Document 27 A Jewish underground party informs the Polish government-in-exile of a plan to murder all Polish Jews
This document was composed in mid-May 1942. On 21 May it was transferred by a Swedish citizen living in Warsaw, Sven Normann, who departed for neutral Stockholm the next day. From there he forwarded the letter to the Polish government-in-exile in London. It reached London on 31 May 1942.
From the day the Russo-German war broke out, the Germans embarked upon the physical extirpation of the Jewish population on Polish soil, using Ukrainians and Lithuanians for that purpose. This began in the summer months of 1941, first in eastern Galicia ... In Lwow 30,000 Jews were murdered, in Stanislawôw 15,000, in Tarnopol 5,000, in Zioczow 2,000, in Brzezany 4,000 ...
In October-November the same thing began to happen in Wilno and environs and in the Kaunas area in Lithuania. During November 50,000 Jews were murdered in Wilno. At present there are 12,000 Jews there. According to various estimates, the overall number of Jews in the Wilno and Kaunas regions who have been bestially murdered reaches 300,000 ...
In November-December the murder of Jews in Polish territories annexed to the Reich (the so-called Warthegau) began. Murder was carried out here by means of gassing, which was done in the village of Chelmno ... A special motor vehicle (gas chamber), into which ninety people were loaded at a time, was used for gassing. The victims were buried in special dumping pits in the Lubardzki forest ... Between November 1941 and March 1942, the Jews of Kolo, D^bie, Bugaj, and Izbica Kujawska (altogether 5,000 people), plus 35,000 Jews from the Lodz ghetto and a certain number of Gypsies, were gassed at Chelmno.
In February 1942 the extirpation of the Jews began in the so-called Generalgouvernement. It started in Tarnow and Radom, where Gestapo and SS-men began visiting the Jewish quarters daily, systematically killing Jews in streets, courtyards, and apartments. In March the massive expulsion of Jews from Lublin began, during whose course children and old people in the orphanages and old-age homes, as well as patients in the general and communicable disease hospitals, were brutally murdered ... About 25,000
Jews were transported from Lublin in sealed railroad cars ‘in an unknown direction’; all trace of them has been lost. About 3,000 Jews were housed in barracks in Majdanek Tartarowy, a Lublin suburb. In Lublin there is no longer a single Jew ...
Since 18 April [Gestapo officers] have been killing a number of Jews [in Warsaw] daily in broad daylight, at home or outside. This action is conducted according to prepared lists and encompasses all places where Jews move about in the Warsaw ghetto. There is talk of more bloody nights. According to an estimate, to date the Germans have murdered 700,000 Polish Jews.
These facts demonstrate irrefutably that the criminal German regime has begun to realize Hitler’s prediction that five minutes before the end of the war, no matter how it ends, he will murder all the Jews of Europe ... Immediate annihilation threatens millions of Polish citizens of Jewish nationality.
Therefore we ask the Polish Republic, as the protector and representative of all people living on Polish territory, immediately to take the necessary steps to prevent the annihilation of Polish Jewry. To this end the Polish Republic must exert its influence upon the Allied governments and the responsible agents in those countries immediately to apply a policy of reprisal against German citizens ... [The German government] must know that Germans in the United States and other countries will have to answer now for the bestial extirpation of the Jewish population.
We understand that we are demanding extraordinary steps from the Polish Republic. This is the only way to save millions of Jews from certain annihilation.
(‘Raport Bundu w sprawie przesladowan Zydow’ [Bund Report on the persecutions of Jews], Hoover Institution Archives: Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, Box 12)
Document 28 The Warsaw Judenrat offers to regulate Jewish forced labour
The following description was written by Szmul Zygielbojm, a member of the Warsaw Judenrat, following his escape from Poland in December 1939. Zygielbojm spent two years in the United States before moving to London to serve as a representative of the Bund in the exile Polish National Council. On 12 May 1943 he committed suicide in protest over the evident unwillingness of Western governments to come to the aid of Jews threatened with death.
One of the most awful torments picking away at Jewish life in Poland under the Nazis is kidnapping for labour service. The Germans are seizing old and young in the streets and carrying them away to perform the hardest labour ... When this happens Jews are brutally beaten with regularity and often murdered ...
[The day after the Germans entered Warsaw] lorries parked near the places where Jews were standing in long rows to obtain a piece of bread. Nazis in blue uniforms, holding rifles, revolvers, and whips, undertook to cleanse the queues of Jews. Jewish women, young and old, were beaten out of the queues with fists, pulled out by the hair, knocked out with kicks to the stomach. Jewish men were grabbed by the collar, dragged out of the queues and thrown onto the dark, sealed lorries ...
That was the beginning. Where the people were being taken, what would happen to them - no one knew ...
[Since then] groups of Germans stand on street corners, looking at the faces of passers-by. Whoever is a Jew is ordered, ‘Jew, come here!’ When that happens he is already lost, a captive. Often young Polish antisemites stand with the Germans and help the Nazis recognize who is a Jew. The honest Poles are angry about this ...
I will never forget the faces of some Jews who came to the Judenrat offices to tell about the horrors ... One ... was one of the best-known and finest Yiddish actors. His clothes were torn and smeared with mud and blood. His hands were cut and torn from the hard labour he was forced to perform ... [Another] banged his fist against his own face and wailed ..., ‘Look! I’m being forced to soak myself in blood ... I won’t survive this!
Help, do something, help save me from this, because I’m liable to commit some horrible deed’ ...
We [in the Judenrat] could not bear the humiliating kidnapping of Jews from the streets the way dogcatchers catch dogs. We tried to figure out how to counteract it. The Warsaw Judenrat approached the Gestapo with a proposal: if the German occupation authorities need people for labour, they should obtain them in an organized fashion; but the kidnapping of people in the streets must stop. Let the daily quota of Jews required by the Germans be determined, and the community will provide people.
The Gestapo ostensibly accepted the proposal. From that time (November 1939) the Warsaw Judenrat did indeed provide two thousand Jews a day for labour service. But the kidnapping of Jews from the streets did not stop.
When the community protested, the Gestapo replied ... that the military authorities were the ones doing the kidnapping, and the Gestapo had no control over them. Nonetheless, the obligation that the Judenrat had undertaken remained in force: it had to continue providing two thousand workers every day, even though kidnappings from the street went on anyway.
(Hertz, 1947: 142-150)
