On July 20th the arrests began. Almost all doctors of the "Czyste" Hospital were locked up in the Pawiak Prison, as were part of the Jewish Mutual Aid Committee's managing personnel and several Community councilmen (among others, J. Jaszunski). That the ghetto would shortly be liquidated was obvious.
On July 22nd, 1942, at 10 a.m., German cars halted at the Jewish Council buildings. The "Umsiedlungsstab" members entered the house. At a short meeting the Judenrat members were told the Germans' desire. It was really a simple matter: all "unproductive" Jews were to be deported somewhere to the East.
The Germans departed and another secret meeting took place. Not a single councilman stopped to consider the basic question--whether the Jewish Council should undertake to carry out the order at all. The Secretary of the Jewish Council addressed the meeting: "Gentlemen, before you pass to the technical means of executing the order, stop and think--should it be done?" But his advice was not heeded. There was no debate on the implications of the order, only on matters of procedure for its execution.
The following morning large white posters signed by the Judenrat (the text of the proclamation was dictated by Oberscharfuhrer Hoefle) made it clear to the Jewish population that all, with the exception of those working for Germans (here followed a carefully prepared list of all working places which the order did not concern), employees of the Jewish Council and the ZSS (Jewish Mutual Aid), would have to leave Warsaw. The Jewish police was designated as the agency to execute the deportation order, and its Command was to keep in touch with the "Umsiedlungsstab". Thus the Germans made the Jewish Council itself condemn over 300,000 ghetto inhabitants to death.
On the first day of the deportation period 2,000 prisoners of the Central Jail were sent out together with a few hundred beggars and starvelings who had been caught in the streets.
In the afternoon a meeting of our "instructors' five" took place. We decided that in view of the complete lack of weapons and, therefore, the impossibility of offering resistance, our activities should be directed at saving from deportation as many people as possible. We thought that contacts maintained by certain welfare organizations with people within the Jewish police--the agency in charge of the deportation procedure--would prove helpful. However, even before the end of the meeting and before the final details had been worked out, we learned that the Germans and Ukrainians themselves had surrounded the Muranowska Street--Niska Street block, that they were attending to the "technical details" themselves, and that they had already taken from these buildings over 2,000 people, the number lacking to fill the daily quota. (This quota was, in the first days of the deportation, 6,000 people per day). According to this report, the Germans took everybody without discrimination. Even those in possession of certificates from German places of employment had to come along (L. Rozensztajn perished in this manner). In view of the new developments our plans seemed quite unrealistic.
On the second day, July 23rd, a meeting of the so-called Workers' Committee took place. All political parties were represented on the Committee. Our group, supported only by the Hechalutz and Hashomer organization, called for active resistance. But public opinion was against us. The majority still thought such action provocative and maintained that if the required contingent of Jews could be delivered, the remainder of the ghetto would be left in peace. The instinct for self-preservation finally drove the people into a state of mind permitting them to disregard the safety of others in order to save their own necks. True, nobody as yet believed that the deportation meant death. But the Germans had already succeeded in dividing the Jewish population into two distinct groups--those already condemned to die and those who still hoped to remain alive. Afterwards, step by step, the Germans will succeed in pitting these two groups against one another and cause some Jews to lead others to certain death in order to save their own skin.
During the first days of the "actions", the Party Council sat in continuous session (Orzech, Abrasha Blum, Berek Sznajdmil, Sonia Nowogrodzka, Bernard Goldsztejn, Klog, Paw, Grylak, Mermelsztajn, Kersz, Wojland, Russ, Marek Edelman, and a comrade from the Polish Socialists). We were awaiting the arrival of weapons at any hour then. Our youth groups were all ready. For three days until the time when all hopes to obtain the promised weapons had to be given up, a state of "acute emergency" for our mobilized groups prevailed. All our other members were also mobilized and concentrated at several designated spots awaiting orders. Such was the feeling of excitement and apprehension that several street fights with members of the Jewish police who were taking part in the "action" took place.
On the second day of the "deportations" the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, committed suicide. He knew beyond any doubt that the supposed "deportation to the East" actually meant the death of hundreds and thousands of people in gas chambers, and he refused to assume responsibility for it. Being unable to counteract events he decided to quit altogether. At the time, however, we thought that he had no right to act as he did. We thought that since he was the only person in the ghetto whose voice carried a great deal of authority, it had been his duty to inform the entire population of the real state of affairs, and also to dissolve all public institutions, particularly the Jewish police, which had been established by the Jewish Council and was legally subordinate to it.
The same day the first issue of our paper On Guard, in which we warned the population not to volunteer for deportation, and called for resistance, appeared. "Utterly helpless as we are," Comrade Orzech wrote in the editorial, "we must not let ourselves be caught. Fight against it with all means at your disposal!" This issue, published in three times the usual number of copies, was circulated throughout the ghetto during the fourth and fifth days of the deportation action.
So that we might learn conclusively and in detail about the fate of the human transports leaving the ghetto, Zalmen Frydrych (Zygmunt) was ordered to follow one of the transports to the "Aryan side". His journey "to the East", however, was a short one, for it took only three days. Immediately after leaving the ghetto walls he established contact with an employee of the Warsaw Danzig [Gdanski] Terminal working on the Warsaw--Malkinia line. They travelled together in the transport's wake to Sokolow where, Zygmunt was told by local railroad men, the tracks forked out, one branch leading to Treblinka. It proved that every day a freight train carrying people from Warsaw travelled in that direction and invariably returned empty. No transports of food were ever seen on this line. Civilians were forbidden to approach the Treblinka railroad station.
This in itself was conclusive proof that the people brought to Treblinka were being exterminated somewhere in the vicinity. In addition, Zygmunt met two fugitives from the death camp the following morning. They were two Jews, completely stripped of their clothes, and Zygmunt met them on the Sokolow market place and obtained the full details of the horrible procedure. Thus it was not any longer a question of rumours, but of facts established by eyewitness accounts (one of the fugitives was our comrade Wallach).