For those who did not escape from the trains, their fate was almost certain death. The horror of Treblinka is simply impossible to imagine. A glimpse of its depravity can be gleaned in a book, published by the Polish Underground Press in 1944, by Yankel Wiernik, who managed to escape after working in the camp as a carpenter. Wiernik witnessed the sufferings of the Warsaw Jews who were not, as was the custom, sent directly to the gas chambers, but were treated with particular cruelty. Many were burned alive on the huge pyres lit to destroy the tens of thousands of bodies: ‘Women with children were separated from the others, led up to the fires and, after the murderers had had their fill of watching the terror-stricken women and children, they killed them right by the pyre and threw them into the flames. This happened quite frequently. The women fainted from fear and the brutes dragged them to the fire half dead. Panic-stricken, the children clung to their mothers. The women begged for mercy, with eyes closed so as to shut out the grisly scene, but their tormentors only leered at them and kept their victims in agonizing suspense for minutes on end. While one batch of women and children were being killed, others were left standing around, waiting their turn. Time and time again children were snatched from their mothers’ arms and tossed into the flames alive, while their tormentors laughed, urging the mothers to be brave and jump into the fire after their children and mocking the women for being cowards.’7 The Nazis’ desire to keep the horror of Treblinka secret meant that anyone who went inside as a prisoner had to die. Wiernik saw a German woman and her two sons, who had been put on the transport by mistake, sent to the gas chambers despite having identity papers proving that they were ‘Aryan’. Of the 850,000 people sent to this terrible place, only forty to seventy Jews survived the war.
News of the fate of those who boarded the trains was, however, beginning to leak out. The Polish-Jewish politician and historian Emanuel Ringelblum and others had collected evidence of life in the doomed ghetto, and also of the mass murders in Treblinka and Chełmno. The Catholic Pole Jan Karski was smuggled into the ghetto, and later managed, dressed as a Ukrainian guard, to witness conditions in one of the transit camps. He and others in the AK tried to alert the world about what was happening. Their warnings were ignored. Nevertheless, as evidence mounted of the true destination of the Jews taken for ‘resettlement’, a resistance movement grew. It was to lead to the most tragic of all the uprisings in Warsaw’s long history.
Comparisons between the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 are inevitable, but it is virtually impossible to equate the two. Both were enormous and terrible tragedies, but in terms of motivation, hopelessness and desperation there is absolutely no equivalence between the tragic fighters of 1943 and those who decided to take up arms in 1944. The latter uprising was started largely for political reasons, to demonstrate to the world that the Poles had helped liberate their capital from the Germans and to prove that they deserved an independent state, free from German or Soviet control. The participants in the 1943 Ghetto Uprising had no such grandiose aims. Their choice had been made for them. They had been condemned to death because they were Jewish, and their struggle was not even one for survival. They were not interested in the kind of political or military objectives that preoccupied so many in the AK, nor did they entertain thoughts of any kind of victory. They had only two choices: to be murdered in Treblinka or to be killed, fighting with weapon in hand, in the tiny area remaining to them. Rarely in history has such a desperately tragic choice been forced on any group of human beings.
Mordechaj Anielewicz, organizer of the Ghetto Uprising, did not believe any of the German promises of ‘resettlement’. By September 1942 all but 60,000 of Warsaw’s Jews had been murdered in Treblinka, and despite the measures taken by the Germans to hide the truth, some now knew for certain what awaited them if they boarded the trains. The Jewish Combat Organization under Anielewicz began to gather weapons as best it could, and to organize to fight.
On 19 April 1943 the Germans descended on the ghetto with a force of 2,000 men. They had expected simply to terrorize their victims into getting on the trains, as they had in the past, but this time they were taken by surprise. The Jewish fighters, vastly outnumbered and with far fewer weapons than the thugs sent in to eject or kill them, had an intimate knowledge of the geography of the ghetto, including the sewer system, on their side. The battle raged for three weeks, with the desperate resisters first being hounded by German troops, and then forced from place to place as the ghetto was systematically burned. On 8 May Mordechaj Anielewicz and his girlfriend Mira Fuchrer, along with his staff, were surrounded at the ŻOB command bunker at 18 Miła Street. A monument now marks the site where they committed mass suicide in front of the SS troops who had been sent to kill them. As the Germans took over the ghetto a handful of fighters escaped through the sewers and were hidden on the ‘Aryan’ side of the city; a number went on to fight in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising as the ‘ŻOB Group’.
Having defeated the resisters, the Nazis began to clear the ghetto. Anyone left alive was either killed on the spot or taken to Treblinka. On 16 May SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop announced that the fighting was over. ‘The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more,’ he crowed. Himmler had the Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street, a beautiful and imposing Leandro Marconi landmark, blown up to celebrate this great success. ‘What a wonderful sight!’ Stroop wrote. ‘I called out “Heil Hitler” and pressed the button. A terrific explosion brought flames right up to the clouds. The colours were unbelievable. An unforgettable allegory of the triumph over Jewry.’8 The rest of the ghetto was systematically destroyed. Photographs show a sea of rubble where homes and synagogues and shops had once stood. An entire history had been wiped from the map.
The destruction of the Warsaw ghetto was of importance to the genesis of the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, not least because it was a grave warning of the depths to which the Nazis could sink. The AK had not contributed a great deal to the heroic fight at the beginning of the Ghetto Uprising, but in reality there was little it could have done. At that point the AK had few weapons to spare; some of its members also subscribed to the stereotype that the Jews were unable or unwilling to fight. By the end, however, the sheer heroism of the combatants had greatly impressed many in the AK, who were amazed that a small group of poorly armed Jews had managed to hold off the Germans for weeks under near-impossible conditions, with almost no help. Thirteen thousand Jews had died in the fighting, around half of them burned to death. The Germans had lost seventeen men killed and around two hundred wounded. ŻOB had been so effective in part because they had abandoned street fighting, with its high casualty rate, in favour of partisan-style warfare, with each burned-out building and the sewer network being used to the utmost advantage. At the same time, Warsaw’s citizens had watched in horror from Świętojerska Street and Krasiński Square as Jews trapped by flames had jumped from the upper storeys of burning buildings. All Warsaw could hear the explosions and the sound of gunfire inside the ghetto, and stories of acts of bravery and self-sacrifice spread throughout the city. The uprising won the respect of the non-Jewish Warsawians, many of whom were deeply disturbed by what was being done to the Jewish population just beyond their reach.
The chilling fact was that in the space of a few months the Germans had succeeded in murdering a huge number of Warsawians in the centre of their city, or deporting them to be murdered elsewhere. Despite the efforts of some individuals in organizations like Żegota, a code-name for the secret Council to Aid Jews set up by Władysław Bartoszewski, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and others, few outside Warsaw believed the reports of what was happening, and precious little was done to help. In a moving speech at Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery on the fortieth anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising, Józef Rybicki, commander of ‘Kedyw’, who later recruited Stanisław Aronson, described his feelings of helplessness at the time. ‘There behind a wall, burning ghetto houses, detonations, shots, executions, murders. And from our side the pain and despair of powerlessness. It is like a mother who knows her child is dying and she can only suffer and despair that she can’t help him. This feeling of despair and powerlessness stays with us forever