Mila 18 - Leon Uris

Statistics? The ghetto is a thousand acres, or one hundred square blocks, or fifteen hundred buildings. Any way you cut it, it’s pretty rough to find places for a half million people.

On November 7, 1940, the Big Seven had completed the wall and the ghetto was declared. In a fell swoop tens of thousands who were working at jobs outside the quarantine area were jobless.

Sieghold Stutze’s Reinhard Corps had the task of ghetto security. True to early rumor, a Jewish Militia was formed. On paper it was under the direction of the Jewish Civil Authority, a guise in keeping with the German policy of trying to create the illusion that the Jews were imposing this upon each other. Stutze was the ruler of the Jewish Militia.

He chose as his chief a former sub-warden of the Pawiak Prison named Piotr Warsinski, who had a long-time reputation of brutality to prisoners, especially Jewish prisoners.

Piotr Warsinski was squat, bald, and sported an immense mustache. A tormented youth filled with fear of a brutal father had left him impotent and seething with hatred. Warsinski blamed his demented soul on being a Jew. He converted. Conversion left him with an unreasonable hatred of Judaism. Now the Germans forced him to be a Jew again and it intensified his hate.

Warsinski gathered about him the dregs of Jewish society. Men and women with limited mentality, criminal records, without conscience. They were given truncheons, special armbands, blue caps, and they were issued black boots, the symbol of power. They were given preferential rations and quarters for themselves and their families.

There was one condition. Warsinski made it utterly clear that their personal survival depended upon complete obedience.

As 1940 closed, a half million people in the Warsaw ghetto formed the largest human stockyard the world had ever known. They were at the complete mercy of the greatest military power ever experienced by man. The Germans had craftily carried out their master plan by forcing Jew to rule Jew through the impotent Jewish Civil Authority backed by the potent Jewish Militia under the sadist Warsinski. To augment their problems, the Big Seven continued their legalized swindles.

All that was left to protect this swell of humanity was a thin line of Zionists, Socialists, and the Orphans and Self-Help Society with American Aid.

Chapter Nineteen

Journal Entry

I THINK THAT SUSAN Geller will die of a broken heart. The Germans have ordered her to abandon our orphanage (and pride and joy) in Powazki and move inside the ghetto. Their directives order Susan to leave all equipment attached to the floors and walls, and that constitutes some of our most expensive things. Even the Orphans and Self-Help Society has a hard time renting property these days. Space is at a premium. We were able to find Susan a building on Niska Street, which she must completely convert. It is hardly comparable to the place in Powazki.

Thank the Lord for my dear Sylvia and for Deborah Bronski. Between the two of them, they kept Susan from a breakdown on moving day. It is so strange how different Deborah and Paul Bronski are. Yesterday I had to argue for three solid hours to convince Paul Bronski to petition the Germans to allow us to keep our farm in Wework running. You never know how the Germans will react. Paul just phoned me that the farm will be allowed to operate. Tolek Alterman will be overjoyed.

I am sending my son Wolf out to the farm in Wework. It will be good for him out there.

We have received our first group of Dutch Jews. The trip to Poland was very hard. They were jammed in cattle cars.

Where can we put them? I don’t know. The ghetto has over five hundred fifty thousand people in it now.

Mila 19 has been divided up by the Bathyran Council. On the first floor we have the ghetto administrative offices of the Orphans and Self-Help. We have a soup kitchen that can be entered from the back alley (Orphans and Self-Help now runs sixty soup kitchens), and we have a dispensary for minor ailments and a delousing shed as demanded by our German friends.

Second story. Bathyran families. Our rule is one family to a single room, regardless of the size of the family. The kitchen for the entire house is also on the second floor.

Twenty-one families ... sixty-two occupants, including Sylvia, me, and baby Moses (now that Wolf is gone).

Third floor. Walls have been broken through. Our dormitory for single girls. We have thirty. Divided right down the middle; fifteen work in the dispensary and soup kitchen and fifteen are hired out as domestics in the small ghetto on the southern end. I cheat by supplying our domestics with green armbands denoting a Self-Help employee in order to allow them to move about unmolested by Warsinski’s overeager Jewish Militia.

Fourth floor. Fifty of our boys have a dormitory. Twenty of them work in Mila 19. Thirty work at various jobs around the ghetto, mostly as bicycle porters and riksha drivers.

The problem is shaping up. Of our eighty “kids,” most have left families to live with us in the communal. How many members of their families can we take in — the aged, the ill? This is going to become serious.

In the attic we have cut up a dozen cubicles for the married couples. They are living on the second floor, mostly more than two to a room, so they must have a place where they can duck off for a few hours to have privacy. There are preset signals on the doors to advise whether the cubicles are in use or not. Sylvia and I are fortunate. With Wolf gone and the baby still an infant, we manage very well in our room.

The unmarried who wish privacy have to work it out for themselves. We neither officially encourage nor discourage it. Off the record, the unmarried know that the basement is available to them.

Irony. David Zemba, who wins more and more respect from me all the time, went in to see Schreiker and demanded that American Aid be allowed to open an office in the ghetto. So, he gets it. The dollars he receives from American Jews are our main support, but we can’t keep up with the flood of refugees, mass fines, and confiscations.

Dr. Glazer says the typhus death rate is becoming alarming. Pneumonia, TB, and malnutrition will be critical problems.

We are able to get passes in and out of the ghetto with relative ease. We know the situation won’t last long, so we are lining up people in the Jewish Civil Authority and the Jewish Militia who control passes who can be bribed in the future.

Orphans and Self-Help with American Aid money has taken over another important function, running all the Labor Zionist farms and ours at Wework. We have managed to open two more farms and we can also buy food and transfer through this farm system. The over-all operation is called Toporol.

A straw in the wind? Perhaps, I don’t know. For all the astute planning for which the Germans are famous, they are pulling an enormous blunder. In the ghetto we have thousands of building-trade people, craftsmen, tailors, engineers, etc. If used properly, these people would be of tremendous value to the German war effort. There is no rhyme or reason for the way people are slapped into slave-labor battalions. Carpenters are sent to the Brushmaker's factory, doctors are set to digging ditches and building airfields (for an attack on Russia?), and this inconsistency draws me to two conclusions.

1. The Germans are not quite certain why they are herding Jews into Poland.

2. A “final solution” of their “Jewish problem” has not been decided.

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

In the winter of 1940 and the spring of 1941 Wolf Brandel worked on Toporol Farm 2 situated northeast of Warsaw, near the village of Wework.