Warsaw Death Ring: 1939-1944 Review

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Warsaw Death Ring: 1939-1944 ReviewWladyslaw Bartoszewski devotes considerable detail to the genocide of both Poles and Jews in German-occupied Warsaw. He estimates that 60,000 Varsovians were killed and wounded during the German conquest of Poland in September-October 1939. Many thousands of Warsaw's Poles and Jews were subsequently murdered by the German occupant. Bartoszewski includes an index which lists, by name, just a few thousand of them. He also discusses some of the main killing locations used by the Germans, notably the woods at Palmiry and Kubaty, the infamous Pawiak Prison, and the extermination camp at Treblinka. Of course, there were also a large and repeated number of street executions (wanton shootings or hangings of both Poles and Jews) throughout Warsaw, and Bartoszewski includes some photographs of these gruesome scenes.
The murdered Poles included prominent ones (p. 66, 88), including members of the Sejm (prewar Polish Parliament). Owing to the large size of the Polish population, the German genocidal policies had to first concentrate on the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia. However, Bartoszewski (p. 16) points out that the German definition of Intelligentsia was so broad that virtually all Poles with more than a minimum of education were targeted.
Whether through ignorance or malice, Poles are sometimes accused of having put Jews into ghettos. Actually, the Jews had, using modern parlance, chosen self-segregation long before the war. The forcing of the Jews all into one small neighborhood, which was then sealed off by a wall, was not done but Poles but by Germans, and not completed until mid-November 1940, more than a year after the German conquest of Poland!
At first, Polish Jews were murdered in much the same way as Polish gentiles. This did not change substantially until almost the third year of the German occupation of Poland. Bartoszewski comments: "In June 1942 even the Jewish leaders had not yet guessed the real objectives of Nazi policy in the immediate future. However, in mid-July the news spread round Warsaw that compulsory expulsions of the Jews from the city were about to take place."(p. 127)." Bartoszewski then continues by citing a text from the Jewish Historical Institute: "The Judenrat (Jewish Council) having received the most solemn assurances from the German authorities, discounts the warnings originating from Polish sources of the deadly danger threatening Warsaw's Jewish population, in the form of liquidation of at least 300,000 Jews, and has denounced them as harmful and absurd."(p. 127). Amazing! Warsaw's Jewish leaders actually believed the Germans more than the Poles. And now we have certain Jewish writers and scholars (e. g., David Engel) complaining about Poles being allegedly slow in warning the world about the mass extermination of Jews!
Bartoszewski briefly discusses the central role played by the Jewish ghetto police in the roundup of Warsaw's Jews for the train trip to the gas chambers of Treblinka. He cites Jewish authors Barbara and Adolf Berman (brother of the infamous Pole-killing Jewish Communist Jakub Berman): "Vicious as the Ukrainians were in rooting out defaulters they failed to detect the better concealed hiding-places. In the next phase of the Aktion this job was assigned to the Jewish police who often enough cashed in on their finds by extorting money..." (p. 131).
Bartoszewski touches on the Polish aid to the Warsaw Ghetto fighters by citing from the report of Jurgen (Juergen) Stroop: "In his April 22 message to Higher SS and Police Leader, General Kruger in Cracow [Krakow], Stroop reports the capture and execution of 35 Poles helping the Jews in the Ghetto. On April 28 Stroop again refers to `a Polish group of terrorists' assisting the Jews. On April 27 he reports the capture of 17 Poles and says that `It is certain that there were Polish terrorists among the captured or killed "bandits". Throughout Stroop's report there are continual references to "bandits liquidated alongside the Jews".'(p. 173).
Finally, Bartoszewski gives the reader a taste of overt Polish guerilla actions directed against the German terror: "By 1943, the unending German atrocities were being increasingly met with retaliations by the Polish underground. Arrests, round-ups, secret executions, were answered with sabotage, commando raids, killing of notorious Nazi criminals, liquidation of Polish and Jewish renegades who collaborated with the Germans against Polish people."(p. 173).Warsaw Death Ring: 1939-1944 Overview

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