thank you very much for coming tonight i want to thank belmont media center for sponsoring this event and diane colby who's in the audience for organizing a title of my talk is called return to the warsaw ghetto i it and the photo that you see on the front is a photograph i took several years ago from the from the from the window from the window from the car of the guide and this is actually where the bridge was located and so i kind of put the two together and in some ways one of my purposes of going to warsaw was to learn what can we learn how can we learn the lessons of the warsaw ghetto for today and in some ways this talk is really what i learned and what i saw and what i've learned since then one of my sources in the sources of all of my talks is i try to learn from the diaries that were written at the time one of the primary sources for the warsaw ghetto is the diary of emmanuel ringle blom and this is him on the side he was a social worker a historian probably he would be called almost a socialist in in that world at that time he was also involved in jewish self help and he spent many years trying to write a book about the history of jews in poland in lithuania in that part of the world when the ghetto was forming he brought together a group of different sectors of society they would meet on every friday night and they would take a writing assignment so that they could tell future generations about what was happening in the warsaw ghetto and they called it all negs shabat they would come every friday night and they would gather they would get assignments and they would write and it consisted of journalist teachers he con a mist engineers and others because he wanted a whole spectrum of the ghetto at the time and after the war his the work was buried and it was buried in milk cans like what you see here and one thousand nine hundred six one was discovered in one thousand nine hundred fifty a second was discovered and they've never discovered the third one another diary at the time was that the diary of adam shen yakov and he would be the head of the jewish council and he wrote his diary up to the day that he that he died and it's from a different perspective there were other diaries there were diaries of teenagers there were diaries of rabbis there were diaries of others this is the diary of hi i'm kaplan and he was a hebrew teacher and this is what he writes on october twenty sixth one nine hundred thirty nine in our scroll of agony not one small detail can be in mid even though we are now undergoing terrible tribulations and the sun has grown dark for us at noon we have not lost our hope that the era of light w surely come therefore every entry is more precious than gold so long as it is written down as it happens without exaggerations and distortions and that is also one of the purposes of my talked today the photographic record of the warsaw ghetto is primarily by german soldiers and the germans were taking different types of photographs in the warsaw ghetto there were propaganda photographers there were war ger for photo journalist and finally probably the most the richest archives were of a german bystander soldiers and on the on your right is sergeant heinrich yost who actually entered the ghetto one time on his birthday in september of one nine hundred forty one joseph heidegger is another one and he entered about three times and they were like any other soldiers in any war they have cameras they want to take photographs of them and these become the real basis of the photographic record of the warsaw ghetto pre war world war two warsaw it was the greatest center of jews in the world and it was in poland and the greatest center is in warsaw and in warsaw the center is at the center of an gees a street and the jewish community at the time consisted of the left end of the right there were communist and atheist  socialists there was the left the middle and the right there were orthodox religious totally religious hasidic jews and everything in between there were teachers and there were entrepreneurs and there were poor people and rich people and middle class people and people in the profession it was extraordinarily dynamic and in some sense it's kind of represented by this photograph of roman vision iraq which was taken in one nine hundred thirty eight but this is why there wasn't a lot of jewish archives for photographs because this is what warsaw looked like after the war it was the most destroyed city or one of the most destroyed cities in world war two it was bombed in one nine hundred thirty nine parts where the jewish ghetto was it would be destroyed by flame throwers and bombs by the germans and then in one thousand nine hundred four in august there was also the polish rebellion or the polish revote and it was bombed again and this is also the ghetto area and the only thing existing would be the catholic church the warsaw ghetto at its greatest was probably between four hundred fifty thousand to five hundred thousand something even more there was two parts of the ghetto there was a small ghetto and a large ghetto and with the circle right up here on the upper right that is actually were key in jesus street come together so that would be like the center at least of that quote it was about four square miles now boston has around six hundred twenty thousand people it's the city of boston proper and i know it's more than four square miles this had five hundred thousand and it's all basically in this area there were different phases of the ghetto there was an occupation phase from basically october in one nine hundred thirty nine to october of one nine hundred forty the ghetto was sealed in november fifteenth one nine hundred forty walls would be put all around this there w deportations which occurred both in one nine hundred forty two and in one thousand nine hundred three there was the jewish ghetto revote which is about were about seventy years ago plus a few months that's when it occurred in april jews this is the german army and adolf hitler on the lower on your lower right entry in warsaw on october first one nine hundred thirty nine this is what warsaw looked like the jewish area was particularly bombed and about more than ten thousand jews would also be killed at the time basically many families were affected and think about just think about what happened when  occurred in in this area many talking about new jersey lights went out but what happened if you had no hospitals what happens if you're wounded what happens if a family member gets killed that's what they were facing at the time about three hundred sixty thousand jews live in warsaw many also flee those that can flee will flee to places like the soviet union romania some go to britain where they they form a polish government in exile many of the leaders both polish and jewish left warsaw so you're left with the people who can't leave and one of the questions and any time you talk about a ghetto is the whole choice why do some families go in other families don't it depends depends on the ages of your children it depends on whether you're taking care of sick relatives it depends on whether you're one of your children are disabled or not depends if you have resources so people made different choices at that time this is just another photograph of the ghetto now one of the german propaganda posters this is a german propaganda poster and in polish jews bring lice and spread typhus one of the rationales for forming a ghetto was infectious diseases and it would be utilized by the nazis at the time to try to not only confined jews to quarantine them away from the rest of the population but at the same time to separate them from the poles so that was also the intent when the nazis when in it wasn't just simply confined to jews they didn't want the polish jews to link up with the poles because that would make them more powerful and this is a quote from heinrich himmler head of the gestapo of the s hundred thirty nine the time has come to gather all the rabble together and get ghettos and then introduce some epidemics and let them all die another thing that the nazis did when they go into every jewish community or any community at hall at all they would totally disband all the jewish organizations and they create it what they called a youth in iraq it was it was a nazi established jewish council and it was actually part of a secret protocol that went out as early as september of one thousand nine hundred forty one and they said in every community either jews should elect themselves it would differ in the area or they would be appointed but again it wasn't really the jewish community that was there before the war it was de jewish community as a stablished by the nazis and the head of it in this case was was adam sharon sharon sharon sharon sharon the cos he was trained as an engineer  kind of than a simulated polish jew very educated was involved in jewish self help particularly vocational training and at one time was even sat on the polish legislature and this  another photograph of him now i like this photograph because it really shows you what the union rot was all about this is adam sharon no knock he often hears the gestapo or german soldier like looking over him what was his life like and this is taken from his diary he had constant migraines and when you read his diary he talks about the migraines that he had almost every night he had to move numerous times because the ghetto parameters are always changing because the nazis are always changing them he was constantly being intimidated and there were several times that he was beaten he was in charge of of a half a million people for food housing medical care and security with refugees that would come into the city for jobs and for labor for education in orphanages he was also involved in money accounting and taxes and he also had to try to keep the jewish community together from the left into the right that's his life and on top of that he had to make weekly reports to the germans and it would be imagine the worst i r s audit that you can ever think of and that's what it's like though you have to do it every week for all of these things and all by the way they have a gun to your head and they have a gun to the family's head and they have the gun in theory or in principle to five hundred thousand people and you're you're responsible and that's where he that's that was his life and finally you had the gun gestapo behind him  kaplan would write in his in his diary on december eighth one nine hundred thirty nine from day to day the noose around our neck grows tighter and here are some of the things within the first several months happened a jew jew star everyone had to wear a jewish star and it didn't matter if you were a catholic you all it mattered if your grant one of your grandparents was jewish you were forced to wear the jewish star and you're going to be forced to go in the ghetto you could be a professor of economics in  warsaw university and you were a catholic you were baptized catholic it didn't matter because hitler's notion was not based on religion it was based on race so and that becomes a factor even within the ghetto because a lot of convert come into the ghetto what do you do about them you have all these jews some who say well why did you convert that becomes an issue even within it and actually some of the converted jews become head of the jewish police  isolation of businesses there is a total freezing a restriction on bank accounts you can't get your money out education or religious prohibitions if you had any type of retirement it's gone the germans have taken it and also you get put out it cur curfews and travel restrictions the nazi also established degree of forced labor for jews age fourteen to sixty and they also established a census the jewish community and all these diaries no one like the cens because the census tells you how many there are where you are what you do and later the census will be utilized to deport people the labor was also tricky initially they focused on orthodox jews with beards initially and they would be walking down the street example where in belmont if you were walking from a waverly to cushing square and you were just going for groceries that day the germans could come by pick you up and send you to a labor camp and sometimes you never came back or sometimes you came back beaten or sometimes you came back ten years ten week ten days later and so what happens is the jewish community said we don't want this chaos what we want to do is we will establish the quotas give us how many people you want and we will bring the numbers for you first it was a thousand within six months it was ten thousand so now the jewish community and the union rep is going to choose who goes on these labor camps now it seems reasonable initially but it became becomes a group of becomes a big problem because who do you choose who gets out of the labor duty who do you choose and one of the things that begin to happen is the jewish police also become involved because if you don't provide the quota then the germans are going to retaliate so you again kind of have a new sort of new thought on your neck and you have to provide the quota so what happens is they have taxes if you're wealthy enough and you can pay the tax you can be exempt from the labor camp if you're connected you can be exempt from the labor camp but if you're just kind of a poor joe you go so this pick creates conflict within the community it begins as labor camp quotas but then what happens when it becomes deportation quotas and so that's how it moving but we have to always remember when we speak about the holocaust the people making the decisions at the time in most cases don't know the ending we know the ending they didn't and this is one of the gathering up of the labor camps and it would be compared to exodus and building the the sphinx and other things in farrel's egypt like beasts cattle geese slaves ferals egypt and they talk about that a lot in their diaries in the in the ghetto or in that area it was constant humiliation particularly people jews with beards orthodox jews were particularly targeted and as time went on fewer and fewer people wore to they cut their beards off because it was safe but then it becomes a religious issue some would refuse to cut their beards because they would rather die than to get their beard cut off so it depends it becomes an individual choice in the ghetto you didn't control your own body because it could be searched at any time and in the ghetto there was what you called collective responsibility on november twenty second for instance one nine hundred thirty nine fifty jews living at nine left key street are executed same street we talked about at the beginning a jewish thief that shot and killed a polish policeman so because that one person shot a policeman the germans said now fifty of you are going to die or fifty three of you're going to die and they did this in many of the other ghettos as well so if you did something bad it's not just simply the cost for you could be the cost of your family cook the cost of your street the cost for the entire neighborhood an initially shortly a after several months the jewish police were formed and initially in all the diaries everyone rejoiced on that because they thought there would be greater consistency and stability with with other jews being the police officers rather than germans and missionary they were involved in traffic they were also involved in guarding the prayer materials of the ghetto people can't came inside one of the photographers joseph heidegger came in he came in three times and he tells a story that i come to this fence and the i met by these two guys and i don't want them follow me around i'm a photographer you know i want to do my own shooting and they wouldn't leave me and he and he and any and i kept trying to get away from him they kept following me and he said kind of like would you leave me alone and they said we can't and he said why because if anything happens to you they're going to kill us and they're going to kill our families and then he got it and then he allowed them to come with him but that's the kind of things now in the warsaw ghetto there's three levels of security there's the jewish police right here there's the polish police and there's the germans and you have to go through all three levels now if you think the smuggling and we'll talk a little bit about smuggling later everyone gets involved in the smuggling wherever there's in train and exits from the ghetto at every level but any level this could change quickly because they couldn't get jobs doing anything else so they made a jewish policeman and what happens is is it becomes they get involved in blackmailing graft and they maybe weren't getting paid very much so they say well we'll get paid in other ways and so they were extort money from people in other things we have to be careful however making such judgments because there were also jewish police at the time of deportations that would commit suicide because they would rather do that then to be involved in g quotas to select jews so it depends and it would come in all shapes and sizes as early as november december one nine hundred thirty nine jews are expelled into warsaw and as time goes on there would be more than one hundred thousand it's going back to the map quickly this is this is also part of poland actually woods our luggage is down here this literally becomes a next to germany annexed and they want to get all the jews out of it and in november december they're trying to push them all into this area called the general government it ultimately doesn't work because they don't they haven't created the infrastructure but it's also part of that secret just stop oh protocol to to get jews out of the little villages and move them to large urban areas where there's railroads the final solution probably hadn't been developed yet but it's on its way how do people get there some came like this some come on the roads some come in little carts and some come by train refugees within the ghetto create a whole new class of people if you live there it's like a person coming into your own neighborhood from outside and all they have is a bag an immigrant an illegal alien or whatever they don't they they don't live there they don't know the area they have no connections they only have on them what they carry well what happens when you come into a place where there's five hundred thousand people there's going to be starvation no infrastructure and everything else what happens to you if you don't have any connections they become the first that die there are some international care efforts initially and they exist from september one nine hundred thirty nine to basically pearl harbor when the united states goes into war one of the biggest groups was the american joint distribution committee coming from new york in the united states in particular and that was found it after world war one to help jews in palestine but it also was very active throughout eastern europe helping jews both with self help with the lawns as well as other things and here's some photographs of that and they were involved in refugee work these are actually jewish soldiers in the polish army returning back to warsaw maybe they no longer had a home how do you help them there were other groups i list them up on top sentosa was an organized group that took care of children and orphans taz they have long polish names but i'm just using the acronyms taz was for health care and or was for vocational education i believe or does still in existence even today this is actually a synagogue and a doctor is going to the synagogue and it's no longer being really used as a place of worship but is being used as a refugee center in which the doctor is coming to them to deliver medical care this is a soup kitchen also sponsored there were hundreds of soup kitchens in warsaw and they could differ from the orthodox to the to the communist to the socialist they were often times where the underground would also meet at the soup kitchens they were for children there for women they were for intellectuals they would also wane in wax based on how much money and how much food was coming in there was professional training courses and that's just a list some of them metal work electrical work except sewing machines what two to three writer and he's established his first orphanage in one nine hundred twelve his second in one nine hundred twenty and he would take care of both polish children and jewish children and he was so respected in so well known that as the ghetto form the pole the poles at offered him to escape to come to come outside the ghetto but he would refuse because he never wanted to leave the children and the person involved in the day to day work was to funny and they worked for several decades and this is actually a photograph of their orphanage right before the war and they would have to move it several times imagine taking care of two hundred kids in this situation how do you do it the ghetto was sealed on november fifteenth one thousand nine hundred forty a wall which the jews paid for with taxes on themselves because they're required to buy the nazis and they also built and it ends up being about nine feet high this is from one of the survivors all the streets in the ghetto were dead ends people had nowhere to go and could find no exit also another x another aspect of this they it took them about more than a year to decide upon the parameters of the ghetto and share new yakov kept trying to hold it off through negotiation and it creates great conflict because where you put that was going to make a difference what happens if let's say the ghettos on this side and you're a polish family you're going to have to get out so you have to move to the other side so it creates great great disruption both within the polish community as well as in the jewish community if you're a jew who lives outside you get him again those who who are live inside jews that live inside and they've always lived there have advantages for survival than those who are coming from the outside this is that bridge again and this is a polish access road and german access road why bridges in ghettos you see them in many ghettos it because as a way germans could control populations it was also a way they could divide the community because if this is the small ghetto which it is and this is the large ghetto how do you come out of the to communicate only through these bridges and also let's say this side of the ghetto gets more food than the other side someone's always going to get angry someone's going to look in the bridge so you have more than we do it's a way to divide the community they also needed it for access roads mary berg was a teenager and a survivor she would actually go to new york one of the few get out of the ghetto the red bricks are growing higher and higher as well as the bridge everywhere we are walled up locked in and all the diaries they talk about that that experience of being locked in we can no longer leave we are totally confined not totally because they do there are some excuse back and forth and this is what the bridge imagine it looks like now just just look at this bridge you can almost feel the claustrophobia as you look at it but think of it on another in what if you're german soldier during the jewish ghetto revo and you're going to go looking for jews who are going to shoot at you in these buildings now you understand why maybe they they ceased trying to fight and they're just going to destroy by fire because they can't they can't they can't get them out because those jews are ready to die for whatever even by hand to hand combat but are you going to risk your soldiers going into that in the ghetto there were different classes of people there were cafes there were some become very wealthy and this is an example of that and this is another example there is examples also of religion almost stereotypical these are propaganda fatah photographs taken by two german photographers and they're basically going to be sent to germany and they're going to say look at how great the jews are living and so you have to be careful with the photographs too because the natural fact time kaplan would say public prayer in these times is a for been at anyone caught in this crime is doomed to severe punishment so it shows like they're praying but in reality it's illegal and this is the german propaganda team photographing this is everyone had to of survive and this is a woman who's trying to survive by selling jewish stars there were the cloth ones were more expensive than the paper ones in the warsaw ghetto you put the star in your arm in other ghettos it would be on your chest in the ghetto of load you would be on your chest and on your back this was a blue star in the ghetto would be a yellow star so it would be different says a different ghettoes what's also interesting about this photograph this elderly woman who looks like she's ready to fall on the back there is a poster shimon pullman that's the pianist from the movie the concert the pianist that one night believing cademy award for adrian brody so you have both things kind of going on at the same time in the ghetto there was music there were concerts like by shimon pullman there were street photographers there were benefits to aid the poor within the ghetto and again here's kind of a soup line and they're probably selling potatoes there there's an account in one diary where a street musician was playing his violin he got in the way of the german truck they ran and they ran him over took his violin and smashed it on the ground and even though he wasn't dead he no longer could earn a living  cut cuts nelson a jewish poet who lived in the ghetto would write seven million souls seven million tragedies heim kaplan it is for been to hold parties with music and dancing but at night everyone is dancing even though a stomach is empty it is awful some mitzvah a good deed to dance every dance is a protest against our oppressors so within the community they're going to try to resist if they can't resist to arms through their human dignity through their through the power of their culture through the power of their religion i was a surreal experience though because here we have looks like an orthodox jew with a and very unorthodox hat and almost designer glasses and here we have again no beards and balloons and joseph heidegger the german soldiers said balloons in the ghetto i found it so surreal i never understood but we have to think about people had to live there were still bar mitzvahs there were still birthdays there were still das there were still weddings people were living including probably having a birthday or something caplin again february eighteenth one thousand nine hundred one the jewish community is on a battlefield but the battle was not conducted with weapons it is conducted by means of various schemes of deception schemes of smuggling and so on we don't want to simply disappear from the earth there was there was rations at certain times the rations people were were trying to survive on two hundred sixty calories a day sugar coke is one hundred sixty so and how long can you do that for this is again food coming in from the joint distribution committee but what happens when world war what happens when the us center war enters the war all of this dries up so how do you feed the people i just want also point out this is  and so this is what you have on one hand you have stores that have goods but no one but people are starving outside of them whole families this probably sister girl and two sisters i don't know what's going on there  there was there was also the question of typhus remember that first that first thing that first poster about the typhus well the germans actually knew when you begin to confine people in small places with  little medicine what's going to happen people are going to get infectious diseases and it's going to spread and so whole communities are courtyards would be quarantine becomes a horrible event again this is a jewish policeman he's koren team that group off but it also becomes kind of it becomes also a way in which the jewish police can gain goods from others because what would happen is they would threaten house or a court yard they say unless you give us money or goods we're going to take you to the steam baths which is a twenty four hour process in which you have to leave all your possessions you have to get all your clothes stripped off you're going to be showered by hot steam and oh by the way when you come back to your house nothing's going to be there because someone has stolen it so people would pay off there was all this negotiation about medical care and it becomes a way in which the community also becomes divided this is mary burke again the typhus epidemic is raging the doctors are simply throwing up their hands in despair there are no medicines and all the hospitals are overcrowded setting sick people down in front of hospitals has become a daily occurrence and this is a young child in front of the hospital it was the burson involvement us children's hospital on salissa street and this was the director of that hospital donner dr anna brody heller and she would later die in the ghetto she was also given an opportunity to  xscape her she sent her children now but she would remain she said as long as there's medical care for people in this ghetto i will remain until the day i die this is from ringgold archive a journalist who was walking on the street one day he's part of that zero neg group and this is what he writes as he trudges home he looks into a window facing the street it is a hospital and surgeons are operating to save a child's life but why why why save why to whom to what is this child being bought brought back our halls are like the cry of jackals but we are not animals we operate on infants it may be pointless or even criminal but animals do not operate on their young even though there was death all around them they wanted to save the life of a child and there's one story that is in one of the ghettos that said even though the fire is raging you try to save one bush and if you can save one bush that's important and that's what they kept trying to do as a community there was they organized there was also jewish self help committees established by emmanuel ringgold blo they would actually this is one of them also on twenty seven not aloof street and it usually consisted of people from all different groups that would form around these court yards just like this and the court yards become the basis of their existence and even if you go to warsaw today you have many of these court yards so imagine you can do things on the outside but on the inside they were doing education they were doing soup kitchens they were doing benefits they were doing hanukkah services and they were basically organizing within hine kaplan would later write in these days of our misfortune we live the life of moron those were jews who basically converted during the spanish inquisition but they publicly were catholic but secretly they were jews everything is forbidden to us and yet we do everything every occupation is under ban yet we somehow support ourselves public social life has been stopped but something can still be done in secret so the community begins to move underground and there would be secret schools from the left to the right from socialist communist zionist orthodox there'd be secret religious services and there would be secret political gatherings there would also be the jewish underground and it was primarily young people very few older people and one of the reasons for that many of these younger people's families were already dead and they were young and because they were young they did not feel that they should take it they felt we should be doing more and for several years there would be a debate between these young people and the wiser ones in the community and the wiser one said in a wise kind of fashion if you act up they may be going to kill all of us and so that was the thing so so a lot of times the young ones would ascend but they had they form secret cells usually of five people soup kitchens in the soup kitchens they educated each other had secret newspapers and radio they had underground schools to train people i gave a talk in manhattan several weeks ago to a group of hundred fifty holocaust survivors and one of the women said i knew some of these people they were in my apartment and i remember them practicing with brooms like they were rifles and she said and they would sing songs but they would be before they had rifles they had brooms and they would practice in our apartment and they had that system a network of curious couriers that actually got outside the warsaw ghetto and went throughout eastern europe many times they were women and reason they were women because women could pass better than men because men were circumcised and they could always be if they're caught that basically that was the problem women also they if they looked polish or german they were better couriers than if you look so called stereotypically jewish also they're polish had to be really good or the german had to be good if they were if they were versatile in multi languages it was also easier being a courier but it was a very dangerous job in these these health help committees forming in these courtyards there were as many as two thousand of them in one thousand nine hundred many of them were democratically based they would elect they would elect their own leaders they were often at great odds with the you didn't rob they were like their own community and they were like grassroots versus the establishment and so there was always conflict there but by january  there would be sixteen hundred committees and two thousand or less volunteers why people are dying and emanuel ringle bluhm june tenth one thousand nine hundred eighty two lately we have seen an interesting phenomen in many house committee women or replace the man who are leaving because they are burned out and tired there are no house committees where women comprise the entire leadership one of the phenomenas and a lot of there are so there are reports on this in general women were better survivors they develop better support systems among themselves they were very realistic and they would just do what needed to be done the men oftentimes burnt out many of them were also sent into these labor details and they never came back so that was also occurring at the same time but women begin to come to the forefront as as time goes on but what do you do with the kids this is a soup kitchen and a school you see someone playing music in the background but what do you do with all these kids because when parents die and maybe the children don't die what do you do they try to educate their children self help activity is simply that people die more slowly we must finally admit to ourselves that we can save nobody from death we don't have the means to and this is what that meant at were thirteen thousand there on certain days there were thirteen thousand children in the streets of warsaw dying like this others were beggars this is a these are the german soldiers going through this is heinrich ios so this is a drug store but you most people couldn't buy drugs stores that were full of people dying outside them and begging again look at this photograph of to a beggar and also a man in a suit there was that kind of divergence class divergence also within the ghetto janu score shock the body of a dead boy lies on the sidewalk nearby three nearby three boys are playing horses and drivers they notice the body move a few steps to decide to go on planes whole families would be on the street emanuel people were dying in the street when a woman was asked why she went out on the street with their children she replied that she would rather die in the street than at home the german soldier who went in for one day the woman died in front of me people were standing around no one helped her because no one was able to help this is the marketplace everything was for sale anything that you had in your house was a commodity for sale books medicine clothes shoes whatever furniture would to keep keep yourself warm everything was received with then the question is what happens when you don't have anything else left to sell heinrich ios the german soldier it looked like a flirtation the begging children in the background provided a contrast there was prostitution there was weddings there was love and on love families would explode apart men would go off with other women it was just like other lives like like we are only everything was much more extreme this is yawn it's course shock the look of this district is changing from day to day he wrote this like four days before he died a prison a plague stricken area a mating ground a lunatic asylum a casino monaco the stake your head smuggling in the warsaw ghetto particularly when the americans leave becomes a full time op operation the head of the union rot adam share share and yaakov would say as much as eighty five percent of the food coming in the ghetto came in through smuggling some of the smugglers were conan heller's in these kind of things they would smuggle they would not only carry people there they were becoming multi millionaires equivalent in the ghetto because they were the only ones with transportation but they would also use these things for smuggling and every one almost smuggled the lies of the smugglers are filled with danger not a day passed and one of them was not cut down by machine gun fire but the smuggling did not stop it happened through the sewers it happened through the walls it happened in the coffins it happened in the cemeter it was going on all the time and here is them going over the wall they also went through the wall they went under the wall and it was smuggling between them and the polish community on the other side they would smuggle back and forth emmanuel  three things are invincible the german army the british isles and jewish smuggling one of the biggest smugglers a multimillionaire kind of a gangster was a adam grant as you bike not sure if i'm pronouncing that correctly and they called him the head of the thirteen he was actually appointed to be the head of grafton and bribery and and corruption within the union rights but he becomes the biggest one ok and the thirteen was a location it was thirteen legs no street and he would have five hundred people working for him however say something more about that as they move forward children were particularly oftentimes the most active smugglers whole gangs of little children are organized made up of boys and girls from five to ten years of age and here some of them being caught as smugglers now you had some german soldiers when they saw kids smuggling they would kind of look the other way because they also had choices you had other german soldiers who waited for them to stick their head through the wall on the edge they would assassinate him you had both sides both types of german soldiers it all depended on who was sitting on the other side of the wall and they get put in prison some go to the other side and they hide out the rest of the rest of the war selling cigarettes cigarettes were of high everyone wanted cigarettes in the ghetto ok and it we comes a real big source of smuggling because people were really anxious and up tight and you know they would sell cigarettes for almost anything and these are three that survive but the vast majority were also dying and this is joseph heidegger one of those german photographers this is my guilt and those are his three photographs and this is his photograph this is my guilt i stood there and took photographs instead of doing something to ask what i should have done then is a coward question something kill one of my guards with my band that lift my rifle against an officer dessert and go over to the other side refuse service sabotage refuse to obey orders give my life today i feel there is no excuse this is the face that was part of the flyer and this is haim kaplan a missed the general hoar the tragedy of the individual is is neutralized and ignored sometimes from among tens of thousands of the ravaged your eyes are drawn to a face which haunts you does not leave you alone follows you like a shadow and this is one of those faces that haunted me and here are others that haunted me and also haunted the german photographers as they were watching through taking photographs a day at a time at the most three days at a time this person isn't it's an interesting photograph her it's taken by heinrich yost the sergeant who went in september for his birthday september one thousand nine hundred one these photos he kept in his room until almost that he was he was about ready to die in the late late seventy's or early eighty's and he realized that he should do something with these photographs is unclear why you hid them i just don't know he wanted to give them to stern magazine in germany and they refused them because they said they're too controversial so he gave them to yad vashem the holocaust museum in jerusalem they had a show and they put the photographs up as part of a photo show within the holocaust museum and a person who saw this photograph was this woman's son and his name this is her name posh nick his name was aaron potts nick and when he saw this photograph he wept  he said i think this german soldier this is the last time i will ever have ever seen my mother he had left earlier before the war and went to palestine and now every year he brings all of his relatives and they light candles on her birthday and on other days to remember his mother and so all these faces you're seen the faces that haunt us the faces that we don't see they all had names and families just like  also have children and grandparents and aunts and uncles and sometimes when we when we think of numbers like seven six million and and plus we forget that each was an individual from the beginning of the war september one nine hundred thirty nine to hundred two close to one hundred thousand jews die from starvation disease and murder initially if you could afford it you had a coffin this is a jewish cemetery and also by the way smuggling was taking place one of the one of the most one of the most prominent places for smuggling was this jewish cemetery because it was next to the catholic cemetery and they would actually tunnel and they would actually there would be a lot of smuggling that takes place but some some could afford coffins but as time went on you couldn't afford coffins and the time got on it was people dying in the streets and mentally mass graves and if you go to the jewish community  a grassy area right next to it and they said we can't identify who these people were we don't know who died here because it's just a mass grave and this is look at this this is probably a german soldier probably watching out for smuggling at the same time heinrich yost went there and took photographs and he would say later when i looked at these pictures i asked myself how could i photograph something like that when the three horsemen of the apocalypse summoned by the invader pest and so there we have the next stage and this is the stage of deportation this is called the plots and the first series was from july twenty first to september twenty first one thousand nine hundred two about three thousand three hundred thousand jews would be murdered in that six week period six to eight week period before that even before they began they started assassinating the smugglers the self help workers and also anyone that they thought was part of the jewish underground because they were trying to get rid of all those people who had contacts outside but at this point in one nine hundred forty two and this is what it looks like today that place and if you if to my i guess to your to your left there's a little plaque maybe as big as this biggest side of this room and that's the you plots but that's where it is at the time and you see it right here this is the building and that's where the wall was with my own hands the children of my people there is nothing left for me to do except to die my act will reveal the truth to others and maybe will lead to a proper course of action many people thought this was create just act and kaplan  the jewish underground thought it was an act of cowardice they said in stead of killing yourself why didn't you work with the community so we could resist so even his action was controversial the deportations this is the ghetto again small ghetto large ghetto here's the plots up here here's the jewish cemetery just to give you a context it started out with prisoners beggars children disabled the second the elderly this is a common theme  all the ghettos the germans warsaw was one of they had they had already eliminated other ghettos places like luke lynn and others so they kind of learn from that and but they realize where saul was big  refugees they were vulnerable whole groups of refugee centers would be sent out sometimes work permits would save you but as time went on they weren't usually accepted sometimes people stopped coming on their own so they would offer them bread and jam and if you're starving bread and jam looks pretty good initially probably people didn't know where they were going and finally the jewish organization is giving quotas two thousand jewish police officers approximately bring in five a day because ten thousand and that's when some jewish police would commit suicide others would bring in people because if they didn't they said their families would be killed and believe it or not one of the last trains most of the jewish police are sent out so the nazis actually lied to them this is what it looks like this is how they would get they would go block by block by block and this is usually the elderly they may get shot earlier or those who are disabled and you see the jewish police you see the german soldiers there this is y zuckerman one of the fighting one of the jewish underground what do i think is our great guilt my guilt since most of my companions are dead our guilt was that not immediately from the first day we didn't begin our harsh war against the jewish  more images it kind of shows you the chaos another known jewish poet angels and spirit smashed the commandments darkness all around is god anywhere in chaos and confusion of people goes under the destroy the highest commandments and where is god many lost their faith others held to their faith it all depended if you resisted this is what happened to you and this is from the diary of abraham leaven school teacher july twenty sixth twenty eighth  also a member of all negs shabat a lovely morning the sky is wonderfully beautiful the sun is shining the a k c is blooming and the slaughter is slaughter and sometimes i am calm about my life and sometimes a little indifferent but suddenly i universal blackness my luba was taken away during a blockade on thirty geese history and he's writing this and he's writing it to us because he knows he may not live but he wants a record he and his child would later be deported in january of one thousand nine hundred three and they would die in troubling tough yonex course shock the doctor the pediatrician this is what he looked like his last photograph he's caring for two hundred children he would write the diary the last two months the day up to his death at night he would tear care of children all day preparing them for death at a certain point writing a play for them so that they could they could be as common as peaceful as they could possibly be and this was his his last entry august fourth one thousand nine hundred two i am watering the flowers my bald head in the window what a splendid target he the german soldier has a rifle why is he standing and looking on calmly he has no orders to shoot perhaps he was a village teacher in civilian life or a notary a street sweeper in leipsic or a waiter in cologne what would he do if i nodded to him wave my hand in a friendly gesture perhaps he doesn't even know that things are as they are he may have arrived only yesterday from far away he would walk out with two hundred children they had banners he would have a child in his arms stiff we would have a child in their arms and they would march through the streets and when they got to the trains they would saying they were singing even the german soldier said who is this man and these would all be the other staff members that would go with them many of them had the opportunity to leave the ghetto go into hiding and if you go to the warsaw jewish cemetery today you see on its course shock with his children later after the war unesco poland israel and others would create stamps for him but this is where they went they went to the plots they would put anywhere between sixty to one hundred in these trains it was very hot and they would travel approximately sixty miles to a place called treblinka it wasn't just happening in  warsaw it was happening in every village in every town in every city across eastern europe and this is what it looked like and this is what it looked like when they went there and this is what it looks like today and this is the train going to treblinka and what happened is as you went in right here they would stop you would be pushed out of the train with whips and bats and other things and men and women would be separated you would be stripped and you would be pushed into this tunnel which the germans called going to have them and within thirty minutes you would be dead and they would do train at a time would take about two hours and trains were piled up for miles back and the first commandant of troop blinko would be relieved from duty because they thought he was too messy because he crematories could not keep up with the the mass of bodies so they discharged him and put someone else in place if you go to treblinka today the seventeen thousand stones representing all the stuff all the villages jewish villages that were massacred by the germans and there's only the name of one person yon it's course shock his real name was henry goldsmith and the children this is what warsaw look like when you returned is about fifty thousand people there are others in hiding and they become work crews and they basically become concentration camps geared around the factories and you have a accounts where you know you come home and there's nobody left but you one of the people went in hiding was a young doctor name agar and she her first job was to work in the children's hospital her next job is when jews are going in for deportation her choice was to either give the elderly and the sick  that would kill them and injection or let the germans massacre and beat them to death so she gave them that and later when she went into hiding she was she looked kind of polish and she becomes a courier between the polish and the jewish underground and she would deliver food medical supplies and information to jews in heidi one time she went there there was about ten people in hiding and there was a person in psychosis who began to scre and they couldn't keep the person quiet and she said my only choice was to kill because he he actually threatened everyone else's life and she said that death has haunted me but the however before he went he wrote a poem and it was called song of the murdered jewish nation and in some sense it represents what was happening how they felt saying saying raise your term meant it in broken voice how can i sing how can i lift my head scream from every sand dune from under every stone scream from the dust and fire and smoke it is your blood your sap the marrow of your bones it is your flesh and blood scream scream scream aloud scream oh murder jewish people screen screen scream aloud some said we're not just going to scream we're going to shoot and these are the young people the jewish fighting organization forms right when these do or deportations take place they were forming separately they were often at odds with one another is the right to not always agree with the left the communist and not always agree with the blue and the buddha not always agree with the orthodox and but they finally begin to form together and there's actually two get to get all revolts one in early january eighteen eighteen and january twenty second one nine hundred forty three when they first began to fight back and then later at the time of passover in april for about a month to may one thousand nine hundred three this is the commander age twenty three years old he commits mass suicide because there's no escape and everyone in that bunker kids commits mass suicide this is in resistance and these are also some other two other survivors many women joined there was about seven hundred to a thousand people all young think the oldest was about thirty three years of age they didn't have many weapons they were helped a bit by righteous poles called gota a bar to chef ski is one of the righteous he was part of the jewish underground irene a dom of its was a courier that actually was going through all of eastern europe sending information and yon carsick who actually visited the ghetto and he also wrote to both of franklin delano roosevelt winston churchill and others the whole notion of what was happening to the jews in the ghetto the jewish fighting organization this was their mandate deportation means annihilation eleventh commandment thou shalt not despair better to die with dignity than shee going to the slaughter we will not give up a single jewish life we will fight to the death terrorist actions against the jewish police and the jewish camino authorities they assassinate the attempted assassination a woman who goes in police jewish police office in tries to assassinate the head of the jewish police she wound him he never become but be alternately dies a few months later the second one in command they also assassinate him there's an active struggle against factory managers the most difficult thing was getting weapons they also this is a good stop a collaborator they assassinate him here's some jewish collaborators with nazi soldiers not all jews were saints not all jews were good there were also those who were who were fighting for the life and they would rather collaborate because maybe that could help them these are a lot feehan early ukrainian soldiers they were also brought in this is the jewish fighting organization every threshold in the ghetto has been and will remain a fortress this is a struggle for a common freedom for common human and social dignity and honor and this is what it looked like when they were fighting they were fighting for every doorway every building and they held the german army have bay for about a month and they didn't have many weapons they had a lot of molotov cocktails one machine gun a time your choice was either to die by fire to jump out and this was the head of the german army your going stroup he's looking at a woman there's a story of a jew of jewish mother with her child and she says to him i do not beg you for mercy because i know that i will not receive mercy from your hand but remember that for what you are doing today you are not excused punishment she jumped with their child she wasn't a dead she is he  they shot he had he ordered german soldier to shooter entered child but a few years later he would be hung as a war criminal so in some sense she was prophetic these are poles looking on the ghetto berni it's a very complicated topic some poles were bystanders there was also a poet their name see slow meatloaf's the nobel prize winning poet and he would write someone else will read of the passing of things human of the oblivion born before the flames have died but that day i thought only of the long leanness of the dying those dying here the lonely forgotten by the world our tongue becomes for them the language of an ancient planet excuse to the sewers very few but some did yet saga zuckerman would say those who helped we're amazing people he says to cause the death of one hundred jews all you need it was one polish to announce to save one jew sometimes it took ten decent poles some went into hiding and many of those who were captured would be deported to auschwitz and other places now this is one of the most famous photographs of the warsaw ghetto and one of these soldiers was though was the one who assassinated little kids coming through the walls his name was frankenstein this photograph was seen in eastern germany in one nine hundred sixty he would be tried and executed as a war criminal and this is them going and heinrich himmler would finally destroy the last thing they strode was the synagogue right there and he would write to adolf hitler this is the end of all the jews  these are the population statistics less than one survey person survival rate and you see the numbers they fluctuate at the end in the rubble there's only three hundred but there's others that survive other places the last the first event to commemorate it was a sewer in one thousand nine hundred six and here are some of the survivals to commemorate it emmanuel ringle blonds last letter he went into hiding with his family hundred four the watchword of the word of the organized groups of the jewish community was to live with honor and to die with honor he himself would be betrayed by a collaborator he and his family would be tortured to death his his wife and his and his child in front of him and they wanted them to him to tell them where his archives were hidden he probably didn't even know they would all be executed and they would be discovered in these cans after the war and it would create a journal one of my major resources and this was a nineteen year old boy who hid one of these cans and at the top of the candy put his last will and testament what we were able to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground i would love to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth that the world may the treasure fall into good hands may at last into better times made alarm and alert the world to what happened we may now die in peace it's important that we recognize that they want their faces seen the direst want their words heard and they want to teach every person and every generation the lessons of the holocaust and we mean we will never know who these people are but there was a poet and this is what i'm ending on its supposed name was a vod slush l'engle he died in that he was writing a poem to those who were resisting the jewish underground literally as they were being killed he's writing a poem but this is a famous poem of his called from the monument it's much longer than this i did some excerpts to heroes point rhapsodies to heroes the descendants will pay homage to valiant soldiers medals to soldiers deaths across but who will tell you the future generations but that they took her killed her and that she is no longer was she good not even so she often quarreled after all slammed the door reprimanded but she was pretty she was never pretty even before her hair silvered wise well quite ordinary not stupid but she was and this is the commemoration of the jewish ghetto revote in warsaw this was on its anniversary several years ago we who do not perish leave it to you to keep their memory alive forever dr marie cattlemen one of the survivors of the jewish underground revolt thank you