Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service During the Nazi Occupation by Katarzyna Person

Author:Katarzyna Person [Person, Katarzyna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Military, World War II, History, Poland, Europe, Jewish
ISBN: 9781501754098
Google: bN3gDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell
Published: 2021-04-15T13:55:33+00:00

Aside from those employed in the offices, the daily duties of all other functionaries of the Jewish Order Service from that time consisted only of assisting in the deportations. On the first day of the operation, July 22, the policemen were to bring two thousand people directly to the Umschlagplatz before four in the afternoon; according to the deportation order, “a contingent could be drawn from the general population.”8 As the first to be displaced, the Directorate of the Jewish Order Service designated the residents of a “refugee town” located at the Umschlagplatz, at 3, 9, and 12 Dzika Street, which housed twelve hundred people. The complex included a children’s shelter for two hundred children and one for sixty girls and boys aged fourteen to eighteen. According to a witness, this operation began at one o’clock in the afternoon under the command of group leader Seweryn Spotkowski,9 a lawyer from Warsaw and former head of the Jewish Order Service teaching staff, who not long before had taken over the management of the Gmina Precinct. Spotkowski already had experience in such operations; in April 1941, he had commanded the blockade of buildings during roundups to labor camps. A witness the roundup of July 22, 1942, wrote:

No one from the house was released. In addition, the double cordon of the [Jewish] Order Service led from 3 Dzika to the Umschlagplatz. The people from the building had only one option: straight into the wagons. The [Jewish] Order Service urged and hurried them. People did not put up any resistance. They were often deportees [from other localities]; they agreed to be deported again. But the children and young people in the shelter reacted differently, especially young people who, after much torment and many misadventures, had received a few days before, a clean bed, new clothing, were in extreme despair. The shelter managers made every effort to get Spotkowski to release them and leave them in peace. Spotkowski agreed to displace these institutions only at the very end, but he would not agree to a full release. . . . Of the fifteen hundred residents, about fifteen remained on the site—several people because they hid, and a few because they showed their papers proving that they worked in the factory workshops.10

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