A Light in the Darkness: Part III

Warsaw symbolized all that was both sublime and tragic during the war—and the ghetto was at the heart of the tragedy.

The Führer denounced the ideal of peace as a Jewish-Christian swindle, a violation of the natural order.

Emboldened when Great Britain and France, allies in World War I, did nothing but “deplore” his actions, he turned his attention to Poland.

As the generals cheered, Hermann Göring could not contain his joy. The official transcript states that the portly thug “jumped on a table...and made bloodthirsty promises. He danced like a wild man.”

German and Polish civilians reacted differently to news of the war. By and large, Germans were subdued, dreading a repeat of 1914–1918.

Warsaw street peddlers sold a paper toy that looked like a pig but, if unfolded a certain way, turned into a cartoonish picture of Hitler’s face.

Hitler relished newsreels of Warsaw’s agony.

The severest raids took place on the two holiest days in the Jewish calendar: the first day of Rosh Hashanah (that year September 14), the Jewish New Year; and Yom Kippur (September 23), the Day of Atonement—a solemn day of prayer and fasting, when Jews ask God’s forgiveness for their sins.

At Dom Sierot, he and a few of the older boys and girls stood guard on the roof with buckets of sand, ready to douse incendiary bombs and windblown embers.

As for Warsaw, more than 6,000 soldiers died defending the city; another 40,000 civilians died in air raids and artillery bombardments.

Hans Frank, Hitler’s lackey, ruled this territory from Kraków, Poland’s second-largest city.

Governor Frank relished his position. He lived with his wife and two sons in a castle, amid elegant furniture, precious antiques, and liveried servants.

With diabolical efficiency, Heydrich set out to “decapitate” Poland. In effect, he would kill its natural leaders—people with the stature, character, education, and will to challenge Nazi authority.

When, for example, a Polish physician asked a nurse about the fate of psychiatric patients, she replied: “All the mentally ill were shot with machine guns, but under penalty of death, the hospital personnel were forbidden to talk about this crime.”

Heydrich drew a line between the Nazis’ “final goal” and the “preliminary measures” needed to “facilitate subsequent measures.”

Above all, councils had to carry out every Nazi order promptly, efficiently, and without protest. Jewish Council members were not Nazi stooges. Most were practical, responsible men (never women) committed to helping their people.

The Talmud says: “Be pliable like a reed, not rigid like a cedar.” High winds topple rigid trees, so be flexible, bend, adapt to changing conditions.

Over the centuries, Jews had devised ways of coping with their oppressors, always more numerous and violent than themselves. Coping did not involve preventive attack, armed resistance, and revenge. Instead, it involved bribing oppressors, bargaining with them, placating them, then procrastinating when it came to following through.

Certain Warsaw streets, they said, resembled Hollywood: “Wherever you go, you see a star.” Most, however, did not see the humor. Instead, they were mortified at having to wear the “ribbon of disgrace.” For this strip of cloth separated them from the rest of the population, making them easy to identify and, therefore, easy prey for Nazis and Polish anti-Semites.

According to historian Michael Burleigh, the Nazis had a sinister reason for establishing Jewish ghettos. They served as “interim warehousing,” pending the decision to empty them by mass murder.

Long, long rows of little carts and all sorts of makeshift vehicles heaped with household possessions, wailing children, the old, the sick, the half-dead, moved from all directions toward the ghetto, pulled or led by the stronger and healthier, who plodded along, tearful, despairing, bewildered.

Already ailing, he seemed less energetic than in all the years they’d known him.

The author of The Senate of Madmen could not fathom—really fathom—the racist ideology that drove Hitler and the Nazi leadership.

Trouble began at the entry gate. A German sentry looked very cross.

Those sacks of potatoes in the cart are verboten—forbidden.

There he faced a dapper officer sitting at a desk beneath a portrait of Hitler.

“There are human laws which are transitory, and higher laws which are eternal,” Korczak said.

Space was so limited that six or seven people, families and strangers, might share a small room. Often, young children shared a bed with their parents and siblings. All lived amid a “deafening clamor” that seemed to jangle every nerve.

Of the Warsaw ghetto’s 450,000 inhabitants, 150,000 were utterly destitute refugees.

“Often those dwellings consist of nothing but the four naked walls, without a single article of furniture or a single garment. People are often lying on the bare ground, on straw; beds are conspicuous by their absence. Whatever bedding one finds is the color of mud. Sometimes they lie on a heap of feathers, the pillowcases having been sold a long time ago [to buy food].”

There were two types of smugglers. Children working alone or in small groups brought in meager amounts of food. Adult gangs of professionals smuggled large quantities of food and other goods.

What is remarkable is that, despite rampant anti-Semitism, there were those who could see beyond bigotry to their common humanity.

Anyone who didn’t know their occupation would think them deformed. But the connoisseurs of smuggling know their secret. This is an artificial, manufactured hump whose inside is filled with potatoes and onions.

Its patrons wore fine clothes, the women sporting gaudy makeup and dresses with plunging necklines.

Jewish police officials might also sit at tables nearby, meeting contacts and taking bribes. These men had a schmaltz-grub (literally, a “hole filled with chicken fat”—schmaltz is a Jewish delicacy, a yellow mixture of rendered chicken fat, often with added onions, spread on bread in place of butter), Yiddish slang for a profitable racket.

The saddest sights, however, were small children clad in rags, walking skeletons with gray, pinched faces and bulging eyes.

“These were not human cries, nor human weeping. It was the haunted baying of creatures facing death, clinging to life with the only physical effort still left to them—the whistling howl that ripped out of their empty bellies and contracted entrails to fill the troubled night with frightful tremor.”

With a sack over his shoulder, he knocked on the doors of likely donors. Sometimes they gave him a hard time, forcing him “to shout, reprove, beg, and lose his temper.”

From time to time, Korczak was able to wangle a barrel of tiny salted fish called “stinkies,” which were used to make soup.

“It is a long time since I have had a bath. Yesterday I caught on myself and killed without turning a hair—with one dexterous squeeze of a nail—a louse.”