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Women of the Warsaw Ghetto

Keynote delivered in honor of Yom Hashoah, on the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Event sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Dutchess County, New York.

The version of my talk below includes some pieces I had to edit out the live version for timing purposes. Majority of talk under a cut for reasons of: length, content relating to the mercy killing of children and the elderly, general genocide. I will also be posting a version of this talk to my instagram: @historicity_wasalreadytaken.

What I am about to read is an abridged version of Rachel Auerbach’s poem, “Yizkor, 1943,” translated from the original Yiddish, originally printed in David Roskies’ The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe.

I saw a flood once in the mountains. Wooden huts, torn from their foundations were carried above the raging waters. One could still see lighted lamps in them; and men, women and children in their cradles were tied to the ceiling beams. Other huts were empty inside, but one could see a tangle of arms waving from the roof … At a distance, one could see mouths gaping, but one could not hear the cries because the roar of the waters drowned out everything.

And that's how the Jewish masses flowed to their destruction at the time of the deportations.

Sinking as helplessly into the deluge of destruction. And if, for even one of the days of my life, I should forget how I saw you then, my people, desperate and confused, delivered over to extinction, may all knowledge of me be forgotten and my name be cursed like that of those traitors who are unworthy to share your pain.

Who can render the stages of the dying of a people? Only the shudder of pity for oneself and for others. And again illusion: waiting for the chance miracle. The insane smile of hope in the eyes of the incurable patient. Ghastly reflections of color on the yellowed face of one who is condemned to death.

Condemned to death. Who could—who wished to understand such a thing? And who could have expected such a decree against … such low branches, such simple Jews. The lowly plants of the world. The sorts of people who would have lived out their lives without ever picking a quarrel with the righteous—or even the unrighteous—of this world. How could such people have been prepared to die in a gas chamber? The sorts of people who were terrified of a dentist's chair; who turned pale at the pulling of a tooth.

Even the sweetest ones: the two- and three-year-olds who seemed like newly hatched chicks tottering about on their weak legs. And even the slightly larger ones who could already talk. Who endlessly asked about the meanings of words ... Five-year-olds. And six- year-olds. And those who were older still—their eyes wide with curiosity about the whole world … Girls who still nursed their dolls off in corners. Who wore ribbons in their hair; girls, like sparrows, leaping about in courtyards and on garden paths … to whose cheeks the very first wind of summer seems to have given its first glowing caress. Girls of eleven, twelve, thirteen with the faces of angels.

And pious Jews in black gaberdines, looking like priests in their medieval garb: Jews who were rabbis, teachers who wanted to transform our earthly life into a long study of Torah and prayer to God. They were the first to feel the scorn of the butcher. Their constant talk of martyrdom turned out not to be mere empty words.

And still other Jews. Broad shouldered, deep voiced, with powerful hands and hearts. Artisans, workers. Wagon drivers, porters. Jews who, with a blow of their fists, could floor any hooligan who dared enter into their neighborhoods...You were swept away in the flood, together with those who were weak.

Grandfathers and grandmothers with an abundance of grandchildren. With hands like withered leaves … Who already trembled at the latter end of their days. They were not destined simply to decline wearily into their graves like rest-seeking souls; like the sun sinking wearily into the ocean's waves. No. It was decreed that before they died they would get to see the destruction of all that they had begotten; of all that they had built.

“I have so many names to recall, how can I leave any of them out, since nearly all of them went off to Belzec and Treblinka or were killed on the spot? … Absurd! I will utter no more names. They are all mine, all related. All who were killed. Who are no more. Those whom I knew and loved press on my memory, which I compare now to a cemetery. The only cemetery in which there are still indications that they once lived in this world ... I may neither groan nor weep. I may not draw attention to myself in the street. And I need to groan; I need to weep. Not four times a year. I feel the need to say Yizkor four times a day.

Remember, Oh Lord, the souls of those who passed from this world horribly, dying strange deaths before their time. And now, suddenly I seem to see myself as a child standing on a bench behind my mother who, along with my grandmother and my aunts, is praying before the east wall of the woman's section of the synagogue … And just then the Torah reader, Hersh's Meyer-Itsik, strikes the podium three times and cries out with a mighty voice … ‘We recite Yizkor.’

Auerbach composed this piece in November 1943, after the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, after its Uprising, and after its destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

Born in 1903, Rachel Auerbach studied psychology at the University of Lwow. A talented and prolific writer, Rachel began her literary career in 1925, moving to Warsaw, home of the largest Jewish community in Europe, in 1933. She thrived there, among the city’s numerous theaters, publishing houses, cafes, art galleries, libraries, and museums; and socialized with the city’s Jewish intellectual elite.

When Poland fell to the Nazis in September 1939, Jewish historian Emmanuel Ringelblum recruited Rachel into the Aleynhilf, the Jewish “Self-Help” Organization of the Warsaw Ghetto. Ringelblum put Rachel in charge of a soup kitchen, a position which allowed her to observe a wide swathe of the ghetto’s inhabitants. In 1941, Ringelblum recruited Rachel into the Oyneg Shabbes, or “Pleasure of the Sabbath,” his underground group dedicated to documenting life in the Warsaw Ghetto as it happened, without analysis or commentary. He asked Rachel to write for the archive regular reports on her experiences in the soup kitchen.

In both these reports and her post-war writings, Auerbach described the ordinary people she worked with each day at that soup kitchen on Leszno Street. There was the efficient bookkeeper, Halina Gelblum, whose competence soothed the nerves of the rest of the staff. There was the sixteen-year-old Henie, who was always smiling and flirting with the boys who worked in the kitchen. There was Gutchke the cook; talented, yet often at odds with Auerbach’s fastidious approach to hygiene. She would sing to herself in Yiddish as she bustled about the kitchen, talk to the pots and pans, and test the soup with her fingers.

There was Dama, a once-wealthy woman who, as Auerbach wrote, had “been wearing for many weeks a black georgette cocktail dress, dragged down at the bottom in uneven tails, the seams plastered with nits; on her head a cloth jockey cap, yellow with brown strips, perhaps from some skiing costume; and over her shoulders, weighing her down, inseparable collections of large bags and small handbags stuffed with what few possessions she has left.”

Ringleblum so valued Rachel’s reports that he soon gave her additional assignments. One of these, was to conduct interviews with those who had escaped from the Treblinka death camp and returned to the ghetto. These escapees were brought to the attention of the Oyneg Shabbes through the work of two young female underground couriers: Chavka Folman, and Frumka Plotnicka—who once smuggled grenades, hidden in a basket of potatoes, into the Warsaw Ghetto. Those interviews became critical to alerting the outside world of the extermination of Polish Jewry.

After the War, Rachel—with fellow Oyneg Shabbes survivors Hirsch and Bluma Wasser—was critical to the recovery of the archive, which the Oyneg Shabbes buried beneath the ghetto in summer 1942, when the Nazis liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto, rounding up 90% of its inhabitants, over 300,000 individuals, and sending them by cattle-cars to their deaths at Treblinka. In April 1946, at a meeting held to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on its third anniversary, Auerbach—the only female speaker present—stood up, and said:

“We cannot rest until we dig up the archive. Even if there are five stories of ruins, we have to find the archive … I will not rest, and I will not let you rest. We must rescue the Ringelblum Archive!”

Eventually, through her persistence, and assistance from the Jewish Labor Committee in New York, the search began that summer, 1946. Thanks to Rachel Auerbach, the majority of the archive was recovered from beneath the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, and would become one of the most vital sources on daily life therein.

The Aleynhilf was not the only organization of its kind operating in the Warsaw Ghetto. Most homes in Warsaw were built in clusters of four, with a shared courtyard between them. During the initial occupation of the city, and the first months of the Ghetto’s existence, “house committees” began to emerge in these courtyards. The house committees provided to the clusters’ residents child-care, communal kitchens, and illegal educational and cultural activities. By April 1940, there were 778 house committees operating in the Warsaw Ghetto; by early 1942 there were 1,108, with 7,500 members between them.

One such member was a young woman named Hannah Fryshdorf, who would go on to fight in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and escape the burning ghetto through the sewers under the leadership of Zivia Lubetkin, the highest-ranking woman in the Jewish Fighting Organization. In an abridged section of a talk she delivered after the war, “Memories of the Warsaw Ghetto,” Hannah briefly discussed the illegal educational activities conducted by the house committees; activities in which she took part. This source was provided to me by Hannah’s niece, Ettie Goldwasser; according to Goldwasser, this is the only public statement Hannah ever made about her experiences in the Holocaust.

She wrote:

What has not been spoken of is the important role the hoyf (courtyard) played in the life of the ghetto … Because the police curfew began at 6 p.m., effectively prohibiting anyone from leaving the apartment after that hour, life within the confines of the four hoyf walls took on unprecedented significance.

Let Genshe 33 serve as an example … Before the war some eighty families lived in this building. Though acquainted with one another, they did not socialize much. But during the ghetto years, over one thousand people—those who had been driven out of nearby neighborhoods and those who had originally lived in Warsaw outside the ghetto walls—were crammed into the building.

When curfew fell at 6 p.m. and the gates closed, people, including children, began gathering in the hoyf to walk around until late into the night. In the courtyard they exchanged news about daily life, discussed the miracle of surviving yet another day, and gave voice to rumors true and false, recounting them over and over. Gradually, the inhabitants of the hoyf became more and more intimately connected, and the hoyf itself actually became a shtetl.

Quite naturally there arose a wish for an organized cooperative way of life, and…it fell to a group of the older activists to organize and create a hoyf committee. The organizers felt that it was their responsibility to look after the spiritual and bodily well-being of those who lived within the hoyf's quarters.

The first job was to raise money for feeding the hungry, since there were people close to starvation. It was difficult, yet funds were found and a soup kitchen was started. Every day several women volunteered to work there, cooking and serving supper … One good meal a day saved dozens of families from starvation.

Some 40 teenagers would meet every evening in a small room and spend several hours together, talking, discussing, reading books … For a few hours each night they were able to forget their cares and their hunger; for a few hours they were young again. And these same youngsters took it upon themselves to be concerned with those even younger, helping them to live a little, making them laugh, sing, and play.

So a ‘children’s corner’ was created, a kind of ghetto school. During the day it accommodated the smaller children, and at night the 18-year-olds. And it was terribly hard work to deal with shivering and starving children in a cold unheated room for six or seven hours a day. How much ingenuity and effort were summoned by untrained teachers to keep the children interested, to keep them from running out into the streets to grab or steal something to eat. And what strength it took for the teachers, cold and hungry themselves, to stand for hours at a time, teaching kids between six and thirteen, in one room without educational materials, without toys.

But they accomplished their aims … Both teacher and student knew what awaited them should they be caught attending this clandestine school, but fear held no one back; no child gave up his or her place.

… Back then we put in so much of our heart and hard work; and this was a time when hundreds of people were dying of starvation and illness, when not a single household was without a member stricken by typhus … a time when the Germans snatched people off the street for work details and dragged young men from their beds at night … At this moment when energies were being depleted, it became important to find comfort, to give each other hope.

These house committees quickly became the center of public life in the Warsaw Ghetto. And more often than not, these committees were managed and staffed by female volunteers. And for most of these women, this was the first time in their lives that they were able to step into leadership roles. Many of them thrived, finding within themselves strength which they had never before had reason to access.

However, this change in women’s traditional behavior went beyond the confines of the courtyard. One such process is illustrated in the recollections of Feigele Peltel, better known to the world as Vladka Meed, a courier and arms-smuggler for the Jewish resistance, and later, a Holocaust educator.

During the siege of Warsaw in September 1939, the Jews and the Poles experienced a brief moment of unity as they rushed to their city’s defense. Yet, the food, water, gas, and electric shortages which accompanied the German siege put a quick end to this showing of camaraderie. As the Germans marched into the city, they fanned the flames of Polish anti-Semitism. For example, as they set up soup and bread lines for Polish civilians, they encouraged the Poles to drive Jews out of the lines with such statements as: “the Jews deprive the Poles of their spoonful of soup!”

On September 28, 1939, a cheerful Jewish man named Shlomo Peltel was standing in one of these lines. He’d encountered German soldiers during their occupation of the city in World War I, and had found them to be friendly and courteous. But, as he stood on that bread line, the Poles around him began to mutter that he was a Jew. As their mutterings grew louder, a German soldier grabbed Shlomo, pulled him roughly out of the line, and beat him. According to Feigele, his oldest daughter, this experience was traumatic for Shlomo, and, afterwards, he retreated into the family home “a broken man,” no longer able to support, provide for, or protect the family as he had in the days before the occupation.

Before the war, Shlomo had owned a modest haberdashery. When the store was struck by a German bomb in the early days of the invasion, the Peltels were able to salvage some of the merchandise; merchandise, which could be sold for cash on the black market. Those sorts of transactions, however, were only conducted in the parts of the city declared off-limits to Jews. The shattered Shlomo certainly couldn’t undertake such a mission, but Feigele, a Bundist activist with features more Aryan than Jewish, certainly could. And so, Feigele loaded up their wares, sold them on the black market, stood in the breadlines, and just like that, took on the role of family provider.

Shlomo was not alone. Finding themselves unable to act as breadwinners and protectors, Jewish men struggled, and often, failed to adapt, leaving their wives and daughters to support the family.

Further, men were the typical targets of Nazi forced labor round-ups. German gangs would seize Jewish men at random, and force them to engage in all manner of labor—from road construction to forest clearance—typically designed to exhaust even the most physically fit of men. These forced laborers were subject to random and brutal violence, and many died from a combination of exhaustion, hunger, heart failure, and exposure. As husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers returned from work assignments sick, beaten, and traumatized, and retreated into the home, their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters emerged from its confines. As Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote in his diary:

Women’s perseverance—the main providers. Men don’t go out. When [a man is seized for forced labor], the wife does not let go. She runs after [the kidnappers], she screams and cries ‘please, Mister’—she is not afraid of the soldiers. She stands on the long line—some are seized to work … The beautiful hats have disappeared. In wartime [women] put on scarves. When there is need to go to [the Gestapo] the daughter or wife goes; in the worst scenario they stand and wait in the hallway … The women are everywhere since the [men] have been taken to all sorts of work … When a husband escapes … his wife has to be the sole provider. [Women] who never thought of working [out of their homes] are now performing the most difficult physical work.

While women expressed satisfaction, and indeed, newfound empowerment, with their new roles and responsibilities, the enforced starvation, terror, and poverty of daily life in the Warsaw Ghetto took their toll. Women abandoned their children on the front steps of orphanages and self-help institutions, in the hopes that there, their children might have a chance at survival. Some women worked as smugglers and prostitutes to provide for their families, often with the tacit approval of their husbands and parents. Once-wealthy women took work as house-cleaners, while female nurses and doctors worked relentlessly at the impossible task of containing the typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis outbreaks which plagued the ghetto.

Some of these doctors and nurses described their own attempts to shield their patients from pain and suffering, even as the Nazis were forcing Jews onto the cattle cars which would bear them to their deaths. In her memoir, I Remember, Nothing More, Dr. Adina Blady-Szwajger recalled:

… Sister Mira came for me—I can’t remember her last name but I still see her face in front of me as if she were here now. And she asked me to go downstairs with her for a moment. When we left the ward, she said—and I can still hear this — ‘Doctor, please give my mother an injection. I can’t do it. I beg you, please. I don’t want them to shoot her in bed, and she can’t walk.’ So I asked her what was in the syringe and she told me it was morphine.

… We went to the first floor where the families of staff were ... And so, that grey-haired lady smiled at me and stretched out her arm. The sister put on the clamp. And I injected the morphine into her vein. And then I saw a few more people who didn’t have the strength to move. I asked Mira what we should do and she said: ‘Help them, surely.’ So we helped them, too. And by the window there was this woman, swollen from starvation, and suffering from circulatory insufficiency, and she kept on looking at us, pleading with her eyes. She was the last one we gave an injection to.

… When I left the room, I held out my hand and got two large containers of morphine. We didn’t say a word to each other, just squeezed each other’s hands, I think.

I took the morphine upstairs. Dr. Margolis was there and I told her what I wanted to do. So we took a spoon and went to the infants’ room. And just as, during those two years of real work in the hospital, I had bent down over the little beds, so now I poured this last medicine into those tiny mouths. Only Dr. Margolis was with me. And downstairs, there was screaming, because the…Germans were already there, taking the sick from the wards to the cattle trucks.

After that we went in to the older children and told them that this medicine was going to make their pain disappear. They believed us, and drank the required amount from the glass. And then I told them to undress, get into bed and sleep. So they lay down and after a few minutes—I don’t know how many—but the next time I went into that room, they were asleep. And then, I don’t know what happened.

These ordinary women rose to meet circumstances unimaginable to them even two years earlier. Their resistance was not of the military variety that comes to mind when we discuss the concept of resistance, but each act; each dose administered; each child taught; each person allowed to live one more day, was an act of resistance.

There were women in the Warsaw Ghetto who did engage in resistance as we typically think of it: as fighters, arms smugglers, spies, and commanders. And, despite what 80 years of novels, comic books, films, and theater would have us think, women were present and vital at every stage of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I have already mentioned several of these women: couriers and arms smugglers Chavka Folman, Frumka Plotnicka, Hannah Fryshdorf, Zivia Lubetkin, and Vladka Meed.

The female couriers acquired guns, explosives, and ammunitions, smuggled them past the German guards, and into the Ghetto. They slept with chemical explosives and instructions for the manufacture of homemade bombs under their pillows, and smuggled dynamite into the ghetto through labyrinthine passageways of the factories which abutted the Ghetto.

In her memoir They Are Still with Me, Chavka Folman wrote of one such mission:

For a short while I lived in the same room with Tema Schneiderman … Under the bed was … a suitcase containing pistols and grenades … Tema and I brought the grenades to the ghetto ... Each of the girls hid a grenade in her most intimate place, her undergarments. From a suburb of the city we took a streetcar in the direction of the ghetto. I recall our odd behavior during the ride. Tema stood at my side and asked: ‘What would happen if a gentleman invited us to sit beside him?’ We broke into laughter; hiding our fear in this way…

Jewish Fighting Organization commander Yitzak “Antek” Zuckerman wrote that he would never forget the celebration which took place in honor of courier Frumka Plotnitcka when she smuggled the Jewish Fighting Organization’s first weapons acquisition—those basketed grenades—into the Warsaw Ghetto.

Stories such as these proliferate through the diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and testimonies of surviving members of the Jewish Fighting Organization. Male and female resistance leaders alike made it very clear in their post-war writings and testimonies that no uprising could have happened without the women, many of whom were discovered, tortured, and murdered over the course of their missions. Indeed, a courier named Hasia began her underground work in a group of 23 women. Only five survived.

When the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on April 19, 1943, women served as sharpshooters, reconnaissance officers, fighters, and commanders.

Today, the 27th of Nisan, is the day of Yom HaShoah, as set by the Israeli Parliament in 1953 to align with the events of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Today, as we approach the 80th anniversary of that Uprising, we remember these women of the Warsaw Ghetto; their courage, their loss, and their resistance.

Thank you.

#holocaust #holocaust history #warsaw ghetto #warsaw ghetto uprising #yom hashoah

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