Once he became aware of the true goal of the ‘resettlement’ plan, Czerniaków committed suicide.Īt first, members of the Jewish resistance movement decided not to challenge the SS directives, believing that the Jews were being sent to labour camps. Under the plans German SS major Hermann Höfle, the Nazi’s ‘Resettlement Commissioner’, informed the Ghetto Jewish Council’s leader, Adam Czerniaków, that he would require 7,000 Jews a day for ‘resettlement to the East’ – the people of the Ghetto were told that they were being transported to work camps, but in reality they were being ‘resettled’ to Treblinka extermination camp. Mass deportations to Treblinka first began in July 1942 under the secretive Grossaktion Warschau operation.
Even before mass deportations from the Ghetto to Treblinka extermination camp began, Nazis controlled the amount of food that was brought into the Ghetto so disease (particularly typhus) and starvation were rampant, killing thousands each month. Many of the people had no housing at all and those that did were crowded in at about nine people per room. In November 1940 the Ghetto was sealed off with barbed wire, brick walls and armed guards – anyone caught leaving would be shot on sight. The largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, confined over 300,000 people into a densely packed area of central Warsaw that was little more than 1 square mile. Shortly after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, German authorities began to concentrate Poland’s population of over three million Jews into several extremely crowded ghettos located in the larger Polish cities. Surviving ghetto residents were then deported to concentration camps. By May 16 the Germans had crushed the uprising and the ghetto was all but ruins, having been burned to the ground. Although ultimately doomed, the militants were (against all odds) able to resist for almost a month. Seventy-five years ago on Thursday 19 April 1943, in a stand that would become the largest single act of Jewish resistance against the German army during World War II, starving Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto mounted a rebellion against the Nazis.
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