deep in Soviet Asia. As the Germans noted (and would have occasion to note again), the Soviet regime, unlike their own, had the state capacity and sheer terrain required for effective mass deportations. The Germans proposed a transfer of European Jews in January 1940. Stalin was not interested.60
If the General Government was too near and too small to resolve what Nazis saw as the racial problem, and the Soviets were not interested in taking Jews, what was to be done with the racial enemies who made up its native population? They were to be held under control and exploited until the time for the Final Solution (still seen as deportation) came. The model came from Greiser, who ordered the creation of a ghetto for the 233,000 Jews of Lodz on 8 February 1940. That same month Ludwig Fischer, the German mayor of Warsaw, entrusted the lawyer Waldemar Schon with the task of designing a ghetto. In October and November more than a hundred thousand non-Jewish Poles were cleared out of the northwesterly district of Warsaw that the Germans declared to be the ghetto, and more than a hundred thousand Warsaw Jews moved in from elsewhere in the city. Jews were forced to wear a yellow star to identify themselves as Jews, and to submit to other humiliating regulations. They lost property outside the ghettoes, in the first instance to Germans, and then sometimes to Poles (who often had lost their own homes under German bombs). If Warsaw Jews were caught outside the ghetto without permission, they were subject to the death penalty. The fate of the Jews in the rest of the General Government was the same.61
The Warsaw ghetto and the other ghettos became improvised labor camps and holding pens in 1940 and 1941. The Germans selected a Jewish council, or Judenrat, usually from among people who had been prewar leaders of the local Jewish community. In Warsaw the head of the Judenrat was Adam Czerniakow, a journalist and prewar senator. The task of the Judenrat was to mediate between the Germans and the Jews of the ghetto. The Germans also created unarmed Jewish police forces, in Warsaw headed by Jozef Szerzynski, which were to maintain order, prevent escapes, and carry out German policies of coercion. It was not at all clear what these would be, although with time Jews were able to see that life in the ghetto could not be sustained indefinitely. In the meantime, the Warsaw ghetto became a tourist attraction for visiting Germans. The ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum noted that the “shed where dozens of corpses lie awaiting burial is particularly popular.” The Baedeker guide to the General Government would be published in 1943.62
The Germans themselves returned in summer 1940, after the fall of France, to the idea of a distant Final Solution. The Soviets had rejected a deportation of Jews to the Soviet Union, and Frank had prevented their massive resettlement in his General Government. Madagascar was a French possession; with France subdued, all that stood in the way of its recolonization was the Royal Navy. Himmler mused along those lines: “I trust that thanks to a great journey of Jews to Africa or to some other colony I will see the complete extirpation of the concept of Jews.” That, of course, was not the end of the ambition, as Himmler continued: “Over a somewhat longer period of time it must be possible to cause the disappearance on our territory of the national conceptions Ukrainians, Gorals, Lemkos. And what has been said about these clans applies, on an appropriately greater scale, also to the Poles….”63
Jews were dying at high rates, especially in the Warsaw ghetto, where well over four hundred thousand Jews were assembled. The ghetto comprised an area of only about two square miles, so the population density was about two hundred thousand people per square mile. For the most part, however, the Jews dying in Warsaw were not Warsaw Jews. In the Warsaw district, as elsewhere in the General Government, the Germans drove Jews from smaller settlements into the larger ghettoes. Jews from beyond Warsaw were usually poorer to begin with, and lost what they had as they were deported. They were sent to Warsaw with little time to prepare, and often unable to carry what they had. These Jews from the Warsaw district became the vulnerable ghetto underclass, prone to hunger and disease. Of the perhaps sixty thousand Jews who died in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940 and 1941, the vast majority were resettlers and refugees. It was they who suffered most from harsh German policies, such as the decision to deny any food to the ghetto for the entire month of December 1940. Their death was often a hungry one, after long suffering and moral degradation.64
Parents often died first, leaving their children alone in a strange city. Gitla Szulcman remembered that after the death of her mother and her father she “wandered aimlessly through the ghetto and became entirely swollen with hunger.” Sara Sborow, whose mother died with her in bed, and whose sister then swelled and starved and died, wrote: “Inside myself I know everything, but I can’t say it.” The very articulate teenager Izrael Lederman understood that there were “two wars, a war of bullets and a war of hunger. The war of hunger is worse, because then a person suffers, from bullets you die at once.” As a doctor remembered, “ten-year-old children sold themselves for bread.”65
In the Warsaw ghetto, Jewish community organizations established shelters for orphans. Some children, in their desperation, wished for their parents to die so that they could at least get their food allotment as orphans. Some of the shelters were awful spectacles. As one social worker remembered, the children “curse, beat each other, jostle each other around the pot of porridge. Critically ill children lie on the floor, children bloated from hunger, corpses that have not been removed for several days.” She worked hard to bring order to a shelter, only to see the children catch typhus. She and her charges were blockaded inside, in quarantine. The shelter, she wrote in her diary with uncanny foresight, “now serves as a gas chamber.”66
Whereas the Germans preserved prewar Polish-Jewish elites, choosing from among them a Judenrat to implement German policies in the ghetto, they tended to regard non-Jewish Polish elites as a political threat. In early 1940, Hitler came to the conclusion that the more dangerous Poles in the General Government should simply be executed. He told Frank that Polish “leadership elements” had to be “eliminated.” Frank drew up a list of groups to be destroyed that was very similar to that of Operation Tannenberg: the educated, the clergy, the politically active. By an interesting coincidence, he announced this plan to “liquidate” groups regarded as “spiritual leaders” to his subordinates on 2 March 1940, three days before Beria initiated the terror actions against the Polish prisoners in the Soviet Union. His basic policy was the same as Beria’s: to kill people already under arrest, and to arrest people regarded as dangerous and kill them too. Unlike Beria, Frank would use the opportunity to execute common criminals as well, presumably to clear prison space. By the end of summer 1940, the Germans had killed some three thousand people they regarded as politically dangerous, and about the same number of common criminals.67
The German operation was less well coordinated than the Soviet one. The AB Aktion (Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion, Extraordinary Pacification Action), as these killings were known, was implemented differently in each of the various districts of the General Government. In the Cracow district prisoners were read a summary verdict, although no sentence was actually recorded. The verdict was treason, which would have justified a death sentence: but then, contradictorily, everyone was recorded as having been shot while trying to escape. In fact, the prisoners were taken from Montelupi prison in Cracow to nearby Krzesawice, where they dug their own death pits. A day later they were shot, thirty to fifty at a time. In the Lublin district people were held at the town castle, then taken to a site south of the city. By the light of the headlamps of trucks, they were machine-gunned in front of pits. On one night, 15 August 1940, 450 people were killed.68
In the Warsaw district prisoners were held at the Pawiak prison, then driven to the Palmiry Forest. There the Germans had used forced labor to dig several long ditches, three meters wide by thirty meters long. Prisoners were awakened at dawn and told to collect their things. In the beginning, at least, they thought that they were being transferred to another camp. Only when the trucks turned into the forest did they understand their fate. The bloodiest night was 20-21 June 1940, when 358 people were shot.69
In the Radom district, the action was especially systematic and brutal. Prisoners were bound, and read a verdict: they were a “danger to German security.” As in the other cities, Poles did not usually understand that this was supposed to have been a judicial procedure. They were taken away in large groups in the afternoon, according to a schedule: “3:30 binding, 3:45 reading of verdict, 4:00 transport.” The first few groups were driven to a sandy area twelve kilometers north of Czestochowa, where they were blindfolded and shot. The wife of one of the prisoners, Jadwiga Flak, was later able to find her way to the killing site. She found in the sand the unmistakable signs of what had happened: shards of bone and bits of blindfold. Her husband Marian was a student who had just turned twenty-two. Four prisoners who were members of the city council had survived. Himmler’s brother-in-law, who happened to be the man who ran the city for the Germans, believed that he needed them to construct a swimming pool and a brothel for Germans.70
Later groups from Czestochowa were taken to the woods. On 4 July 1940 the three Glinska sisters, Irena, Janina, and Serafina, were all shot there. All three of them had refused to disclose the whereabouts of their
