During the next year and a half, thousands of
Polish Jews as well as some
Romani people from smaller cities and the countryside were brought into the Ghetto, while diseases (especially
typhus),
[13] and starvation kept the inhabitants at about the same number. Average food rations in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw were limited to 184 calories, compared to 699 calories for
gentile Poles and 2,613 calories for Germans.
[14]
Unemployment was a major problem in the ghetto. Illegal workshops were created to manufacture goods to be sold illegally on the outside and raw goods were smuggled in, often by children. Hundreds of four- to eight-year-old Jewish children went across en masse to the "
Aryan side," sometimes several times a day, smuggling food into the ghettos, returning with goods that often weighed more than they did. Smuggling was often the only source of subsistence for Ghetto inhabitants, who would otherwise have died of starvation.
Despite the grave hardships, life in the Warsaw Ghetto was rich with educational and cultural activities, conducted by its underground organizations. Hospitals, public soup kitchens, orphanages, refugee centers and recreation facilities were formed, as well as a school system. Some schools were illegal and operated under the guise of a soup kitchen. There were secret libraries, classes for the children and even a symphony orchestra. Rabbi
Alexander Zusia Friedman, secretary-general of
Agudath Israel of Poland, was one of the Torah leaders in the Warsaw Ghetto. He organized an underground network of religious schools, including "a Yesodei HaTorah school for boys, a
Bais Yaakov school for girls, a school for elementary Jewish instruction, and three institutions for advanced Jewish studies". These schools, operating under the guise of kindergartens, medical centers and soup kitchens, were a place of refuge for thousands of children and teens, and hundreds of teachers. In 1941, when the Germans gave official permission to the local
Judenrat to open schools, these schools came out of hiding and began receiving financial support from the official Jewish community.
[15]
Over 100,000 of the Ghetto's residents died due to rampant disease or starvation, as well as random killings, even before the Nazis began massive deportations of the inhabitants from the Ghetto's
Umschlagplatz to the
Treblinka extermination camp during the
Grossaktion Warschau, part of the countrywide
Operation Reinhard. Between
Tisha B'Av (July 23) and
Yom Kippur (September 21) of 1942, about 254,000 Ghetto residents (or at least 300,000 by different accounts)
[7] were sent to Treblinka and murdered there.
[16]
Friedman alerted world Jewry to the start of deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto in a coded message. His telegram read: "Mr. Amos kept his promise from the fifth-third." He was referring to the
Book of Amos, chapter 5, verse 3, which reads: "The city that goes out a thousand strong will have a hundred left, and the one that goes out a hundred strong will have ten left to the House of Israel".
[17]
Polish resistance officer
Jan Karski reported to the Western governments in 1942 on the situation in the Ghetto and on the extermination camps. By the end of 1942, it was clear that the deportations were to their deaths, and many of the remaining Jews decided to fight.
[7]
For years, Ghetto residents in the group
Oyneg Shabbos had discreetly
chronicled conditions and hid their photos, writings, and short films in improvised
time capsules; their activity increased after learning that transports to "resettlement" actually led to the mass killings. In May 1942, Germans began filming a propaganda movie titled "
Das Ghetto" which was never completed. Footage is shown in the 2010 documentary calledrrounded y "
A Film Unfinished" which concerns the making of "
Das Ghetto" and correlates scenes from 'Das Ghetto' with descriptions of the filming of these scenes that Czerniakow mentions in his diary.
100,00 Jew died of starvation because of disease and hunger. Thousands were deported to extermination camps. They were surrounded by Nazi soldiers who would regularly walk up to Jews and torture,kill them.
