"It's not about eliminating the epidemic, but about eliminating the Jews." The wall around the Warsaw Ghetto

The ghettos established by the Germans in occupied Poland are commonly associated with a wall surrounding their borders. During the occupation, such structures were rare. They were certainly built in Warsaw, Kraków, and Nowy Sącz. The Seuchensperrgebiet , or typhus-prone area—as German propaganda called the section of Warsaw designated for Jews—was designated in the capital's so-called northern district. In 1940, the Warsaw ghetto was surrounded by a sixteen-kilometer-long wall, separating it from the rest of the city.

After the September Campaign ended, the Germans began establishing an administration and legislation in the occupied Polish territories. In October 1939, the General Government was established from some of these territories, others were incorporated into the Third Reich, and some of the eastern territories were occupied by the Soviet Union. The legislation introduced by the German occupiers in the General Government changed the situation of the Jewish population. The new regulations concerned both property and general economic issues, forced labor, mobility, and the requirement to mark the Jewish population and the businesses or shops they ran with the Star of David. However, this was only the beginning of their actions against the Jewish community. Over time, the Germans began physically separating Jews from other inhabitants of cities, towns, and villages. The first ghetto in occupied Poland was established in October 1939 in Piotrków Trybunalski. The separation of Jewish districts was justified, among other reasons. the alleged need to separate Jews from the rest of the population for hygienic reasons: they were believed to be carriers of lice, typhus, and other diseases. Ghetto areas were often marked with a sign in Polish and German: " Typhoid Threatened Area ."

Warsaw Ghetto

In a secret telephone message from Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), to Einsatzgruppen commanders dated September 21, 1939, in addition to a passage about the need to establish Councils of Elders (Judenrats), there appeared, among other things, a note about plans to resettle Jews from Gdańsk, Pomerania, and Upper Silesia—territories that the Germans incorporated into the Third Reich a few weeks later. According to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's decree of October 30, 1939, they were to be transferred to the General Government by February of the following year, but the resettlement lasted until the fall. Between November 1939 and October 1940, approximately 360 Jewish displaced persons from the so-called incorporated territories arrived in Warsaw (recall that in 1939, Jews constituted almost one-third of its population, or approximately 90). primarily residents of the so-called Warthegau (mainly from Łódź) and the so-called Ciechanów district. The influx of such a large population worsened the city's already difficult housing conditions. As early as the autumn of 1939, the Germans planned to establish a so-called residential district for Jews in Warsaw, justifying this for sanitary reasons. On November 4, 1939, during an extraordinary meeting of the Warsaw Judenrat, SS-Standartenführer Dr. Rudolf Baatz presented an alleged order to designate such an area, issued by General Karl-Ulrich von Neumann-Neurode, the city's military commandant. Pending its execution, 24 hostages were detained. A Judenrat delegation, led by chairman Adam Czerniakow, attended a meeting with Neumann-Neurode, where it was revealed that the decision to establish the ghetto had been postponed. However, word of this quickly spread among the Jewish community. An uproar ensued.

During the winter of 1939 and 1940, rumors began to circulate in Warsaw about new dates for the creation of the ghetto and potential locations. One of these was the right-bank district of Praga, as Czerniaków recalled in his diary. Even then, fences and barriers were being erected on some streets. Some of these barriers were to eventually constitute the boundaries of a designated Jewish district. In mid-January 1940, Waldemar Schön arrived in Warsaw and was entrusted by the General Government authorities with the task of establishing a ghetto in the city. A few days later, a Resettlement Department was established in the District Head's Office, where the organizational framework for the ghetto was prepared. Schön became its head. One of the initial plans involved the creation of a ghetto in Praga – the Vistula would serve as a natural boundary separating the Jewish community from the rest of the city (this solution was adopted almost a year later in the capital of the General Government, Kraków). However, Schön's proposal was criticized by the City Council. There were fears that the relocation of such a large group of people engaged in trade and crafts to the right bank of the Vistula would negatively affect the economic life of the city.

And the walls grow

In March 1940, the Germans established a typhus-prone area in the so-called northern district of Warsaw, known as the Seuchensperrgebiet. Soon, the designated area began to be separated from the rest of the city. As early as March 18, 1940, Czerniaków wrote in his diary: " A demand that the Community fence the ghetto, drive in stakes, etc., and then guard it ." It was decided to separate the ghetto from the rest of the city with a brick wall. This idea was pushed through by two officials from the Health Department: the head of the Health Chamber, Oberführer SA Dr. Jost Walbaum, and Dr. Kamiński from the Warsaw district. It should be added that between March 22 and 29, anti-Semitic riots, later known as the Easter pogrom, took place in Warsaw. During these riots, Jews were attacked and their apartments and shops were looted, among other things. According to historian Tomasz Szarota, these speeches were probably inspired by the Germans to justify the need to establish a ghetto.

On March 27, the Warsaw Judenrat received official instructions to build a wall around the Seuchensperrgebiet (Seuchensperrgebiet). Three days later, Czerniaków wrote in his diary: " This morning at 7:00 a.m., we began digging holes for the walls." Simultaneously, Council members held discussions with German authorities regarding various technical issues (e.g., concerns about damaging the tramway lines) and financial difficulties related to building the wall. The building materials came from demolished houses destroyed in September 1939. The construction of the wall, and eventually its maintenance, was overseen by the Schmidt and Münstermann construction company. Two years later, at the request of the Central Construction Board of the Waffen SS, they carried out construction work at the Treblinka extermination camp, among other projects.

When construction of the wall began, it was not yet entirely clear whether or when a ghetto would be established. In his chronicle memoirs, Ludwik Landau wrote of the mood and fears these actions aroused among Warsaw's Jewish residents: " The Jewish population of Warsaw looks with fear at the walls rising around their district. […] These walls are popularly referred to in Warsaw as a prelude to a ghetto; rumors of dividing the city into sections to facilitate police surveillance seem more likely. In his book Bread Thrown to the Dead, Bogdan Wojdowski described the area separated by the wall: one day, in the eyes of people from this and that side, masons began building a wall on Żelazna and Sienna Streets, and Wielka Streets, and through Bagno and Próżna and Grzybów and Graniczna Streets, and Żelaznej Brama Square to Hale [Mirowskie] , thus sealing off the southern district. And this was a small ghetto. And beyond that, the wall stretched along Chłodna to Ptasia Street, Przechodnia to Długa Street, Mylna to Przejazd Street, Świętojerska to Ciasna Street, Koźla to Przebieg Street, through Pokorna Street, Stawki Street, Dzika Street, and Okopy Street, enclosing the northern district. A large ghetto existed there. Wojdowski wrote of the surprise caused by the construction of the wall. There were also voices that neither the fencing off of the district for Jews nor the creation of the ghetto were surprising. Stefan Szpigielman, for example, stated that this threat, like the sword of Damocles, had been hanging over the heads of Warsaw Jewry since November 1939.

Construction work was completed in the first half of June 1940. Kurt Schrempf and Erwin Supinger from the Technical Department inspected the wall on June 7th, and the building was accepted a few days later. In some places, it had been reinforced with barbed wire or covered with a layer of glass shards. The structure was not continuous; in some places, the ghetto's boundaries were formed by the walls of existing buildings or fire walls, wooden fences, and even fragments of fences or barbed wire entanglements. In July 1940, the "Gazeta Żydowska" published an anecdote regarding the wall's height: a sarcastic and bitterly smiling batlan from the Beth Midrash imbued this novelty with a peculiar joke: "Do you know why the walls are 2,5 meters high?" [in reality, 3 meters]. And he answered himself: "Because a flea only jumps to a height of 2,40 meters..." The construction of the wall forced, among other things, changes in the direction of street traffic, as well as the relocation of existing workshops, shops and shopping squares.

The Aryan side and the Jewish side

On October 12, 1940, the decree of the head of the Warsaw district, Ludwig Fischer, "On the Establishment of the Jewish Residential District," was announced over street loudspeakers. Mass relocations of the population ensued. Jews moved into the ghetto, while Poles abandoned buildings that were supposed to remain in the district. The streets and sidewalks were literally flooded with luggage carts, horse-drawn carriages, and even baby carriages, carrying some of their belongings; some were sold or stored with people remaining on the so-called Aryan side. A month later, on November 16, the gates of the Warsaw ghetto were closed. From then on, any attempt to leave or enter without a pass was punishable (from beatings to arrest and, later, the death penalty). In border buildings, primarily in the lower sections, the windows and doors on the so-called Aryan side were bricked up.

On November 29, 1940, the "Gazeta Żydowska" published an article addressing the issue of entry and exit from the ghetto. The author pointed out that this was only possible at 22 special points where traffic was controlled. These points were located, among others, at the exit of Twarda Street near Złota Street, on Żelazna Street near Grzybowska Street, on Leszno Street near Żelazna Street, on Nalewki Street near Krasiński Garden, and on Chłodna Street near Żelazna Street. These places were guarded by Jewish Order Service posts inside the ghetto, and on the other side by the Polish Police of the General Government (the so-called Blue Police) and German policemen (Schupo) on the outside. Warsaw Jews were cut off from the rest of the city, confined, isolated. They "disappeared" from its perimeter, as it were.

The closing of the ghetto gates was accompanied by a propaganda campaign aimed at demonstrating that this was not only necessary but also the only rational solution to protect the remaining inhabitants of Warsaw. One element of this campaign was a 1941 propaganda film titled " Human Life in Danger," shot by the Germans in the Warsaw Ghetto, which listed, among other things, the potential dangers of contact with Jews. This attempted to prove that isolation within the enclosed ghettos was the most appropriate course of action. Bacteriologist and immunologist Ludwik Hirszfeld addressed this issue in his memoirs: " The feeling of being imprisoned is intensified by the fact that passersby constantly encounter walls or barbed wire. In this way, the authorities wanted to isolate carriers of dangerous germs. People calling themselves doctors of medicine justified this thesis. Science has long since abolished medieval quarantines not only as cruel but also as pointless. Pointless? After all, it is not about eliminating the epidemic, but about eliminating the Jews.

The Impudent Jewish Window

In the accounts of ghetto residents, both those recorded in the ongoing census and after the war's end, references were often made to the ghetto's first moments. " We went to bed in the Jewish quarter, and the next morning we woke up in a closed Jewish ghetto – a ghetto par excellence ," Chaim Kapłan wrote in his diary. For the Jewish residents of Warsaw, the establishment of the ghetto, and especially the necessity of moving there with their loved ones, came as a shock. Moving out of their current apartments, they could only take a fraction of their belongings, and the ghetto was so overcrowded, and the available spaces so small that many items would not have fit. According to the April 1940 census, over 395 Jews lived on approximately 307 hectares. The population density was therefore nearly 129 people per square kilometer. Over time, the ghetto's population grew. Behind the walls were people of varying social standing, education, profession, degree of religiosity, gender, and age. What united them was their racial origin, as defined by the Germans, and the imperative to live behind the walls.

The cramped apartments and streets of the ghetto, the difficult sanitary conditions, the wall surrounding the district, and many other factors contributed to the feeling of isolation and detachment of its inhabitants. The renowned musician Władysław Szpilman wrote about this in his diary: " Yet the streets of the ghetto, and only they, ended—in walls. It happened to me more than once that, rushing forward, I would suddenly encounter such a wall. It would block my path, even though I wanted to continue along it." Halina Aszkenazy-Engelhard, a teenage ghetto resident, noted the overwhelming sense of imprisonment: " When I passed by the ever-growing ghetto walls and watched the birds flying above them, I envied them and dreamed of transforming into one of them, of flying through those terrible walls and fleeing far, far away, so far away that there would be neither Germans, nor typhus, nor the terrible, starving faces of the ghetto ."

The ghetto poet Władysław Szlengel, describing in one of his poems the isolation and confinement behind the walls, pointed to the border houses from which one could, at least surreptitiously, observe what was happening outside the district:

I have a window on that side,

impudent Jewish window

to the beautiful Krasiński Park,

where autumn leaves get wet…

In the evening, gray-lilac

the branches bow down

and the Aryan trees are looking

into this Jewish window of mine [...].

But even in these houses, residents were forbidden to open or even approach the windows, forbidding them to spy on life on the so-called Aryan side.

The ghetto ceased to exist

The separation of the ghetto from the rest of the city by a wall also had an impact on the lives of the remaining residents of Warsaw. Chaim Kapłan wrote: " Warsaw resembled, in a sense, Noah's Ark. These walls blocked off the streets that had been the busiest until then. For example, a wall was erected at the corner of Nowolipki and Nalewki Streets; to get to the house at 5 Nalewki Street (until then, it was a matter of just a few steps), a resident of the house at 2 Nowolipki Street (which until then had been a matter of only a few steps) now had to take a detour of about half an hour, namely through Nowolipki, Zamenhofa, Gęsia Streets, and finally to Nalewki Street. The same applies to Rymarska and Leszno Streets, as well as other streets. Contrary to the Germans' intentions, the borders of the Warsaw ghetto proved to be unstable. Between November 1940 and May 1943, their course was changed several times, as the ghetto's area steadily decreased. In May 1943, SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop reported in a report that the Jewish residential district had ceased to exist. However, the wall surrounding it remained. Over time, some were demolished, fragments destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising. After the war, most of the surviving Warsaw Ghetto walls were dismantled, often using bricks as building materials. Eleven fragments remain, the most famous at 62 Złota Street, 55 Sienna Street, and 11 Waliców Street. It is worth noting that for a time, until December 1941, the wall of the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street, still standing today, also served as the ghetto's border. In 2008, plaques and concrete slabs commemorating the boundaries of the Warsaw Ghetto and its murdered residents appeared in public spaces.

Dr. Martyna Grądzka-Rejak

Photo: public domain