Diary Of Adam Czerniakow

I just finished reading: "The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow." I have read countless diaries from both Jews and Christians about their experiences during World War 2, but this is something unusual as it is from the head of the Judenrat (the German created Jewish Council) of the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe: Warsaw - where around 400,000 people were put in an area of 1.3 square miles. Most of the diary (which are actually several notebooks with one notebook missing) is about dealing with the different German and Polish agencies who were in charge of different aspects of the Warsaw Ghetto - the Jewish District of Warsaw as the Germans officially called it. Those aspects are pretty mundane and some just plain confusing to follow, but the rest of the work is very interesting. The diary starts right with the German invasion and bombing of Warsaw and the first years of the war when the Jews continued to live throughout the city. It tells how the Germans restricted Jews from certain streets and buildings, how they were forced to wear the Star of David armband, how both the Germans and the Poles could do anything they wanted and take anything they wanted to without fear of punishment. The diary goes on to describe the confusion of the creation of the Ghetto (ie which streets will be in it and when it will be closed.) Once the Ghetto was created and closed in Oct/Nov. 1940 the diary focuses on the daily management (ie the food rations, housing problems, epidemics, constant violence from the Germans, compulsory labor crews being needed and the constant flow of Jews from the rest of Poland and other Nazi-occupied territories to the Ghetto.) Czerniakow writes in a very straight-forward way by mostly stating the facts. Maybe he did that in case the Germans ever found his diary or maybe that was just how he wrote - I don't know. He regularly writes about the amount of food rations the people got, how the children fared and how many people were killed or died. The diary ends in July 1942 when Czerniakow learned the Germans were about to deport every man, woman and child from the Ghetto to the Treblinka Death Camp. He killed himself rather than follow the murderous orders of the Germans (like the Judenrat head of the Lodz Ghetto did.) Czerniakow has a difficult place in history with some seeing him as a collaborator who helped the Germans contain and kill the Jews of Warsaw while others see him as a man who was put in a difficult position by the Germans and did everything he could to lessen the misery and deaths of people in the Ghetto. One thing is clear - in the end he knew what the Germans had in store for the hundreds of thousands of Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants and killed himself rather than overtly help the Germans kill his own people. I think it would have meant more for him to have warned the Ghetto that they were going to the gas chambers and then killed himself. While I don't believe he could have stopped the deportations or the murders he could have at least warned people so they could have made up their minds of whether to go to their deaths like sheep or stand up to the Germans with a lot more people and earlier than they did during the eventual Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 after hundreds of thousands of people from Warsaw had already been gassed. In the end, his diary gives a sampling of what he and millions of others faced at the hands of the Germans.