WARSAW Timeline of Events

September 1, 1939

WORLD WAR II BEGINS, NAZI FORCES ATTACK WARSAW

Nazi forces invade Poland (Jewish population 3.35 million—the largest in Europe) and its capital city of Warsaw. Warsaw has a population of 1.3 million residents, 360,000 of whom are Jewish. The Germans surround the city from all sides and launch deadly air attacks, causing heavy damage to buildings and significant loss of life. Germany is able to attack Warsaw without fear of Soviet intervention because of the German-Soviet Pact, which confirms Poland is to be partitioned between the two powers. On September 21, the SS Einsatzgruppen are given special orders regarding treatment of Jews in Poland: they are to be segregated in ghettos near railroads in preparation for a “final solution,” which is ultimately a plan to destroy all European Jews.

Warsaw resists the German siege until September 28, then surrenders and falls under Nazi military command.

October 1939 – February 1940

JEWS MUST REGISTER FOR FORCED LABOR, DECREES BAN JEWS FROM PUBLIC PLACES, CURFEWS ENFORCED FROM 9 PM TO 5 AM

Jewish males between the ages of 14 and 60 are required to register for compulsory labor for the German authorities. In addition, all Jews are required to wear white armbands bearing a blue Star of David so they might be easily identified. By January of 1940, Jews are forbidden from such public places as restaurants, theatres, parks, and museums. They are also banned from train travel and public transportation, and are required to post signs identifying their shops. This is followed by the confiscation of all Jewish real estate, an order for Jews to deposit money in frozen bank accounts, and a mandate that Jews withdraw only $50 per week. The practice of Jewish religion is strictly forbidden. Failure to obey the decrees is punishable by death.

Governing the ghetto is the Nazi-mandated Jewish Council, or Judenrat, whose 24 members are former Jewish community leaders. While aspiring to alleviate the tremendous suffering of ghetto inhabitants, the Jewish Council is called upon to implement Nazi policies and decrees. At this time, many Jews die from typhus, measles, and hunger. Under the pretext of containing the outbreak of typhus, the “Seuchensperrgebiet” (area threatened by typhus) is established, and Jews are forbidden to live outside this designated area. The construction of walls, also known as “sanitary blockades,” begin to allegedly contain the disease.

October 16, 1940

WARSAW GHETTO OFFICIALLY ESTABLISHED, MORE THAN 350,000 JEWS ORDERED INTO DESIGNATED AREA

German officials announce a decree establishing a ghetto in the city. All Jewish residents of Warsaw are ordered into the ghetto, and 140,000 Poles are directed to move out. Armed Nazis guard the ghetto boundary to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw. German authorities force more than 350,000 Jews—about 30 percent of the city's prewar population—to live in an area of 1.3 square miles. There is an average of 7.2 persons per room.

The ghetto population increases after thousands of additional Jews are evicted and deported from neighboring towns and cities. Food and medical supplies are strictly rationed in amounts that are calculated to be inadequate, with the ultimate goal of killing off the Jewish population by hunger and disease.

November 15, 1940

WARSAW GHETTO SEALED—ALL JEWISH CIVIL LIBERTIES SUSPENDED

More than 400,000 Jews are sealed off from the rest of the city. The walls surrounding the ghetto are now 11 miles in circumference, from 10 to 20 feet high, and topped with glass and barbed wire. The complete segregation of the ghetto, the regulations under which no newspaper can be brought in and all news from the outside world is kept out, has a very definite purpose: to shield the ghetto residents from the horrors of the Holocaust occurring throughout occupied Europe.

All Jewish civil liberties are suspended. No one may cross from the Aryan side of ghetto to the Jewish side (and vice versa) upon penalty of death. For Jewish workers, all possibilities of earning a living vanish, thus they start selling their valuables in order to secure food, and approach the depths of extreme poverty. All houses vacated by Jewish residents are given to Poles. When the ghetto population floods with even more Jews deported from outside Warsaw, the situation becomes disastrous and many die of malnutrition. Every morning at 4-5 a.m., funeral carts collect dozens of corpses in the streets that are covered with sheets of paper and weighted down with rocks.

January-March 1941

STARVATION AND DISEASE YIELD HIGH MORTALITY RATE IN GHETTO

More than 66,000 Jews from the Warsaw district are transferred into the ghetto, which reaches its peak population at 445,000. Food allotments rationed to the ghetto by German authorities are calculatedly insufficient to sustain life. Thus widespread smuggling of foods such as bread (which Jews are forbidden to bake) and medicines supplement the meager rations, keeping the death rate from increasing even further. A staggering number of people—5,000 to 6,000—die each month from starvation, disease, exposure to cold, and shootings. In 1941, one year before mass deportations, more than 43,000 people perish.

The Role of Smuggling

According to Israel Gutman in Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Houghton Mifflin, 1984):

If caught, those engaged in all three forms of smuggling could be shot. Official food supplies to the ghetto were so scarce that survival would have been impossible had it not been for widespread smuggling. Jewish council leader Adam Czerniaków estimated that 80 percent of food consumed inside the ghetto was smuggled in. It was brought in over, under, or through the ghetto wall; via the cemetery; and on one occasion, even through a pipeline (carrying milk).

Life in the Warsaw Ghetto

The prominent Warsaw-based historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a secret archive in the Warsaw Ghetto that became an organized underground operation during the German occupation. The running of the archive was taken over by the Jewish Fighting Organization, who eventually buried it in metal containers and milk jugs. Two of the three sections of the archive have been recovered, but the third is still missing. The documents discovered after the war (including the following) meticulously detail the armed resistance, smuggling, and anti-Jewish restrictions.

Smuggling began at the very moment that the Jewish area of residence was established; its inhabitants were forced to live on 180 grams of bread a day, 220 grams of sugar a month, 1 kg. of jam and 1 kg. of honey, etc. It was calculated that the officially supplied rations did not cover even 10 percent of the normal requirements. If one had wanted really to restrict oneself to the official rations then the entire population of the ghetto would have had to die of hunger in a very short time....

The German authorities did everything to seal off the ghetto hermetically and not to allow in a single gram of food. A wall was put up around the ghetto on all sides that did not leave a single millimeter of open space....

They fixed barbed wire and broken glass to the top of the wall. When that failed to help, the Judenrat was ordered to make the wall higher, at the expense of the Jews, of course....

Several kinds of guards were appointed for the walls and the passages through them; the categories of guards were constantly being changed and their numbers increased. The walls were guarded by the gendarmerie together with the Polish police; at the ghetto wall there were gendarmerie post, Polish police and Jewish police...The victims of the smuggling were mainly Jews, but they were not lacking either among the Aryans (Poles). Auerswald, too, employed sharply repressive measures to stop the smuggling. Several times smugglers were shot at the central lock-up on Gesiowka Street. Once there was a veritable slaughter (100 persons were shot near Warsaw). Among the Jewish victims of the smuggling there were tens of Jewish children between 5 and 6 years old, whom the German killers shot in great numbers near the passages and at the walls....

And despite that, without paying attention to the victims, the smuggling never stopped for a moment. When the street was still slippery with the blood that had been spilled, other smugglers already set out, as soon as the "candles" had signaled that the way was clear, to carry on with the work....

Source: Life in the Warsaw Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum, quoted in Yad Vashem, Documents on the Holocaust, pp 228-229.

June-November 1941

SOVIET-GERMAN WAR BEGINS, EXTENSIVE NAZI EXTERMINATING ACTIVITIES LIKE THOSE AT BABI YAR ARE NOT BELIEVED IN GHETTO

Nazi Germany occupies the remainder of Poland when it invades the Soviet Union in June 1941. The beginning of the Soviet-German war is a time of extensive exterminating activities on the part of the Germans in the Western Ukrainian territories. In September, Nazi forces murder 33,771 Jewish civilians at Babi Yar, a ravine in Kiev. In Odessa, 35,000 Jews are shot and tens of thousands perish in rapid killings throughout occupied Europe. News of these atrocities reach Warsaw, but are dismissed as false. Most ghetto residents believe the murders are isolated incidents rather than the result of an organized plan to exterminate the Jewish population. Political parties, however, now begin to realize the true state of affairs.

December 11, 1941

America Declares War on Germany

Roosevelt states, “Never before has there been a greater challenge to life, liberty, and civilization.”

January, 1942

REPORT OF CHELMNO MASS MURDERS REACH WARSAW FOREIGN PRESS BROADCASTS NEWS TO A DISBELIEVING WORLD

In mid-January, Yaakov Grojanowski escapes the Chelmno extermination camp, where 10,000 have been murdered in this month alone. He flees to Warsaw and warns ghetto leadership of the exterminating atrocities that he has witnessed. Although the organized resistance groups believe this report, the Warsaw Ghetto does not—the general population cannot fathom they could be killed in such a systematic, state-sponsored campaign of persecution. Resistance members undertake major propaganda activities to warn the ghetto of the imminent danger. Dozens of copies of a report on the Chelmno murders circulate throughout the ghetto. The report is also sent abroad with a demand for immediate action. A member of the foreign press broadcasts the literal text of the message in a radio speech to the world. The world, however, does not believe the story either, and there is no response.

July 22, 1942

FIRST OF FOUR MASS DEPORTATIONS TO TREBLINKA

In four phases from July 22 to September 1942, more than 265,000 Jews are forced to the Umshlagplatz (deportation point) in the ghetto, delivered to the “forced labor” camp of Treblinka in crowded freight trains, and murdered in the gas chambers. The overwhelming majority of deportees are killed upon arrival. Few ghetto residents equate deportation with death. Nazi posters offer bread and jam to those who report, which fuel rumors that the Jews are indeed going to labor camps. They rationalize, “Why feed those who are about to die?” Germans continue to portray the deportations as a resettlement of the Jewish population in the East, and demand that members of the Jewish Council help organize their efforts. Rather than provide a quota of 5,000-6,000 Jews per day for deportation, Judenrat Chairman Adam Czerniakow commits suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill.

July 28, 1942

JEWISH FIGHTING ORGANIZATION (ZOB) IS ESTABLISHED

Reports of the mass murderers at Treblinka leak back to the ghetto. In response, three underground political youth movements unite to form an armed group known as the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa; ZOB). The ZOB has an estimated 450-500 members, both women and men, who are carefully vetted to avoid potential informers. Most are under 25, the youngest being thirteen. Under the command of 23-year old Mordechai Anielewicz, the ZOB calls for Jews to resist deportation and establishes contacts with Polish resistance forces who provide pistols, explosives, and training.

September 6, 1942

FINAL PHASE OF MASS DEPORTATIONS

The mass deportation enters its final phase. Between July and September 1942, the Germans deport at least 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. Nearly 35,000 essential workers are permitted to stay in the ghetto area. With perhaps another 25,000 Jews who remain illegally, only 55,000-60,000 remain. For the last ghetto residents, deportation seems inevitable.

Despite the horrific ghetto conditions and the Nazis’ attempt to control and degrade them through oppression, the Jewish people strive to maintain their dignity. They secretly study, pray, put on plays, write diaries documenting their struggle to survive, and conduct religious services.

January 18, 1943

DEPORTATIONS SPARK RESISTANCE ACTIONS, HIMMLER DEMANDS LIQUIDATION OF GHETTO

SS chief Heinrich Himmler visits the ghetto in early January, and orders the deportation of 8,000 more Jews. On January 18th, SS and police units begin the expulsion of Jews, who resist the calls for deportation and flee to bunkers. The early morning roundups take some resistance fighters by surprise. Only 5 of the 50 ZOB battle teams participate in the ensuing fights as others cannot reach their weapons in time. One unarmed ZOB group is caught and forcibly escorted to the Umschlag, where many Jews are about to board railroad cars to Treblinka. When guards are preoccupied, a ZOB member passionately warns the group of the true purpose of the deportations, and implores them not to get on the train. Consequently, not one of the 60 boards when ordered, and are all shot on the spot by the chief of Treblinka. Tales of this brave act of resistance quickly spreads throughout the ghetto, inspiring those that remain to fight the Nazis at all costs.

Fighters led by leader Mordecai Anielewicz infiltrate another group of Jews on their way to the Umschlag. When a signal is given, they jump out of line and fight the Nazi escorts. The astonished German forces abandon their captives, who run in all directions. Minutes later, a reinforced Nazi platoon counterattacks and kills all of the ZOB squad except for its leader.

The Nazis ultimately murder over 1,000 Jews in retaliation, but suspend further deportations after four days of combat. The deportation efforts end with the removal of only 5,000 Jews rather than the planned 8,000. Encouraged by this success, the ZOB prepares for a full-scale revolt and create many underground bunkers and tunnels in preparation. Legends of the heroic actions of the ZOB are supported with great enthusiasm throughout the ghetto. The Polish Army smuggles arms to the ZOB; bribing Polish policemen to ignore large packages thrown over ghetto walls at designated points. The three months between January and April are used for intensive training, acquiring weapons, and drawing up a strategic plan for the defense of the ghetto.

An enraged Himmler demands the liquidation of the ghetto as soon as possible.

April 19, 1943

WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING, LARGEST JEWISH REVOLT OF HOLOCAUST

On the eve of Passover, 2,000 German troops under the command of SS General Jurgen Stroop storm the ghetto to renew deportations. With minimal arms, an organized Jewish resistance consisting largely of Jewish Fighting Organization members heroically battle the Nazis as they attempt to take the remaining ghetto inhabitants to Treblinka. This time, few Jews heed the order to assemble, as they now believe they will be sent to their deaths. Lead by ZOB commander Mordechai Anielewicz, Jewish resistance members throw grenades at the incoming tanks and engage the Germans in hand-to-hand street combat. Organized attacks take place at street intersections and from rooftops and attics of surrounding houses to limit resistance casualties. With minimal arms and training, members of the Jewish resistance—including many young children—force the Germans from the ghetto within four days. The Nazi retreat evokes jubilation.

Thousands of Jews spontaneously join the uprising once it starts. The Nazis respond by setting the ghetto aflame block by block, ultimately forcing many that are trapped to jump to their deaths from burning buildings or perish in the flames.

On May 8, 1943, Nazi forces discover the main command post of the ZOB at Mila 18. The house is bombed by SS soldiers, who then throw tear gas into the bunker to force its occupants out. Unwilling to surrender, many resistance fighters take their own lives with cyanide capsules. Mordecai Anielewicz dies in the bunker with his brave comrades. Some fighters manage to escape through the sewers to forests outside of Warsaw where partisan groups reside.

May 16, 1943

GERMANS DESTROY WARSAW GHETTO AND BLOW UP SYNAGOGUE, DECLARE END TO UPRISING

After 27 days of fighting, the Germans blow up the Tlomacki Synagogue in Warsaw to signal the destruction of the ghetto and the end to the uprising. In all, 56,065 Jews are captured: 5,000-6,000 are killed in the fighting and fires, more than 7,000 are shot, and nearly 7,000 are deported to Treblinka. However the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising sets a heroic precedent, and becomes a symbol of the indomitableness of the human spirit. Jewish resistance continues sporadically in Warsaw and throughout concentration camps. The revolt is ultimately the largest Jewish uprising during the Holocaust, and the first urban uprising in German-occupied Europe.

“Peace go with you, my friend! Perhaps we still may meet again! The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality….I have been a witness to the magnificent, heroic fighting of Jewish men in battle.” --Mordechai Anielewicz