UNWILLING ACCOMPLICE

In 1939, even before Germany had completed its conquest of Poland, the Nazis began herding most of the country’s 3.3 million Jews into marked-off urban ghettos. The German occupational authorities created Judenräte (Jewish councils) made up of Jewish community leaders who, in many cases, were involuntarily appointed. Their function was defined by Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s deputy and one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, who decreed that the Judenräte were to “bear the full responsibility for executing exactly and according to a time schedule, every order given at present or in the future.” What those orders would be, and the catastrophe that was about to befall Poland’s Jews, was left unstated.

In Warsaw the German occupational authorities appointed Adam Czerniaków, a prominent engineer and senator, to head the 24-member Judenrat there. “I now find myself in a post which I did not assume on my own initiative and of which I cannot divest myself,” Czerniaków wrote in his diary. “I am not independent and I do only what is possible.”