Czerniaków Swallows Cyanide Rather Than Sign for the Children

Twenty-eight years had passed since the Chafetz Chaim wept at the news from Berlin. The war he had prophesied was in its third year. Germany, under the man he had lived just long enough to hear about, had invaded Poland in September 1939 and the Soviet Union in June 1941. Behind the German army came the Einsatzgruppen — mobile killing squads that by the summer of 1942 had already shot more than a million and a half Jews into ravines from Kiev's Babi Yar to the Lithuanian forests. Now the shooting was about to be replaced by something more efficient.

The Warsaw Ghetto had been sealed in November 1940. Four hundred thousand Jews — a third of Warsaw's population — were packed into 1.3 square miles behind three miles of brick wall. The daily food ration was 184 calories. Tens of thousands were already dead of starvation and typhus before the deportations began; corpses were collected each morning by pushcart from the sidewalks where they had fallen. A historian named Emanuel Ringelblum and his team were burying steel milk cans full of documents under the ghetto — testimonies, decrees, children's drawings, poems — so that after the war, someone would know what had happened.

In January of this year, at a lakeside villa outside Berlin, Reinhard Heydrich had chaired a ninety-minute meeting of senior Nazi officials. The minutes, taken by Adolf Eichmann, laid out the Final Solution to the Jewish Question — the plan to murder every single Jew in Europe, eleven million people, from Ireland to the Urals. In a secret forest north of Warsaw, at a rail siding called Treblinka, a death camp was being built: gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, powered by the exhaust of a captured Soviet tank engine.

The Germans posted the notices on the ghetto walls on the twenty-second of July. Starting the next morning — the ninth of Av — all Jews of the ghetto 'not fit for labor' would be 'resettled to the east.' Six thousand a day were to be brought to the Umschlagplatz, the loading square next to the freight terminal.

Adam Czerniaków was the head of the Judenrat, the Jewish council the Germans had put in charge of running the ghetto. He had spent three years trying to keep it alive one small compromise at a time. The Germans handed him the deportation quotas and told him to sign them, and specifically told him that the orphanage children were included. He asked for the orphans to be spared. He was refused. That afternoon he wrote one final line in his diary: 'They demand that I kill the children of my people with my own hands. There is nothing left for me to do but die.' He took the cyanide capsule he had kept in his desk drawer for years.

The first train left for Treblinka the next morning. The trip was sixty miles. On arrival, the deportees were told they were at a transit camp and instructed to undress for the showers. Within an hour they were dead. Their bodies were pulled out and burned in open pits by a slave-labor unit. The whole process — from cattle car to ash — took ninety minutes. No one came back to tell what had happened. The Polish railway workers who worked the sidings whispered it.

The rabbis of the ghetto ruled. Rav Menachem Ziemba, together with Rav Yitzchak Meir Kanal and Rav Dovid Shapiro, ruled that under these circumstances armed resistance was not just allowed — it was required. Janusz Korczak, the beloved children's doctor who ran the orphanage on Krochmalna Street, was offered a chance to escape by Polish friends on the Aryan side of the wall. He refused. Two weeks after the deportations began, when the orphanage's turn came at the Umschlagplatz, he walked at the head of his two hundred children in a small orderly column, holding two of the youngest by the hand, and got onto the train with them.

Between the ninth of Av and Yom Kippur, an estimated 265,000 Jews of Warsaw were murdered at Treblinka. The remnant that was left rose in armed revolt the following Pesach — the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, led by a twenty-four-year-old named Mordechai Anielewicz. It was the first urban uprising against the Germans in occupied Europe. By the end of the war, six million Jews had been murdered — one third of the Jewish people, and the entirety of Ashkenazi civilization in Eastern Europe. That the Grossaktion began on the ninth of Av was, to those who read history through the eyes of Torah, no coincidence.