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The Warsaw Ghetto, isolated from the world in November 1940, quickly became a gigantic, enclosed engine of extermination. The German plan was simple: if bullets did not kill, hunger would. Official food rations for the Jewish population amounted to a mere 180–200 calories per day.
The effects of this policy were horrifying. In 1941 and the first half of 1942 alone, more than 100,000 people died of starvation and typhus within the sealed district. Anyone who has watched the harrowing documentary films from that era carries the exact same image under their eyelids—the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street. The bodies of the deceased, resembling human skeletons covered in skin, were laid on special ramps and chutes made of rough wooden planks, from which they were dumped anonymously and en masse directly into massive communal graves. In such conditions, the fight for even one extra bowl of soup was a battle to avoid becoming just another nameless skeleton on the cemetery chute.
To fully grasp the magnitude of this tragedy and to understand that these were not ordinary "difficult wartime conditions," but a death zone artificially engineered by the German apparatus, one need only look at the hard demographic data from the first four months of 1942.
The comparison below contrasts the average monthly mortality rate in the ghetto with the situation on the so-called "Aryan side" of Warsaw, in London during the Luftwaffe air raids, and in neutral Stockholm:
Comparison of Monthly Mortality (January – April 1942)
| City / Area in 1942 | Approximate Population | Average Number of Deaths Within a Single Month | Percentage of Population Dying Each Month |
|---|---|---|---|
| 馃敶 Warsaw Ghetto | approx. 300,000 | approx. 4,780 deaths | approx. 1.60% of the entire ghetto population |
| ⚪ Warsaw (Aryan side) | approx. 900,000 | approx. 1,000 deaths | approx. 0.11% of the entire population |
| 馃嚞馃嚙 London (during the Blitz) | approx. 7,000,000 | approx. 7,800 deaths | approx. 0.11% of the entire population |
| 馃嚫馃嚜 Stockholm (neutral) | approx. 620,000 | approx. 580 deaths | approx. 0.09% of the entire population |
These figures expose a staggering truth. In the Warsaw Ghetto, a higher percentage of people died in a single month (1.71% in the record-breaking January of 1942) than in Stockholm over nearly a year and a half, and the probability of dying was nearly 15 times higher than on the other side of the wall or in the bombarded capital of the British Empire. While in London the war brought death from the sky, the structure of the state and food supplies protected life. In the ghetto, hunger killed silently.
In this living hell, work was not a matter of career. Work was the only opportunity to secure an extra morsel of food, and food meant surviving another day. My father, Pan Misza (Wasserman Wr贸blewski), took up the gauntlet thrown by fate. In order to survive and help others, he had to take on four completely different roles within the ghetto walls, for which Janusz Korczak's Orphans' Home served as the sole base, shelter, and anchor. Here is the story of his struggle.
- Educator at the Orphans' Home: The Fight for the Child's Dignity
The first job, and the closest to Pan Misza's heart, was serving as an educator in the unique children's republic run by Janusz Korczak. First before the war on Krochmalna Street, and after the forced relocation of the Orphans' Home into the ghetto—in the building at Sienna 16 / 艢liska 9.
An educator in the ghetto had to be more than a teacher—he had to simultaneously act as a shield protecting the children's psyche from the surrounding horror. Alongside the Old Doctor, Pan Misza taught, organized the student self-government, wrote chronicles, and, when no one was looking, wiped away tears. Yet, the supply situation of the institution grew more catastrophic by the week. The number of children exceeded two hundred, and supplies were dwindling rapidly.
It was then that Janusz Korczak took on the role he himself described, with painful irony, as a beggar (ja艂mu偶nik). Ill, profoundly exhausted, his legs swollen from starvation, the Old Doctor went out into the city every day. He walked from door to door—to wealthy landlords, smugglers, speculators, and Judenrat officials—literally begging, pleading, and arguing for every single zloty, for a few grams of groats, for cod liver oil, for rusks to feed his children. When food ran out, the staff had to seek other avenues of rescue beyond the institution's walls.
- Rickshaw Driver: "Leszno-Solna – rickshaw free!"
When an educator's salary could no longer secure czarny rynek (black market) food, Pan Misza had to eke out an additional income on the cobblestones of the ghetto—he became a rickshaw driver. The streetcars in the ghetto (the famous lines marked with the Star of David) were overcrowded, and almost all horses had eventually been eaten. Bicycle rickshaws became the primary mode of transportation for those who needed to move around.
The red rickshaw he operated had its own family history—it belonged to his aunt Krystyna, who worked as a waitress in the very same building that housed the Orphans' Home. Pedal-pushing with all his might along the broken pavement, my father would call out loudly at the intersections: "Leszno-Solna – ryksza wolna!" ("Leszno-Solna – rickshaw free!").
Everything indicates that Pan Misza used this very rickshaw to transport Janusz Korczak himself when the Doctor, acting as the aforementioned beggar, had to cover miles to collect funds and salvage provisions. The rickshaw work brought my father a few pennies, which were immediately exchanged for bread on the free market and brought back to the base on Sienna Street.
- The Smuggler "on the Phone" and the Rescue of Memory
The third facet of Pan Misza's life was the most perilous—he entered the world of smuggling, which was the sole reason the ghetto did not starve to death within three months. My father worked in a system known as "smuggling on the phone."
The key to success was a corrupt arrangement. Whenever a "friendly" (meaning paid-off) Blue Police (Policja Granatowa) officer and Jewish police officer were on duty at the ghetto entrance gate, Pan Misza would send a telephone signal to the other side of the wall—the Aryan side. The contact with the Blue Police was made possible by my grandfather Gabriel; his old school classmate was directly responsible for the police units guarding the ghetto boundaries. Following my father's phone call, sacks of flour, groats, or meat were swiftly hurled over the wall or slipped through the gate.
This group of smugglers with whom Pan Misza was connected likely played another historic role. It was almost certainly these brave individuals, possessing contacts at the gates and knowing every hidden corner of the wall and other passageways, who managed to smuggle Janusz Korczak’s priceless documents (including his Ghetto Diary) out of the Large Ghetto. Pan Misza rescued these papers from the Small Ghetto, secured them, and hid them shortly after the tragic August deportation of the Doctor and the children to Treblinka.
- Construction Worker: A Passport to Life
The fourth and final job held by Pan Misza was a direct gift from Janusz Korczak, who until the very end attempted to save his young, talented educational staff. Prior to the Great Deportation Action (Wielka Akcja), the Doctor utilized his connections to secure work for Pan Misza and three former wards of the Orphans' Home in a labor commando that marched out of the Ghetto daily.
My father began working as a construction worker on the Aryan side. Passing beyond the walls under German escort was a privilege—it meant and provided the opportunity to bring food back from the outside.
This was Pan Misza's final job in the ghetto. One day, taking advantage of the commotion and the guards' lapses in attention, Pan Misza made a definitive choice. He did not return behind the walls from the construction site. He slipped away from the column, tore off his Star of David armband, and remained on the Aryan side to continue the fight against the occupier under a new name and to save the memory of the Doctor, the educators, and the children of the Orphans' Home.
The medical and existential hell of Warsaw in 1941 and 1942 revealed the full spectrum of the phenomenon of survival. As Pan Misza himself summarized years later in his memoirs: "And yet life itself showed that Korczak was not a 'program of resignation'." It was a program of active, desperate warfare for the human being, in which every single job my father performed—backed by the safe haven of Korczak's home—became another day won against death.
