The Polin Museum of Jewish History announced this week that they had discovered long-forgotten photographs depicting the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto: the destruction by the Nazis of the prison city where they had incarcerated up to half a million Polish Jews. The newly-discovered photos were taken by a Polish firefighter, Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski. They are the only known photographs of the ghetto's liquidation that were not taken by German propagandists. They are chilling and distressing, little wonder that Grzywaczewski did not tell his children of their existence.
The Nazis began their destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943. Since the previous summer they had been entering the slum to round up those Jews who were not already dead from starvation and disease. They deported them in their thousands to the Treblinka death camp. By September 1942 they had transported 265,000 Jews to Treblinka and killed another 35,000 in the ghetto itself. There were about 80,000 Jews left in the ghetto when the daily deportations were paused on September 12th.
The Jews remaining in the ghetto knew that the deportations would soon begin again and that they would lead to certain death. They knew that it was pointless to fight back; they had few weapons, were sick, starving and demoralised. Nevertheless, the alternative was even worse. During the autumn of 1942 the members of the underground Jewish resistance in the ghetto started to plan an uprising. They created subterranean shelters and bunkers, gathered together the few weapons they had, prepared Molotov cocktails and trained their fighters. When the Nazis entered the ghetto on April 19th, the resistance was ready for them.
It was an unequal fight. They kept the Germans at bay for nearly a month. In the end the Germans set fire to the ghetto, smoking out those Jewish fighters who remained. Many are believed to have committed suicide. The rest were either shot on the spot or deported to the death camps. Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski took his photographs as the ghetto was burning and the remaining Jews were being rounded up.
My late father in law, Jerzy Lando z”l, was in the Warsaw Ghetto. He wasn’t there at the end, during the uprising; remarkably he had managed to escape a few weeks earlier. He spent the rest of the war fighting with the resistance and hiding in plain sight, his fair hair and blue eyes enabling him to pass off as an Aryan. He called the book in which he chronicled his experiences Saved By My Face.
Jerzy Lando did not fit the stereotype image of a Polish Jew. He didn’t grow up in poverty in a shtetl, his family were not particularly religious, although his grandparents had grown up in observant homes. As a child Jerzy lived with his parents and elder brother in Lodz, Poland’s second city, an industrial town 75 miles to the south west of Warsaw. They were a prosperous family, his father, who had started adult life as an itinerant pedlar had established a textile factory, his mother was the daughter of a successful manufacturer of woven goods. They lived in one of the best apartment blocks in Lodz, travelled to the mountains for their holidays and had both Christian and Jewish friends. Jerzy was a musical prodigy, his parents engaged Poland’s most renowned pianist to teach him and installed a grand piano in the living room. They were not a typical Jewish family. Until the Nazis came.
At 11.00 in the evening on a snowy December night in 1939, four German policemen burst into their flat. The officer in charge barked at them in German: “Get dressed, pack one rucksack each, leave all your valuables behind and follow us. Get a move on. Hurry.”
They were taken to Krakow where they were left to their own devices, able to live freely for a few weeks in the home of a former customer of Jerzy’s father. It was a freedom that did not last long. In April 1940 the German governor of Poland ordered all 35,000 Jews who had come to Krakow since the beginning of the war to leave the city. Many reached the same conclusion as Jerzy’s father and headed to Warsaw. “We have little choice”, he told his family. “Besides, we might be better off in a larger city where we can be with people we know. It might give us a greater chance of survival.”
Warsaw was not as free as Krakow had been. They rented a hot, noisy, soulless room in the Jewish residential area, the sort of place where one wants to spend as little time as possible. But the streets were dangerous, Jews were constantly at risk of being picked up by the many German patrols. Jerzy looked like an Aryan but dared not take off his mandatory Star of David armband; the risk of pretending not to be a Jew was incalculable.
Meanwhile the Germans were building the wall that would enclose the Warsaw ghetto. On 12th October 1940, on the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the Nazis announced the ghetto’s establishment.
Over the following months conditions in the ghetto deteriorated. In the depth of the coldest winter for many years the Germans requisitioned all fur coats and collars. The Jews now froze as well as starved. And yet, despite the horror and desperation the 18 year old Jerzy fell in love. For two young people it was a brief moment of delight in an increasingly distressing story.
It was his father’s business expertise that came to Jerzy’s rescue. Several Polish businessmen, realising that labour in the ghetto was plentiful and cheap, opened small workshops. They argued that they were manufacturing leather and household goods for the German economy and the Nazis gave them passes to come into the ghetto daily. The Polish workshop owners found it practical to form partnerships with local ghetto Jews and Jerzy’s father was asked to become a partner in a leather workshop, manufacturing items for a department store in the centre of Warsaw. Jerzy was given a job in the workshop as bookkeeper and secretary.
He was in the workshop on July 22nd, 1942, when the first deportation of Jews took place. His father tried to save his staff by obtaining certificates of employment for his employees and family and instructing them all to live on the workshop premises. Should the Nazis come for them, he hoped he would be able to argue that they were all working for the war effort.
The Nazis did come for them and paid no attention to Jerzy’s father protestations. The family was shunted into a never ending line of Jews shuffling along the road, carrying their battered cases full of rags, heading for the cattle wagons that would take them to their death. Jerzy had a locket around his neck containing arsenic that he had obtained from a friend who worked illicitly as a pharmacist. He fingered it nervously, wondering if he should swallow the powder.
At the end of the shuffling queue the Germans were dividing the line into two. They sent those on the left hand side towards the railway tracks. Those on the right were allowed home.
“All of a sudden, there was Father a few yards ahead of us, upright, dignified and self-assured. He stood close to one of the officers and, as he addressed him in German, he was pointing his finger at us. The officer, whose grim expression never changed, stared for a while at Mother and then looked straight into my eyes. After what seemed like an eternity he raised his arm and pointed to the right. He allowed father to join us. We were safe!”
The sense of relief was only fleeting. When they returned to the workshop it only took a moment to realise just how many members of their extended family, friends and colleagues were missing.
On September 5th the Nazis announced that all Jews were to assemble for registration. Once again a Selektion took place, once again Jerzy and his family were waved through, though this time without his father’s intervention. They were marched to a factory packed with sewing machines. For the next few days they were enslaved to the German war effort.
One evening in September Jerzy’s father seemed particularly tense. “’I don't believe’ he said hesitantly ‘that we have much chance of coming out of here alive. Certainly not if we stay in the ghetto. Here we can only expect death. You Jerzy have the best appearance; nobody will take you for a Jew. You will go first; we will follow later.”
Jerzy’s father had done his preparations. The next day he produced a blank birth certificate with an official stamp on it. He filled in a false name and details for Jerzy and handed it to him. He gave him a list of names and addresses of his Polish former customers, all of whom he said would be glad to help him when he told them who he was. And he told him that he had made arrangements with the supervisor of one of the ghetto workshops. When the Polish workers were entering and leaving the ghetto they always did so as a group. The group would be one short when they came in the next day. Jerzy would be among them in the evening when they left.
Jerzy’s mother prepared his clothes for him. She told him to wear several layers, telling him there was no knowing whether he would be able to obtain new ones when he got out.
The next day Jerzy, in his multiple layers of clothing, walked with the staff from the workshop to the Ghetto gate. He began to leave with them. “I was just passing the last of the policemen and hoping that my ordeal was over when, ‘Züruck! (come back)’ he yelled. He made me unbutton my first shirt, then the next one. He looked at me again, obviously perplexed. The end has come, was my only thought. The leader turned back from the front of the column. He did not say a word but looked at the German policeman, glanced at me and tapped his forehead with his index finger, indicating the presence of an idiot. The guard must have believed him and waved me on.”
Jerzy Lando survived the rest of the war in hiding. He had false papers, Polish contacts and an Aryan appearance that made it far easier than had he been dark skinned. He fought with the Polish resistance during the Warsaw uprising of 1944 and when the war was over made his way to England where he married, had children, opened a textile business and lived a successful life. He played the piano daily but arthritis in his fingers cut his musical ambition short. His parents both escaped, but his father was killed just a few days before the Russians entered Poland. His mother survived, followed Jerzy to England and lived to a good age.
Jerzy Lando’s biography Saved by My Face is available from Amazon.
Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski’s photographs will be on display from April at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.