before the war, an average lunch – the main meal of the day in Poland - cost 1 or 1.5 zloty; an excellent lunch up to 8 zlotys.

· In the ghetto, at the beginning, 1.25 zlotys bought a plate of soup; 3.5 bought soup with a piece of meat in it; a substantial meal cost 14 – 15.5 zlotys, and sometimes up to 20.

· By July 1942, bread cost 60 zlotys; by August, it cost 88, and then 120 zlotys; potatoes 20 zlotys a kilo; by August, 30 zlotys.

· Szpilman records that when he was working outside the ghetto in late 1942, he borrowed 50 zlotys, bought bread for 20 zlotys and potatoes for 3 zlotys a kilo and sold the bread for 50 and the potatoes for 18 a kilo. He had enough to eat for once and enough to buy more the next day.

· A freedom bribe increased over the months from 500 zlotys to 6000 zlotys.

Jewish Police

· Initially supported by Jews, it was made up of volunteers, including many lawyers and army officers

· By Dec 1941, there were 1000 – 1600; by July 1942, there were 2200.

· By July 1942, they had become a hated symbol of authority. They co-operated with Nazis, rounded up people for the camps; were susceptible to bribes.

· Their self-preservation was limited - one could save his wife but not his mother from the transport.

· They were eventually sent to the gas chambers themselves, so their efforts to save their own lives were unavailing.

Aspects of the ghetto that others have recorded:

· Secret schools; diaries and journals being written

· German Jews, wearing yellow stars, being sent to the ghetto, as were gipsies also.

· Typhus epidemic – 5000 deaths a month

· In spite of the appalling conditions under which they were forced to live, the Warsaw Jews continued to try to make the best of things. Artistic, theatrical and musical aspects of life continued to flourish; children continued to go to school. Szpilman’s family taught music.

So why didn’t the Jews fight back? They outnumbered the Germans.

The age-old Jewish response to persecution, which has dogged them for 2000 years, was to keep their heads down and wait for better times. Some did fight back but vicious reprisals followed.

Szpilman tells of a man shot for not lifting his hat to a soldier, a Christian woman shot for cursing the Germans, another for objecting to the mistreatment of a Jew.