UNIT THree: The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: Ghettos and Deportation

TABLE OF CONTENTSlearning objectives 3

survivor biographies 4

classroom activities• About the Warsaw Ghetto 23

• About the Lodz Ghetto 26

• About the Kovno Ghetto 28

iwitness activities (downloadable mini lessons)• Responsa: Not a Slave 14

• Responsa: Preserving Life 15

• Work in the Łódź Ghetto 16

• Responsa: Keeping Kosher in the Ghettos 16

• Hunger in the Łódź Ghetto 16

• Responsa: Charity Saves from Death 17

text for teachers• Introduction 6

• The Warsaw Ghetto 10

• Jewish Leadership and Rabbi Shapira’s Writings 14

• The Łódź Ghetto 15

• The Kovno Ghetto 18

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES• Map: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 31

• Clips about Jewish Culture and Religious Life in the ghettos 31

• Escape from the ghetto 31

• Final discussion questions 34

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LEARNING OBJECTIVESUNIT 3 LEARNING OBJECTIVESThrough testimony, students will:

1. Learn about the role of ghettos during the Holocaust

2. Understand the similarities and differences among the different ghettos

3. Appreciate what daily life was like in the ghettos

4. Recognize the challenges facing Jewish leadership in the ghettos

5. Study examples of Rabbinic responsa that emerged from the Kovno Ghetto

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In this unit, students will have the opportunity to watch testimony from:

• Frieda Aaron was born on January 4, 1928 in Warsaw, Poland. She describes her childhood growing up in a traditional Jewish home and recounts her experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto and in concentration camps. While in the ghetto she recalls being involved in setting up a clandestine school. Her interview was conducted in New York in 1995.

• Benjamin Meed was born on February 19, 1922 in Warsaw, Poland. He describes his childhood as a religious Jewish person and recounts his experience in the Warsaw Ghetto, his involvement with resistance groups and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and his ultimate escape from the ghetto. His interview was conducted in New York in 1999.

• Vladka Meed was born in Warsaw in 1922. She describes her childhood in a traditional Jewish family and recalls her experience in the Warsaw Ghetto, her memory of watching the Warsaw Ghetto uprising from an apartment window outside of the ghetto, and her ability to conceal her identity and to organize a way to stay on the Polish side. Her interview was conducted in California in 1996.

• George Topas was born on November 3, 1924 in Warsaw, Poland. He describes his experiences growing up as an Orthodox Jew in Poland, his family’s attempt to maintain their traditional observances, and recounts his experiences in the ghetto and in the camps. His interview was conducted in New Jersey in 1998.

• Pinchas Gutter was born on July 21, 1932 in Łódź, Poland. He describes his experiences growing up Ger Chassidic and his family’s attempt to maintain their traditional observance in the Warsaw Ghetto and in the concentration camps. His interview was conducted in Canada in 1995.

• Mordechai Glatstein was born on March 14, 1917 in Lipno, Russia. He recounts his family’s effort made to maintain their religious observance in the ghettos, the sacrifices he and his brother made to try and find food for his parents, and his experiences in the concentration camps. His interview was conducted in Pennsylvania in 1998.

• Reuben Drehspul was born March 18, 1930 in Lithuania. He describes his religious Jewish upbringing and the challenge of maintaining his religious observance in the face of Nazi oppression. He describes Nazi’s interrupting his Bar Mitzvah and the effort his mother took to honor the importance of the moment regardless of the interruption with a blessing for him. He was deported to concentration camp. His interview was conducted in South Africa in 1995.

SURVIVOR BIOGRAPHIES

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• Nechama Shneorson was born May 29, 1929 in Lithuania. She shares her experiences as a child in a traditional Jewish family, the trauma of Nazi’s rounding up Jewish children, their effort to hide her little sister, and their experience in the concentration camps. Her interview was conducted in New York in 1995.

• Jacob Brauns was born May 21, 1924 in Riga, Latvia. He describes his childhood before the war and the effort people made to maintain their religious observance and identity during the war. He survived concentration camps and hiding. His interview was conducted in California in 1998.

• Berel Zisman was born on March 5, 1929 in Lithuania in a Lubavitch Chassidic family. He describes the effort of his family to maintain their religious observance despite increasingly difficult conditions. He was deported to concentration camp and survived a death march. His interview was conducted in New York in 1998.

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TEXT FOR TEACHERSINTRODUCTIONThe Holocaust occurred in stages. The first pre-war phase included Hitler’s rise to power and attack on the Jews of Germany – and, after March 1938, Austria – culminating in the violence of the November 1938 Pogroms, collectively known as Kristallnacht. World War II began and the conquest of Western Poland, and the Soviet Union’s invasion and conquest of Eastern Poland, marking Germany’s next phase in its assault on the Jews: confinement to ghettos. With the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Germany implemented the last and most radical phase: organized mass murder, known as the “Final Solution”.

On September 1, 1939, German troops invaded Poland. WW II had begun. Within weeks, the Polish army was destroyed, and Poland surrendered to Germany. According to the German-Soviet Pact, named the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact after the two participating Foreign Ministers, Poland was divided up between the two countries. Germany occupied Central and Western Poland, while the Soviet Union received the Eastern and Southeastern areas, (as well as the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina). This pact lasted until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, occupying the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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With the advent of war, the Polish Jewish population of 3.3 million was now under German and Soviet rule. There were over two million Jews in the area occupied by Germany, and over one million Jews in the Soviet sector. Germany immediately implemented a new policy to isolate, and contain the Jews in restricted areas, which were called ghettos. The decree to establish ghettos also stipulated that daily life would be run by a Judenrat (Jewish council), composed of 24 men, preferably known Jewish leaders, personally answerable to the Germans.

The word ghetto originally referred to the Jewish quarter in Venice, established in 1516 (in Italian, the word means foundry; the area had been the site of a cannon foundry). Ghettos were traditionally permanent places of Jewish residence, but in occupied Poland the Nazis viewed the ghettos as a transitional measure. From the German point of view, the ghettos—or “Jewish residential quarters,” as they were euphemistically called—were holding pens for a subjugated population that had no rights. Jewish labor was to be exploited, goods and property were confiscated.

Ghettos existed from the time they were first established, after Germany occupied Poland, until the policy of annihilation was firmly in place and the instruments of destruction i.e. the killing centers - were established. In the Soviet Union, and those areas of Poland that had been annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, ghettos were formed only after the German invasion of June 1941, only following the first wave of mass murder, in which mobile killing squads rounded up and killed hundreds of thousands of Jews.

The ghettos present in certain areas of occupied Poland but were established at different times, and existed for varying time periods. They were used for different purposes. Some Jewish ghettos were set up in haste but with great efficiency. The Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto, established on October 28, 1939 was the first. The Łódź ghetto in Warsaw soon followed as did others. In Kovno, first occupied by the Soviet Union, the ghetto was created later, in 1941, soon after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. By 1942, most of the Jews in occupied Poland and in the German-controlled territories of the Soviet Union were confined to ghettos, living in hiding, or on the run.

IWITNESS WATCH PAGEGHETTO LIFE

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Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

Some ghettos were closed, while others were relatively open. The Warsaw Ghetto was surrounded by eleven miles of walls; and the Łódź Ghetto was sealed, enclosed by wooden fences and barbed wire. Warsaw had a sewer system that could be used to smuggle food and materials into the ghetto, whereas the Łódź Ghetto was isolated; there were few ways in or out. Piotrków Trybunalski was an open ghetto. Poles could go back and forth, and at first Jews had little difficulty leaving. Before the final deportations, however, all ghettos were sealed. There were no ghettos in Western Europe, though the Germans had established something similiar to a ghetto in Amsterdam. During the war, Jews in Germany were forced to live in Jewish houses, but these were not ghettos.

Moving large numbers of widely dispersed people into ghettos was a chaotic and unnerving process. In Łódź, where an area designated as the ghetto already housed 62,000 Jews, an additional 100,000 Jews were crowded into the quarter from other sections of the city. Bus lines had to be rerouted. To avoid the disruption of the city’s main transportation lines, two streets

IWitness Connection – IWitness 360

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were fenced off, so that trolleys could pass through. Polish passengers rode through the center of the Łódź Ghetto on streets that Jews could cross only by way of crowded wooden bridges overhead.

In Warsaw, the establishment of the ghetto was announced on October 12, 1940, which fell on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Relocation schedules were posted on billboards. German decrees and aktions were often undertaken on Jewish holidays as a means of further demoralizing the population. Whole neighborhoods were evacuated. While Jews were forced out of Polish residential neighborhoods, Poles were also evicted from the area that would become the ghetto. During the last two weeks of October 1940, according to German figures, 113,000 Christian Poles and 138,000 Jews were relocated, taking with them whatever belongings they could pile on wagons. All abandoned property was confiscated. In every Polish city, the ghettos were overcrowded. The Warsaw Ghetto, which occupied only 2.4% of the city’s land, was inhabited by 30% of the city’s population. Even though the ghettos were comprised primarily of Jews, the inhabitants were still required to wear the Star of David on their outer garments.

Ghetto life was one of squalor, hunger, disease, and despair. Rooms and apartments were overcrowded, with ten or fifteen people typically living in a space previously occupied by four. Daily caloric intake, even with smuggling, seldom exceeded 1,100. If it were not for the smugglers, who brought in food, starvation would have been rampant. Their motto — “Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”—was only too apt.

Serious public health problems existed in the ghettos. Epidemic diseases were a threat; typhus was the most dreaded. Dead bodies were often left on the streets, until the overwhelmed burial

IWitness Connection – Meet George TopasGeorge Topas remembers events from the

Warsaw ghetto and witnessing a murder for the first time there.

IWitness Connection – Meet Roman KentRoman Kent reflects on different types of

resistance in the ghetto and how they impacted everyone involved.

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society could arrive. Beggars were everywhere. Perhaps most unbearable was the uncertainty of life. Ghetto residents never knew what tomorrow would bring. They could well imagine that tomorrow would be worse than yesterday. Cut off from news of the outside world, rumors about what the future might hold were rampant.

Governance of the ghetto rested with the Judenrat (Jewish Council), German-appointed officials charged with controlling its municipal life. The Jewish Council was appointed before the ghetto was formed. They served as go-betweens, representing Jewish interests to their German masters and passing on German demands to the Jewish residents. They labored to deliver a modicum of municipal services: sanitation, food, jobs, welfare, heat, water, and police. In order to provide these services, they taxed those who still had some resources and forced those who had none to work. They practiced the time-honored traditions of their people honed by centuries of exile and persecution. They managed to circumvent some decrees. The Judenrat tried to outwit the enemy and alleviate the dreadful conditions of the ghetto, at least temporarily.

In the ghetto, families adjusted to new realities, living in constant fear of humiliation, labor conscription, and deportation. Survival was a daily challenge, a struggle to obtain bare necessities of food, warmth, sanitation, shelter, and clothing. In some ghettos, clandestine schools educated the young and religious services were held even when they were outlawed. Whenever possible, cultural life continued with theater and music, poetry and art, offering a temporary respite from the squalor of everyday life.

In the summer of 1942, the Germans began “liquidating” – the Nazi term for destroying – the ghettos of Eastern Europe and deporting the Jews who inhabited them to killing centers. Within eighteen months, almost all of the ghettos in occupied Poland were emptied. By late summer of 1944, nearly three million Jews had been transported to concentration camps and killing centers. There were no ghettos left in Eastern Europe.

The Warsaw Ghetto

Before the war, Warsaw had been a cosmopolitan city and the largest center of Jewish life in Europe. Warsaw’s Jewish population was 375,000, almost 30 percent of the city’s total. Only New York City was home to more Jews.

IWitness Connection – Meet Pinchas GutterPinchas Gutter recalls working with his father

in the Warsaw Ghetto.

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The Warsaw Ghetto Jewish Council (Judenrat) appointed by the Germans served as a quasi-governmental authority to provide for the needs of now more than 400,000 ghetto residents living in constantly deteriorating conditions. It was also responsible for conscripting workers to meet the German demands for forced labor. The Judenrat was headed by Adam Czerniaków, a sixty-year-old engineer from a cultured Polish background, who had long been involved with Jewish life and had been a member of the pre-war Jewish Community Council of Warsaw. The Germans instructed him to appoint a twenty-four–member council and serve as its chairman. Czerniaków chose former members of the Community Council as well as members of the Jewish Citizens Committee, which had been created during the first days of the siege of Warsaw.

The Judenrat evolved into a multilayered municipality with a series of departments, including a Jewish police force. The Judenrat struggled in vain to serve two masters: the Germans, who viewed the council as an instrument of their policies; and the Jews, whose ever-increasing needs they unsuccessfully tried to meet.

By the summer of 1940, tens of thousands of conscripted ghetto residents worked for the Germans for long hours, low pay, often under sadistic supervisors. On November 16, 1940, the ghetto was sealed, and conditions worsened dramatically. The Germans practiced what sociologists ironically call “clean violence” —death by starvation.

The Germans allocated food supplies for all residents of Warsaw according to a carefully calculated schedule of priority; Jews were at the bottom of the scale. Deaths from starvation and disease became routine events in the ghetto. During 1941, 43,000 inhabitants—more than one in ten—died inside the ghetto. Daily life was an unending struggle for survival. Smuggling was necessary simply to keep people alive.

Smugglers were forced to be innovative and adaptive. Their methods constantly changed. At first, they moved goods back and forth past inattentive guards. Transfer points were established between two houses attached back-to-back that straddled the ghetto border. Boundary lines were changed and barbed-wire fences erected, but smuggling continued. Smugglers managed to find breaches in the wall. Holes were made and easily covered up by bricks, which were removed at night, allowing goods to be moved swiftly into the ghetto. Jewish policemen and their Polish counterparts found smuggling a source of personal revenue—no serious smuggling effort could succeed without bribery. Every conceivable scheme was exploited. Even carts carrying the dead to the cemeteries outside the ghetto did not come back empty. Families relied on children who could more easily exit through holes in the ghetto walls. Children became quite adept at smuggling. With survival at stake, dangerous missions were undertaken. Emanuel Ringelblum, the chronicler of the Warsaw Ghetto, wrote that if a statue was to be erected for the hero of the ghetto, it would be a ten-year old smuggler.

An informal structure of governance and culture developed under and at times parallel to the Judenrat. A political underground created a clandestine press that published bulletins, manifestos, and newspapers. Cultural life went on; concerts, theatrical programs, and poetry readings found an audience. Education and religion endured. Religious services were held in

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makeshift synagogues, and schools for children as well as adult-education classes continued. Youth movements and urban training communes carried out their work camouflaged as soup kitchens. Cells of the Jewish underground were disguised as agricultural workers’ groups. Historians led by Emanuel Ringelblum painstakingly documented ghetto life, believing that the historical records of a doomed community must be preserved.

Emanuel Ringelblum was an active force within the Warsaw Ghetto. A university-trained historian, prior to the war Ringelblum had worked for more than a decade with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Poland. In the ghetto, he worked at the Institute for Social Self-Help, which ran soup kitchens. At night, the kitchens became clubs for the political underground. Ringelblum kept a daily chronicle of events in Poland and spearheaded efforts by historians to create an archive of the ghetto and of events throughout Poland. Scientific papers were commissioned. Among them was a study of the effects of starvation. He encouraged people from all backgrounds – both religious and secular, and both men and women to contribute. Ringelblum personally read every item that was added to the archive and published a bulletin that gave his colleagues in the underground, who heard only fragmentary reports, a clearer picture of the full scope of what was happening to the Jews of Poland.

The eminent educator, doctor, and Polish radio personality, Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit), headed an orphanage before the war. He was Poland’s most famous children’s advocate, a Jewish physician who wrote under the pseudonym Korczak. During the years between World War I and II, he moved easily between the liberal circle of Polish society that was gradually opening to Jews and those in the Jewish community who wanted to play a wider role in Polish life. Korczak’s children’s books, in which the central figure was the benevolent King Matt, a heroic boy-king who sought to bring reforms to his people, brought him renown, as did his weekly radio program. He developed a popular and respected children’s newspaper, written by young people that appeared as an insert in a Polish newspaper. But the center of Korczak’s busy life was the orphanage he directed, in which he put his educational methods to the test.

When the ghetto was formed in 1940, the orphanage had to be relocated into crowded quarters at 33 Chłodna Street, which was ample by ghetto standards. Korczak moved the group of children as though they were a theatrical troupe “in a kind of parade.” It was a prelude of things to come. For the next two years, the old doctor, as he was known, used all

IWitness Connection – Meet Vladka MeedVladka Meed compares different types of Jewish

resistance during the Holocaust.

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his connections, energy, and ability to help his orphans survive in dignity, to feed them, clothe them, sustain and educate them. Korczak resisted overtures from friends to escape the ghetto and seek safety on the “Aryan side.” He would not leave without his children.

During the summer of 1942, between Tisha B’av and Yom Kippur (July 23 – September 21) 265,000 Jews were rounded up in the ghetto, marched to the Umschlagplatz transit point, and transported in cattle cars to Treblinka, some sixty miles away. Under orders from the German police and their auxiliaries, the Jewish police were forced to round up Jews for deportation. Together these units systematically laid siege to the ghetto block by block, street by street, and finally building by building.

Adam Czerniaków was instructed to preside over the destruction of his people. In the middle of July, when rumors about the scope of deportation swept the city, he sought some reassurance from the Germans. At first, he was told that all but 120,000 Jews would be deported. He then learned that his request for the exemption of children and orphans had been denied.

On July 22, Tisha B’av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem in 586 BCE and 70 CE, Czerniaków concluded the ninth book of his diary. That evening he swallowed cyanide. His last words were a tragic confession of failure: “The SS wants me to kill children with my own hands.” It was something he could not do. The order for deportation appeared without Czerniaków’s signature.

Even in death, Czerniaków was a controversial figure. Those close to him saw his suicide as an act of personal courage that expressed his integrity and sense of public responsibility. Those active in the ghetto’s militant underground were less charitable. Emanuel Ringelblum, the chronicler of the Warsaw ghetto, wrote:

“Suicide of Czerniaków—too late, a sign of weakness—should have called for resistance—a weak man.”

In the early days of the deportations, a decision was made by the underground, the Jewish Fighting Forces, that the time was not yet ripe for resistance. Their reasoning was that the fate of those deported was uncertain—at least in the minds of most ghetto residents. There was too little support for a final stand. With but few exceptions, the fighters were not trained. No weapons had been secured. But as the deportations continued, those who remained became increasingly angry that they had not resisted the Germans or even struck against the Jewish police. A Jewish fighting organization was formed by the Zionists, but did not yet fight, during those fateful days.

On August 6, 1942, the Germans struck against the children’s institutions in the ghetto. Korczak knew that deportation meant death. He lined his children up in rows of four. The orphans were clutching flasks of water and their favorite books and toys. One hundred and ninety-two children and ten adults were counted off by the Germans. Korczak stood at the head of his wards, a child holding each hand. One child carried the flag of King Matt, with the Star of David set against a white field on the other side.

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They marched through the ghetto to the Umschlagplatz, where they joined thousands of people waiting in the broiling August sun. There was no shade, shelter, water, or sanitary facilities. There were none of the cries and screams usually heard when people were forced to board the trains. The orphans walked quietly in their rows of four. One eyewitness recalls: “This was no march to the train cars, but rather a mute protest against the murderous regime . . . a process the like of which no human eye had ever witnessed.”

Korczak was offered a way out of the ghetto for himself, but not for the children. The teacher would not abandon his students. He was with his children to the end. All were gassed at Treblinka.

Jewish Leadership and Rabbi Shapira’s Writings

Ringelblum and his team of historians, poets, scholars, scientists, journalists and rabbis were not the only ones to document and preserve their work for Jewish history and Jewish memory. One of the most important works of Torah learning and of Jewish theology was also discovered in the rubble of Warsaw, buried to be preserved from the ghetto’s destruction.

Its author, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889-1943), the Piasecznier Rebbe, was born in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, Poland to his father, the Imrei Elimelech of Grodzhisk. A scion of Hasidic Royalty, among his ancestors were Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk, the Chozeh of Lublin and the Maggid of Kozhnitz.

Before the war, he founded the Yeshiva Da’as Moshe, one of the largest Hasidic Yeshivot in Warsaw. His educational methods were innovative and his work Chovas haTalmidim (The Responsibility of the Students) advocated that a teacher must speak the language of the student creating an atmosphere that allowed the student to envision and ultimately to live up to his own potential. He argued for joy in learning, celebrating one’s closeness to the Holy One. There are important parallels between his ideas and those of Janusz Korczak, Warsaw’s most prominent educator, whose views were well known. To combat assimilation, he argued, the atmosphere in the Yeshiva had to change.

After the Germans invaded Poland and ghettoized its Jews, Rabbi Shapira was incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto where he established a clandestine synagogue and tried valiantly to preserve Jewish life amidst the ghetto squalor and despair. His personal suffering was deep.

IWitness Activity – Not a Slave

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He saw his son, and daughter-in-law killed in the first days of the German bombings, and a few weeks later his mother died. Still he continued to teach and increasingly he understood that he was not just teaching his community how to live, but also how to face death.

The Judenrat respected his unique status and he was assigned to work in a shoe factory. With that assignment came a work permit, which is why he escaped the great deportation of July 23 – September 21, 1942. His only daughter was not so fortunate; she was deported to Treblinka and Rabbi Shapira’s suffering deepened.

As the ghetto was about to be destroyed Rabbi Shapira took steps to preserve his work, burying it like Emanuel Ringelblum in a canister that was later discovered by a construction worker building on the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. This book, known as the Eish Kodesh, the Holy Fire, records his herculean efforts to apply the insights of the Torah to the suffering of his Jews whose fate he shared, to comfort them, to fight against despair and to preserve his faith – and theirs – as the shadow of death loomed with ever more darkness. Nehemia Polen, who wrote extensively about the Rebbe, said that his writings demonstrate “how it is possible to maintain radiant faith in the midst of profound darkness and despair.” His work was a confrontation between Hasidic theology and the history of the Shoah and it shows how his understanding changed during each of the epics of ghetto life, from its inception, to the period before deportation, and then once rumors of deportation began to take hold until the great deportation, at which time his writings end.

Rabbi Shapira survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943 and was taken to Trawniki slave labor camp near Lublin. After a series of uprisings in Treblinka and Sobibor, the Nazis feared more uprisings in the camps and decided to take action. He was murdered in the “Harvest Festival” that killed the Jews of Trawniki and Majdanek in one vast murderous rampage.

The Łódź Ghetto

Łódź was the industrial center of pre-war Poland and the second largest Jewish community in Poland. More than one in three out of its population of 665,000 were Jews. On September 8, 1939, the Germans captured the city and made it part of the territory annexed to the Reich, known as the Warthegau. Łódź was renamed Litzmannstadt in honor of the German general who had conquered the city during World War I.

IWitness Activity – Preserving Life

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The German occupation force was particularly ferocious in its treatment of the Łódź Jews. In addition to forced labor and confiscation of property, synagogues were blown up. When the ghetto was sealed in April 1940, 164,000 Jews lived in 48,100 rooms, most of them without running water or sewer connections. The Łódź Ghetto, unlike the one in Warsaw, could be cut off from the outside world both above and below ground. Łódź, one of the first ghettoes in occupied Poland to be sealed, was also the last to remain in existence, operating until August 1944.

A Jewish Council, with Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski as chairman, was formed by the Germans to keep order among the starving and desperate population. Unlike the situation in Warsaw, in Łódź the Judenrat controlled all aspects of food, work, and shelter. Czerniaków allowed a form of laissez-faire capitalism in Warsaw. In contrast, Rumkowski ran a centralized, autocratic municipality in Łódź. When the rabbinate was abolished, Rumkowski himself performed marriages. His picture appeared on ghetto currency, nicknamed “Rumskis.”

Rumkowski developed what he believed to be a long-term strategy for survival—salvation through work. He was determined to save the Jews of Łódź by making them a productive and indispensable work force for the Nazis. “Only one thing can save us,” he said: collective acceptance of a productive life. In the midst of squalor, disease, starvation, and the stench of raw sewage, Łódź’s Jews got up each morning and went to work, both within the confines of the ghetto and in work details outside.

IWitness Activity – Work in the Łódź Ghetto

IWitness Activity – Keeping Kosher In the Ghettos

IWitness Activity – Hunger in the Lodz Ghetto

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Conditions deteriorated further when twenty thousand Jews from Germany, Luxembourg, and Czechoslovakia were brought into the ghetto. Five thousand Roma (Gypsies) were also incarcerated in one section. By 1941, forty thousand workers were employed in ghetto factories run by the council. Łódź was also different from Warsaw and the other ghettos in that there was little private enterprise. No smugglers alleviated hunger—Rumkowski would not permit it and conditions of virtual isolation would not allow it. Unlike the Warsaw Ghetto, the Łódź ghetto was isolated, separated by barbed wire and open spaces from the rest of the Germanized city. The Judenrat ran everything—hospitals, dispensaries, schools, orphanages, even a thriving cultural life.

Yet, despite its impressive productivity and the profits made by ghetto industries – all funneled to the SS and Łódź ’s German masters – the Germans were not content to let Łódź remain a working ghetto. During the first five months of 1942, fifty-five thousand Jews and all remaining Roma were deported and murdered in gas vans at nearby Chełmno. Rumkowski was informed of their fate. More than two thousand patients were deported to Chełmno from Łódź Hospital, including four hundred children and eighty pregnant women. Eighteen patients who tried to escape were shot. Rumkowski acknowledged his responsibility. “I received an uncompromising order and carried it out myself to prevent others from doing it,” he said.

In early September 1942, the Germans demanded that all children and old people be surrendered. Rumkowski complied. “The decree cannot be revoked. It can only be slightly lessened by our carrying it out calmly,” he said. In a public speech, he pleaded: “Brothers and sisters, hand them over to me. Fathers and mothers, give me your children.”

Rumkowski was consistent: “I must cut off the limbs to save the body itself,” he argued. “I must take the children because if not, others will be taken as well.” In the next ten days, twenty thousand children and old people were deported to certain death in Chełmno. Many Jews refused to turn over their children. German authorities lost patience, entered the ghetto in force, and carried out the deportations themselves.

For a while it seemed that Rumkowski’s strategy had worked. During the period between September 1942 and May 1944, when the other ghettos in German-occupied Poland were being emptied, there were no further deportations to the killing centers from Łódź. With 90 percent of its starving residents working, Łódź now took on the atmosphere not of a ghetto but a slave-labor camp.

IWitness Activity – Charity Saves from Death

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But even Łódź did not escape the “Final Solution.” On June 23, 1944, the deportations resumed, first to Chełmno, which had been reopened to murder Łódź’s remaining Jews and later to Auschwitz. Of the Łódź Jews, 46,000 died in the ghetto and 145,000 were deported to the gas vans of Chełmno or the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The number of survivors is not known. When Łódź was liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945, only 877 Jews emerged from the ghetto.

Rumkowski himself was deported to Auschwitz in August 1944, where he was murdered. There are three conflicting versions of his death. They may tell us more about what the Jews of Łódź thought ought to have happened than about his actual fate. According to some eyewitness reports, Rumkowski was beaten to death by Jews. In another account, Rumkowski arrived at Auschwitz by train with a letter from Hans Biebow, the German overseer of the Łódź Ghetto. He was “invited” to tour the camp by his “hosts.” His wagon stopped at the crematorium, where he was burned alive without being gassed. In still another account, the aged Rumkowski, too old to work, was selected for the gas chamber upon his arrival.

Historians have wondered if Rumkowski’s strategy could have succeeded. If in the summer of 1944 Soviet troops had not halted their advance on the east bank of the Vistula River, seventy-five miles from Łódź, the approximately seventy-three thousand five-hundred Jews still in the ghetto might have been saved. It can also be asked if it mattered that the Jews of Łódź left the ghetto without knowing their destiny. Were the victims entitled to know their fate? What would they have done with such knowledge? Would they have despaired or revolted? Without Rumkowski’s urging, would they have been forced to board the trains anyway? Whatever judgment history renders, it is clear that Rumkowski’s power was limited. He could not control conditions or initiate policy.

The Kovno Ghetto

The example of the Kovno Ghetto highlights the difference that the unfolding of the war had on ghettos in different regions, specifically the occupation of both Poland and the Soviet Union. Before the war, Kovno (Kaunas) was home to forty thousand Jews; they were 25 percent of the city’s inhabitants. Renowned for its culture and heritage of religious learning, Kovno was the home of the famed Slobodka Yeshiva, which had for generations produced Jewish intellectuals who became leaders in both religious and secular life.

From World War I until 1940. Lithuania was an independent country. During the interval between the invasion of Poland and the Soviet occupation of Lithuanian many Polish Jews sought refuge in independent Lithuania. Among them were yeshiva students and their rabbis who fled both German and Soviet occupation to continue their religious studies. As political conditions deteriorated, a scheme was launched at the initiative of Zionist leader Zerach Warhaftig, to rescue these religious Jews who faced a difficult future in the anti-religious Soviet Union.

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Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara and Jan Zwartendijk were diplomats living in Kaunus (Kovno), the pre-war capital of Lithuania during the brief period of Lithuanian independence. Sugihara represented Japan and Zwartendijk the Netherlands, already occupied by Germany. They were co-conspirators in a plan to rescue Jews, working at the most pivotal of moments.

Zwartendijk discovered that no visa was required for entry to the Dutch-controlled Caribbean island of Curacao. He understood that a stamp, though actually meaningless, could make the difference between life and death for a refugee. So, he had a stamp made: “Valid for entry in Curacao.”

That stamp enabled the Japanese Consul to issue a transit visa for Jews to travel via Japan to Curacao. (Although Japan was unwilling to accept Jews seeking refuge, it would allow those with valid end visas to travel via Japan to another destination and the Soviet Union allowed valid Visa holders to travel across its vast country toward China, then occupied by Japan.) Working until the final moments of his stay in Kovno – just before the Soviet Union expelled all diplomats assigned to independent Lithuania -- Sugihara issued transit visas for Jews, including Talmudic students at the famed Mir Yeshiva. They ultimately found refuge in Shanghai, China (then under Japanese occupation), which previously had a small but influential Jewish community. That community grew to some 20,000 during the war.

As a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union that divided Poland and gave the Soviet Union influence in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, Kovno came under Soviet rule in 1940.

Jews welcomed the Soviet invasion because the alternative was Nazi Germany, yet the non-Jewish population saw things radically differently. They saw the Jews as an agent to Soviet occupation. This perception was later to prove lethal for many Jews who were murdered not by the Germans but by Lithuanian forces collaborating with the Nazis.

Jewish life under Soviet occupation was paradoxical. There was no “official” antisemitism. Judaism – Jewish religious life – was attacked as was all religious life. Jewish businessmen, land owners and capitalist were attacked not because they were Jews but because they were landowners, businessmen, industrialists, and capitalists, the perceived enemies of Communism. So, while individual Jews may have fared reasonably well, Jewish institutions, Jewish life, and Jewish religious life were all subject to attack.

Soviet rule was short lived; within the year the Germans invaded Lithuania expelling the Soviet army and dismantling Soviet institutions. Along with the invasion came the mobile killing units that entered the cities and town and villages of Lithuania murdering Soviet Commissars and Roma, and most especially Jews. Local Lithuanians aided the Germans and a majority of those killed were murdered by Lithuanians not Germans. The Lithuanians saw the Germans as liberators, promising a return to independent Lithuania while the Jews viewed the German invasion with justifiable dread.

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Historian Timothy Synder has termed Lithuania a zone of double occupation and double collaboration. First occupied by the Soviet Union and then by the Germans, there were two occupations. Some, perhaps many Lithuanians who cooperated – even collaborated – with the Soviet Union, then changed sides and proved their loyalty to the Germans by collaborating on the elimination of the Jews.

Life in the Kovno Ghetto

Unlike occupied Poland where ghettoization preceded the killing, in Kovno the Germans murdered first and ghettoized only after the first wave of mobile killing. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, antisemitic Lithuanians went on a murderous rampage against Kovno’s Jews. (Anti-Soviet sentiment and antisemitism were widespread in Lithuania.) The Germans continued what the Lithuanians had started. Within a month, ten thousand Jews had been killed. A ghetto was established immediately. In August it was sealed, isolating its population of thirty thousand.

Three thousand more Jews were killed in a few months. On October 28, 1941, an additional nine thousand—about a third of those who were left—were taken to Kovno’s infamous Ninth Fort, one of a chain built around the city in the nineteenth century, where they were murdered not by gas but by bullets.

As elsewhere, a Jewish Council was established in Kovno. Unlike the Jewish Councils of Warsaw, Łódź, and other eastern European ghettos, which were appointed by the Germans, the Kovno Judenrat was elected and supported by the ghetto population. In turn, the council aided all factions in the ghetto, including the underground. In Kovno, the Jewish police directly assisted the partisans. The Kovno Judenrat was headed by a prominent physician, Elkhanan Elkes, who reluctantly accepted the office when he was drafted by the community.

In 1942, word of the fate of Polish Jews reached Kovno through Irena Adamowicz, a non-Jewish courier for the underground. From then on, the members of the Jewish Council understood they would lead the battle for survival even without knowing if their efforts could postpone or prevent the day of destruction. Despite the Judenrat’s best efforts, only three thousand Jews—8 percent of the ghetto’s original population— survived.

In October 1943, just before his deportation, Dr. Elkes wrote to his children living in England:

I am writing these lines, my dear children, in the veil of tears of Vilijampolé, Kovno Ghetto, where we have been for over two years. We have now heard that in a few days our fate is to be sealed. The Ghetto is to be crushed and torn asunder. Whether we are all to perish, or whether a few of us are to survive, is in G-d’s hands. We fear that only those capable of slave labor will live; the rest, probably, are sentenced to death.

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We are left, a few out of many. Out of the 35,000 Jews of Kovno, approximately 17,000 remain; out of a quarter of a million Jews in Lithuania… only 25,000 live… The rest were put to death in terrible ways by the followers of the greatest Haman of all times and of all generations…

We are trying to steer our battered ship in furious seas, when waves of decrees and decisions threaten to drown it every day. Through my influence I succeeded, at times, in easing the verdict and in scattering some of the dark clouds that hung over our heads. I bore my duties with head high and an upright countenance. Never did I ask for pity; never did I doubt our rights. I argued our case with total confidence in the justice of our demands…

The Germans killed, slaughtered, and murdered us in complete equanimity. I was there with them. I saw them when they sent thousands of people—men, women, children, infants—to their death, while enjoying their breakfast, and while mocking our martyrs. I saw them coming back from their murderous missions— dirty, stained from head to foot with the blood of our dear ones. There they sat at their table—eating and drinking, listening to light music. They are professional executioners...

I am writing this in an hour when many desperate souls—widows and orphans, threadbare and hungry—are camping on my doorstep, imploring us for help...

There is a desert inside me. My soul is scorched. I am naked and empty. There are no words in my mouth.

ELCHANAN ELKES, PHYSICIAN, KOVNO, LITHUANIA

As Dr. Elkes tried to provide for the material and physical needs of Kovno’s Jews, Rabbi Efraim Oshry (1914-2003) of Kovno struggled with their religious needs. Rabbi Oshry was the product of the greatest of the Lithuanian Yeshivot: Khelm, Ponevezh and Slobodka. His education at the feet of some of Lithuanian Jewry’s greatest scholars served him well during the Shoah when ordinary Jews came to him with their questions, seeking immediate, oftentimes life and death guidance. With no Torah library to serve his needs, he had to rely on his memory, his knowledge of the sources and his understanding of the distinct conditions facing ghettoized Jews.

During the Shoah, he continued his teaching in the Yehzkel Kloyz and Tiffereth Bachurim, to students anxious to continue studying Torah despite the horrors of their everyday life. Working closely with ailing Rabbi Avraham Duber Shapira, he responded to the question raised by ordinary Jews seeking guidance under the most trying of conditions.

Like the much-heralded secular historian of Warsaw Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum and the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto Kalonymous Kalmish Shaipra, Rabbi Oshry understood the uniqueness of his time and the responsibility to preserve both the questions and the answers

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for Jewish history. He wrote his answers on scraps of papers and buried them in containers within the ghetto. Like the Ringelblum archives, Rabbi Oshry’s writing were found after the war. But unlike Ringelblum, Oshry had hidden successfully and was one of the few Jews to survive in the Kovno Ghetto. He was liberated on August 1, 1944 and spent the next months in Kovno burying the dead, identifying and returning to the Jewish people Jewish children who had found refuge in monasteries and with Christian families. He published his four part She’elot u-teshuvot mi-ma‘amakim (1959–1976), a condensed English version Responsa from the Holocaust was published in 1983. Other of his later works wrestle with the religious implications of the Holocaust.

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CLASSROOM ACTIVITIESABOUT THE WARSAW GHETTO Consider

As a class, watch this short video about the history of the Warsaw Ghetto.

OVERVIEW OF THE WARSAW GHETTORead the following information together as a class.

There were 380,000 Jews living in Warsaw in 1939. It was the largest Jewish community in Europe and the second largest in the world after New York. After Poland surrendered in late September 1939, Warsaw’s Jews were required to wear white armbands with a blue Star of David. The ghetto was established soon after on October 12, 1940 with Adam Czerniaków appointed head of its Jewish Council. After the ghetto was sealed on November 16, 1940, conditions worsened dramatically. Only 1.3 square miles in size, and surrounded by ten-foot high walls and barbed wire, the ghetto’s population grew to 460,000 after Jews from surrounding towns were relocated there with children making up about one-third of the population. With an official daily intake of 180 calories, smuggling food into the ghetto was essential and- unlike in Łódź - logistically possible though highly risky and accounted for 80 percent of the food brought into the ghetto. Daily life was an unending battle against disease, inadequate food, and brutality. During 1941, 43,000 inhabitants—more than one in ten—died inside the ghetto.

Alongside the struggle for survival, schools, concerts, and clandestine prayers existed. Following Jewish traditions of self-help, prisoners established soup kitchens, hospitals and orphanages. Youth groups were active in the social and cultural events of the Warsaw Ghetto; they developed schools, social service programs, and study groups. Youth groups were also essential to the underground movement and sent couriers – at enormous personal risk- to other ghettos to connect and exchange information with other youth groups about the war and the fate of the Jews. The couriers reported back on transports that were going to death camps. When asked to supply his people for deportation, Czerniaków was unwilling and committed suicide in July 1942.

The deportations, however, went on. Between July 23 and September 21, 1942 – between Tisha B’av and Yom Kippur - the German authorities deported or murdered around 300,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. As a result, in July 1942 several underground groups, collectively known as the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB) decided to organize in order

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to resist future deportations. The group gathered some arms as residents began to construct subterranean bunkers and shelters. In October 1942, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. When the Germans forces entered the ghetto on April 19, 1943 to deport the remaining ghetto population, they were ambushed by the ZOB which was under the command of twenty-four-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz. On the uprising’s first day, the ZOB forced the Germans to retreat outside the ghetto. But within days, the Jews were overpowered. Nevertheless, some individuals and small groups managed to hold out for almost a month. By May 16, 1943, the Germans had crushed the resistance and left the ghetto smoldering in ruins. Captured ghetto residents were deported to concentration camps or killing centers. Even after May 16, however, individual Jews hiding in the ruins of the ghetto continued to attack German patrols.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was the largest armed Jewish rebellion in German-occupied Europe and of profound symbolic importance. The young resisters’ efforts in the face of impossible circumstances inspired other uprisings in ghettos and killing centers.

Show students the following maps and ask them to identify things that stand out to them.

• MAPS OF WARSAW GHETTO

• MAP OF GHETTOS IN OCCUPIED POLAND, 1939-1941

• MAJOR GHETTOS IN EUROPE, KOVNO INDICATED

Study the map of ghettos. Note the difference in dates. Find Kovno. When was it established? How does this date compare to the establishment of Warsaw and Łódź Ghettos? What accounts for these differences?

Collect

Explain to students that these are images of the Warsaw Ghetto. Read the blurbs beneath each image and ask students to identify key features of each photo.

• Constructing a wall around the Warsaw ghetto

• Jews on the street in the Warsaw ghetto

• Children on the street in the Warsaw ghetto

• A man on the street plays the violin in the hope of receiving food or money

• Ghetto residents attend a funeral service at the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw

• Footbridge connecting two parts of the Warsaw ghetto

• A workshop in the Warsaw ghetto

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Watch the following testimonies from the Warsaw Ghetto. Ask students to pay attention to what survivors say about the physical space, and ways that people cultivated family life, culture, and education. Pay attention to what they say about securing food and engaging in work.

Frieda Aaron Ben Meed Vladka Meed George Topas Pinchas Gutter Mordechai Glatstein

Construct

Discuss the following questions with students:

We’ve seen maps, images, and viewed testimony from survivors. What sense do you have about what life was like in the ghetto?

As you just learned there was a lot of smuggling of food into the ghetto, as there was little food available. What did you hear in the survivor testimony that speaks about the smuggling? How do you think these survivors felt when they actually smuggled food?

Listening to Frieda’s testimony, what role do you think schools played in the Warsaw Ghetto? What role do you think education and culture played in the Warsaw Ghetto?

Vladka and Ben Meed describe the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. What do you think the survivors felt as they prepared for this? From the testimony do you think they acted out of hope? Out of desperation-that there was nothing to lose? Another reason?

Communicate

Discuss the following questions as a class:

• What were the goals of the resistance? Did Jewish people in the Warsaw Ghetto think they could really fight off deportations?

• Can you think of another time in history or in your own life, that you took a stand even when you knew you couldn’t change an outcome?

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ABOUT THE ŁÓDŹ GHETTOWatch the short film on the Łódź Ghetto and then read the description.

Read the following information about the Łódź Ghetto together as a class:

Łódź was the industrial center of pre-war Poland and the second largest Jewish community in Poland. More than one in three out of its population of 665,000 were Jews. On September 8, 1939, the Germans captured the city and renamed it Litzmannstadt in honor of the German general who had conquered the city during World War I. When the ghetto was sealed in April 1940, 164,000 Jews were trapped inside. Łódź, one of the first ghettoes in occupied Poland to be sealed, was also the last to remain in existence, operating until August 1944.

A Jewish Council, with Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski as chairman, was formed by the Germans. Rumkowski developed what he believed to be a long-term strategy for survival—salvation through work. He was determined to save the Jews of Łódź by making them a productive and indispensable work force for the Nazis. In the midst of squalor, disease, starvation, and the stench of raw sewage, Łódź’s Jews got up each morning and went to work, both within the confines of the ghetto and in work details outside. By 1941, forty thousand workers were employed in ghetto factories run by the council. Łódź was different from Warsaw in that no smugglers alleviated hunger— Rumkowski would not permit it and conditions of virtual isolation would not allow it.

Unlike the Warsaw Ghetto, the Łódź Ghetto was isolated, separated by barbed wire and open spaces from the rest of the city. The Judenrat ran everything—hospitals, dispensaries, schools, orphanages, even a thriving cultural life. Rumkowski also ensured that there was no underground movement that might threaten his management of the ghetto. Cultural activities in the Łódź Ghetto were under Rumkowski’s tight control. He established a “House of Culture” where concerts by the ghetto’s symphony and theater shows were held. In addition, the Łódź Ghetto Choral Society “Hazamir” as well as the Revue Theater performed there. Rumkowski and his assistants were present at most of the shows, and censored material they found too critical. In the summer of 1942, the House of Culture was officially closed and became a factory to make bedding.

There were also performances by different youth clubs until the end of 1942. In addition, street performers – both children and adults- entertained audiences with social and political satire. The Jewish authorities also censored these performances, and they, too, stopped at the end of 1942.

Despite its economic output, the Germans were not content to let Łódź remain a working ghetto. During the first five months of 1942, fifty-five thousand Jews and all remaining Roma Sinti (Gypsies) were deported and murdered in gas vans at nearby Chełmno. In early September 1942, the Germans demanded that all children and old people be surrendered. Rumkowski complied. However, for a while it seemed that Rumkowski’s strategy had worked. During the

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period between September 1942 and May 1944, when the other ghettos in German-occupied Poland were being emptied, there were no further deportations to the killing centers from Łódź. With 90 percent of its starving residents working, Łódź now took on the atmosphere not of a ghetto but a slave-labor camp.

But even Łódź did not escape the “Final Solution.” On June 23, 1944, the deportations resumed, first to Chełmno, which had been reopened to murder Łódź’s remaining Jews and later to Auschwitz. Of the Łódź Jews, 46,000 died in the ghetto and 145,000 were deported to the gas vans of Chełmno or the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau where Rumkowski met his end. The number of Łódź Ghetto survivors is not known. When Łódź was liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945, only 877 Jews emerged from the ghetto.

Show students the following map and ask them to identify things that stand out to them.

Watch the following clip of testimony to learn more from a survivor about life in the Łódź Ghetto.

Daniel Geslewitz was born Łódź on August 14, 1924. He describes his childhood and recalls the chaotic experience of people being forced into the area of the city where he lived that became the Łódź Ghetto. As the ghetto was surrounded, he describes the non-Jewish people being forced out, the difficulty of becoming entrapped with barbed wire, and the subsequent deportation to concentration camps. His interview was conducted in Arizona in 1995.

For a deeper look at life in the ghetto explore the following collection of photographs of the Łódź Ghetto:

• The Ross Collection: Memory Unearthed Exhibition

• The Grossman Collection

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ABOUT THE KOVNO GHETTO - ACTIVITYConsider

Project this map at the front of the class.

Read the following together as a class:

The example of the Kovno Ghetto highlights the difference that the unfolding of the war had on ghettos in different regions, specifically the occupation of both Poland and the Soviet Union. Before the war, Kovno (Kaunas) was home to forty thousand Jews which represented 25 percent of the city’s inhabitants. Renowned for its culture and heritage of religious learning, Kovno was the home of the famed Slobodka Yeshiva, which had for generations produced Jewish intellectuals who became leaders in both religious and secular life. Rabbi Oshry, whose Responsa is included in this unit, was a product of three great Lithuanian Yeshivot(s).

From World War I until 1940. Lithuania was an independent country. During the interval between the invasion of Poland and the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, many Polish Jews sought refuge in independent Lithuania. Among them were Yeshiva students and their rabbis who fled both German and Soviet occupation to continue their religious studies. As political conditions deteriorated, a scheme was launched at the initiative of Zionist leader Zerach Warhaftig, to rescue these religious Jews who faced a difficult future in the anti-religious Soviet Union.

Soviet rule was short lived; within the year the Germans invaded Lithuania expelling the Soviet army and dismantling Soviet institutions. Along with the invasion came the mobile killing units that entered the cities and town and villages of Lithuania murdering Soviet Commissars and Roma (Gypsies) and most especially Jews. Local Lithuanians aided the Germans and a majority of those killed were murdered by Lithuanians not Germans. The Lithuanians saw the Germans as liberators, promising a return to independent Lithuania while the Jews viewed the German invasion with justifiable dread.

Unlike occupied Poland where ghettoization preceded the killing, in Kovno the Germans murdered first and ghettoized only after the first wave of mobile killing. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, antisemitic Lithuanians went on a murderous rampage against Kovno’s Jews. (Anti-Soviet sentiment and antisemitism were widespread in Lithuania.) The Germans continued what the Lithuanians had started. Within a month, ten thousand Jews had been killed. A ghetto was established immediately. In August it was sealed, isolating its population of thirty thousand.

Three thousand more Jews were killed in a few months. On October 28, 1941, an additional nine thousand—about a third of those who were left—were taken to Kovno’s infamous Ninth Fort, one of a chain built around the city in the nineteenth century, where they were murdered not by gas but by bullets.

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As elsewhere, a Jewish Council (Judenrat) was established in Kovno. Unlike the Jewish Councils of Warsaw, Łódź, and most other eastern European ghettos, which were appointed by the Germans, the Kovno Judenrat was elected and supported by the ghetto population. In turn, the council aided all factions in the ghetto, including the underground. In Kovno, the Jewish police directly assisted the partisans. The Kovno Judenrat was headed by a prominent physician, Elkhanan Elkes, who reluctantly accepted the office when he was drafted by the community.

Cultural activities in the Kovno Ghetto reflected the rich pre-war Jewish culture of Kovno. Two grade schools were opened in the ghetto. When the Germans closed all synagogues in August 1941, observant Jews continued to study and worship clandestinely. At the end of February 1942, the Germans confiscated all the books. Schooling continued, however, until August 1942, when it became completely forbidden. Nevertheless, small groups of children continued to study secretly in private homes. Soon the Judenrat obtained permission to organize a vocational school to train young workers in different occupations. Under the guise of training programs, they also managed to teach basic subjects and offer music and drama – even a ballet group existed through the vocational school. In the summer of 1942, a symphony was established in the ghetto and the site of the Slobodka Yeshiva became the concert hall. Theatrical plays were also performed. There was an underground movement that Dr. Elkes supported. In 1942-43, an unknown number of Kovno Jews managed to escape to join the Soviet partisans in the nearby Belorussion woods.

From 1942 until the summer of 1943 there was relative quiet in the ghetto as the Germans needed the 17,500 Kovno Ghetto Jews for labor in their construction and labor camps outside the ghetto. Despite the Judenrat’s best efforts, only three thousand Jews—8 percent of the ghetto’s original population—survived.

Revisit the map and ask students to talk about what they observe.

Collect

For discussion:

Kovno was known for its rich Jewish life before the war. Watch the following testimonies to learn more from those who lived there.

Reuben Drehspul Berel Zisman Nechama Shneorson

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Construct

Discuss the following questions with a partner or in small groups:

• What does the testimony tell about religious life in the Kovno Ghetto?

• How do survivors describe the cultural life of the ghetto?

• What do the testimonies suggest about the physical description of the ghetto?

• What picture do you have of children’s experiences and responsibilities in the Kovno Ghetto?

Communicate

Share what you discussed and key things you learned with the class.

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• MAP: WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING

• CLIPS ABOUT JEWISH CULTURE AND RELIGIOUS LIFE IN THE GHETTOS

◊ Jack Brauns

◊ Reuben Drehspul

◊ Berel Zisman

◊ George Topas

◊ Pinchas Gutter

◊ Frieda Aaron

• ESCAPE FROM THE GHETTO (additional reading):

Jews were forcibly sent into the ghettos. Once inside, they had little control over leaving. Essentially, there were three ways out of the ghetto: death inside the walls, escape, or deportation to a death camp. The ghetto itself was an instrument of slow, passive murder. People lived under intolerable conditions, packed into overcrowded quarters with little or no sanitary facilities. Disease was rampant. Starvation, cold, and long hours of grueling work weakened many to the point of death. More than one in ten inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto died there in 1941. In Theresienstadt, death claimed more than one in two residents in 1942. Every day, death carts collected corpses to be cremated or buried in mass graves. Emanuel Ringelblum wrote of Warsaw in the spring of 1942:

Death lurks in every chink, every little crack. There have been cases of everyone living in an apartment being fearfully tortured because someone opened a shutter. One of the tortures is to have the culprit strip naked and then roll down a pile of coke [the coal used for heating]. The pain is excruciating and every part of the body bleeds... The Germans driving prisoners in trucks to the Pawia Street prison beat passers-by on the street mercilessly. The Gestapo agent sitting in the back of the car leans out the window, reaches along the narrow Karmelicka Street, and slashes passers-by on with a long lead-tipped stick. He overturns rickshas, and beats the ricksha drivers.

Escape was possible only for a few if there were a way out, the financial resources to survive, and a place to go. It helped if one did not look “too Jewish”. It also helped if one spoke the local language without an accent. Jewish men were circumcised, Jewish women had an easier time passing as non-Jews. Some escaped through gaps in the wall or by tunneling underneath it. Others slipped away from work brigades when they were on the “Aryan side” of the city. In Warsaw, the sewers were a vital link between the

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

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ghetto and the Polish side. Smuggling, hiding, underground operations, even preparing for the resistance—all depended on the sewers. In the end, when the Germans completely demolished the ghetto, the only way of escape was through the sewers. In Łódź, where there were no sewers, the isolation of the ghetto was complete. A girl in the Łódź ghetto wrote in her diary:

When we look at the fence separating us from the rest of the world, our souls like birds in a cage, yearn to be free. . . . How I envy the birds that fly to freedom. . . .

Will I ever live in better times? After the war will I be with my parents and friends?

Will I live to eat bread and rye flour until I’m full?

Some Jews who escaped the ghetto took refuge in the forests bordering Vilna, Minsk, and Kovno. Others found hiding places on the “Aryan side” of the wall. It was possible, though dangerous, to live among the Poles while pretending to be a Polish Catholic. Some Jews found Poles willing to hide them as a gesture of solidarity, an act of resistance, or even a business proposition. For some, hiding was only a temporary reprieve. Rose Brunswic recalled walking along the Vistula River after her escape from the Warsaw ghetto:

I thought, it doesn’t matter to me if I get caught. . . . Should I jump into the river and finish up with myself. I didn’t know how to swim. I thought suicide would be the best thing. I wouldn’t fall into German hands. I would do it myself. And along came this man Jan Majetski and he said, “You know, it’s almost curfew. What are you doing here?” He realized I was Jewish. . . . He said, “I am the director of the Polish Refugee camp. . . . I can give you a little room and you can stay there, but not for long.”

As the hunt for Jews intensified, Jan turned to Rose and said: “I can’t keep you any longer. We have to part.” Rose did fall into German hands, but, with false identity papers in hand, she was able to pass as a Pole.

Those who hid lived in constant fear of betrayal and discovery. Poles who hid Jews were subject to death if they were discovered. Informers who turned in Jews and their rescuers received rewards. The true identity of a Jew attempting to pass as a Pole could be given away at any moment by a gesture, a slip of the tongue, an accent or circumcision. There was always a chance of being recognized by former neighbors, classmates, and friends. Jews who were discovered in hiding were sent directly to the camps or shot on the spot.

Gangs of blackmailers threatened Jews and the Poles who hid them. Thus, the Germans did not always have to expend their own resources and personnel to uncover those in hiding.

Life in hiding was perilous. Abraham Malnik described his escape from the Kovno ghetto:

I went to try to find a place to hide. It’s like a rat looking for some place to hide. I didn’t know where to go, and I didn’t know where they would find us. I saw a little shed. You see the ghetto was made where farmers used to live—farmer country. There was a shed with a cellar inside where they kept hay. So I opened the barn and I saw through a trap door

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in the bottom. So I pushed away the hay in the side and as I was trying to go inside two mothers with little babies came to me and said, “Please help me. Please help us.” I said, “What are you doing? I know what I’m doing.” They said, “Please let me go in with you in that basement . . . in that hole.” I said, “Come down.” I didn’t care. And I put hay on the trap, and I just went down. And it was dark, but I could see through that crack in the door, in that little trap door.

The Germans came, the police, and they start banging houses: Raus, raus, raus, Juden raus. I didn’t know what was going on. And he opened . . . the German opened the door, flinging the door wide open and he comes in and he starts shaking around all that hay and straw and he’s standing on top of that door. The door is almost collapsed, and I’m trying to hold up the door. . .

He looked around and looked around, and took his bayonet . . . I could see all that. . . and shoveled around in all that hay and he walked . . . back and forth. As soon as he walked out, one baby started to cry. So I said, “Please. Please. Help us. Help us.” So, she stopped. The baby stopped crying.

I was only 15 years old, and I could see the German all day long going back and forth. The other baby started crying. So the mother urinated in her hand and gave the baby a drink to keep quiet.

They came in and looked but didn’t step on the door again. Another guard came and they joked and they had a good time going back and forth. At 4 or 5 o’clock, the whistle blew. And a German truck picked them all up, at the post over there. And I made sure and seen them off and walked to the first and looked around.

I told the mothers to come out. And one baby was dead. She . . . the mother . . . the mother choked her own baby. And one baby is still alive because the mother she urinated and she got a drink but the other baby from, from fear, the mother choked her own baby, choked her own child . . . choked her own child.

Many aspects of the Holocaust universe provide examples of seemingly impossible situations that Jews faced. Scholar Lawrence Langer coined the term “choiceless choices”to reflect dire circumstances and decisions with which Jews grappled. Escape from the ghetto and the subsequent results illuminates “choiceless choices.”

• What does “choiceless choice” mean?

• What examples are found in the reading? Why are they “choiceless choices”?

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FINAL DISCUSSION QUESTIONS• What purpose did the ghettos serve?

• What purpose did it serve for Germans, what purpose for Jews?

• What were some ways that people tried to cope with ghetto life?

• What were possibilities for escape? What were some of the consequences?

• Write 3 things you’ve learned about each ghetto (one for each ghetto), two differences between the different ghettos, and one unanswered question you have about ghetto life.