“I was born in Warsaw on August 2nd, 1939. The Germans arrived on September 1st.”
Those are the words of Richard “Rysio” Rogulski, a Franco-Polish Holocaust survivor who lived in the Warsaw Ghetto from 1940 to 1941. Today, he resides just outside of Paris as a husband, father, and grandfather, but he has not forgotten the years of trauma that he and his family endured in Poland during World War Ⅱ.
Between 1939, when the first ghetto was established in Piotrków Trybunalski, and 1944, when the last ghetto was destroyed in Łódź, Jews across Europe experienced the atrocities of the Holocaust. In the span of five years, German Nazis forced millions of Jews into over 1,143 ghettos in Eastern Europe. They seized men, women, children, elderly – whoever had even the slightest amount of Jewish blood in their body.
There was a certain fate to accept when brought to a ghetto: days, weeks, or even months of starvation, disease, and cold. While not everyone who was brought to a ghetto ultimately died – if this was true, the population of Jews in the world today would be much, much fewer – a majority ended up in death camps where they were murdered by German troops. Though the severity of the living conditions in these spaces varied, this does not undermine the genocidal nature of ghettoization.
Concentration camps and ghettos were fundamentally different, and they should not be confused. Concentration camps typically involved the isolation of large numbers of people in small areas with limited facilities for the purpose of forced labor or mass extermination. Both labor camps and killing camps were used during the Holocaust, the latter becoming more common in the final years of the genocide. It is a common misconception that concentration camps were “invented” by the Nazis, but this is not the case. Concentration camps have been used by multiple oppressive and tyrannical governments since the 1800’s, such as by the Spanish Army during the Ten Years War against Cuba and by the United States during World War Ⅱ to isolate Japanese-Americans.
On the other hand, ghettos were secluded sectors of big cities or neighborhoods (usually European) that jews were confined to. The first ever ghetto, Ghetto Nuovo, was created by Italians in early 16th century Venice. Between then and the Holocaust, ghettos were used occasionally throughout Europe to isolate Jewish peoples, but this really only became prevalent when the Nazis developed their own ghettoization system. Though the conditions in these spaces were also often horrific, they were not massive labor sites or killing centers.
As the first major country to have fallen victim to Nazi occupation, Poland was a hotspot for ghettos. Together with the Soviet Union, the two countries were home to over 1,000 ghettos (over 80% of the total amount), in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were kept in at a time. Initially, these ghettos held mainly Polish and Russian Jews, but by the time Nazi forces occupied most of Europe in 1942, Jews from all over the continent were concentrated in these parts of Polish (Łódź, Kielce, Kraków, Tarnów, etc) and ex-Soviet cities (Minsk, Vilna, Lida, Dvinsk, etc). In addition to the ghettos, some of the deadliest concentration camps of all time were in Poland, such as Auschwitz and Treblinka, where a combined 2 million Jews (men, women, children) were gassed and burnt to ashes. Many victims would live in ghettos for a certain amount of time until they were transported to one of these killing centers.
Richard Rogulski’s parents were not living in Poland in the years leading up to World War Ⅱ. “In the early 1930s, my parents lived in France. My father was studying medicine at the University of Montpellier until he met my mother and they left for Belgium,” he said. “When [my mother] was pregnant, she wanted to give birth next to her mother, who was in Warsaw.”
In May of 1939, many Europeans were under the impression that there would not be a war due to the Munich Accords that had been signed by Adolf Hitler just a few months prior. Proposed by the Prime Minister of England at the time, Neville Chamberlain, the Munich Accords infamously offered Hitler the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in exchange for him to stop advancing into Western Europe. This so-called ‘appeasement’ illusioned many European Jews into believing that they were safe and could go on with their lives.
Rogulski, who confessed to rarely talking about the Holocaust with his parents in his teenage and adult years, admitted that this was the only exception. “I would ask her, ‘But what possessed you to go back to Poland in May ’39?’ And she would say, ‘That was the time when they said there would never be another war and that they made peace with Hitler. So we said, that’s it, there’s no war.’”
His parents did not know it at the time, but this fateful decision would lead to years of hardship in Nazi-controlled Poland. Less than five months after their arrival – only one after the birth of their son – German troops would attack and annex Poland. Chamberlain’s ‘appeasement’ strategy had failed, Europe was turned upside-down, and in just a few weeks, nearly 10 million Jews were hiding or planning to leave the continent.
The Rogulskis had nowhere to go.
The German troops patrolling the entire city of Warsaw prevented them from a safe escape back to France, and they had no other choice but to hide like everyone else. “At that time, the Germans began to install in Poland the same thing that they would eventually in other countries,” he explained (referring to ghettos and enforcement of Nazi law). “Even more so in Poland since the Poles were very antisemitic – it was not the Poles who would have hindered them from doing what they wanted to do with the Jews.”
The antisemitism amongst non-Jewish Poles is a harsh reality to face. Despite its significant Jewish population, Poland is equally known for its long history of pogroms (organized massacres) and discrimination against Jews. When the Holocaust began to take root in the nation, the population could not have been more divided: on one side, there were nearly four million Jews (around 40% of the entire Jewish population of Europe) rushing to safety, on the other, there were millions of Poles who were more than willing to expose Jewish hiding spots or who were indifferent to their fate.
Around the same time that Rogulski and his family were beginning to hide from the Nazis, they met another couple: Jerzy and Zofia Wünsche. “[Jerzy] Wünsche began to hide not because he was Jewish but because he was a communist and had married a Jew,” Rogulski explained. “By sheer luck, when he and his wife arrived in Warsaw, they happened to settle in the same building that my parents lived in.” Rogulski goes on to explain that Wünsche was a part of the Polish bourgeoisie and, as typical of the wealthy youth at the time, even had connections amongst the emerging Polish communist party.
The two families quickly became close in 1939, leading them to stick together throughout the entire duration of the war. “When we eventually had to separate, I stayed with Madame (Zofia) Wünsche and my mother while my father hid with the resistance. We had to move every three or four months because there was always someone who would denounce Jewish presence in whichever building we were staying at.”
Polish cooperation with Hitler is one of the integral reasons why the country suffered so much throughout the early 1940s. In fact, such actions as the ones mentioned above directly helped with the creation of ghettos. While most Poles were unknowing accomplices of ghettoization, they still played a major role in the facilitation and efficiency of the process.
The Germans started by evacuating all the Polish homes in a specific part of Warsaw, and then would find buildings in the city where Jews had already gathered and tell them, “It’s forbidden to live here now, but there’s room over there…” Rogulski shared. “Little by little, [the Germans] pushed people back towards a neighborhood, even declaring that this corner was the ‘corner of illness’ to get the Poles out. They transferred around 30,000 Poles from this area and replaced them with 300,000 Jews. Once they brought everybody in, they built a wall.”
It might seem counterintuitive that the Nazis employed such a gradual strategy for creating the Warsaw ghetto; the Holocaust is known for having been particularly brutal in its policies against the Jews, which often culminated into the industrial killing of hundreds or thousands at once. However, these methods only emerged after the Final Solution (formally put in place at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942), when the Nazis officially committed to the complete eradication of European Jews. Prior to this, the killings were performed by special units called Einsatzgruppen, who would shoot the Jews of newly conquered areas (Holocaust by Bullets). Einsatzgruppen are responsible for the deaths of approximately two millions Jews.
At this point, most of Europe was occupied by or allied with Hitler, and the Holocaust had been going on for two years. This gave the Nazis ample opportunity to develop machinery and other materials (such as toxic gasses) that would allow them to kill larger amounts of people in short amounts of time. Prior to this, Nazis were still engaging in war with neighboring nations – like France and Britain – and could not afford to send thousands of troops to Warsaw to force the displacement of 300,000 Jews. Thus, their “little-by-little” approach.
“At some point, we found myself with my mother in the part that the Germans would ultimately close off with a wall. [Wünsche] had managed to get his wife out beforehand and settle in the suburbs of Warsaw, but my mother and I were trapped.”
Officially built in October of 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto was perhaps the most infamous ghetto of the Holocaust. 1.3 square miles with a ten foot tall fence guarding the perimeter, intended to house the single largest Jewish population in Europe (30% of Warsaw’s total population), the Warsaw ghetto was no “home.”
And yet, people did live there. For the first years of its existence, the ghetto really was just a means of isolating Jews into one small part of Warsaw. “In ‘41 it was like a small town, it wasn’t a camp,” Rogulski explained. “It was big enough for a few hundred thousand people and sure, Germans were constantly shooting and killing people in the street but this didn’t feel abnormal at the time – there was commerce and business and other things, it felt like a home.”
Still, certain aspects of the ghetto were undeniably inhuman when we reflect on them today. For one, the use of judenraetes.
The Warsaw ghetto was run by a Jewish council, or judenraete. Judenraete’s were small collectives of Jews that were chosen to enforce Nazi policies in ghettos. The topic of such collectives was sensitive during the Holocaust since Jews were forced to play a direct role in facilitating the persecutions.
One of the horrible responsibilities delegated to the chairmen of the councils was choosing Jews for deportation to camps. While some council members tried to refuse to help the Nazis in this way – such as Joseph Parnes and Adam Czerniakow – this often resulted in death.
A member of the judenraete of the Lvov ghetto, Joseph Parnes was frequently asked to send his neighbors to Janowska, a nearby labor camp (which later became an extermination camp), and Belzec, a killing center. Between early November of 1941 and August of 1942, over 65,000 Jews had been transported from the ghetto to their death. At some point during these ten months, Parnes deliberately refused to partake in such an atrocity. He was dead by mid-November.
Adam Czerniakow was the chairman of the judenraete of the Warsaw ghetto, selected by the Nazis when the ghetto was created. As the largest ghetto of the holocaust, people were constantly moving in and out of the space. For the first few months in his position, Czerniakow actively tried to ameliorate the living conditions of the ghetto by establishing food kitchens, workshops, and vocational schools. After eighteen months of pleading with the Germans to offer the Jews better lives, Czerniakow lost hope. He committed suicide in July of 1942.
Alternatively, many council members chose to comply with the Nazis in hopes to save their families and at least a fraction of the population they oversaw. Though these individuals avoided direct physical torture, they endured tremendous psychological and mental torment.
When Rogulski looks back on the time that he spent in the Ghetto, he acknowledges that he and his mom did not live through its most critical point, which he considers to have been just before and during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. At this point, the Final Solution was in full effect and Jews were being transported to Treblinka every day. By May of 1945, over 275,000 people had been forcefully moved, and a new sentiment had begun in the ghetto: desperation. Starting in mid-April, Jewish rebels resisted the efforts of German troops to deport them by refusing to assemble at Umschlagplatz, the transfer point between the ghetto and the trains. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising soon became the largest of the Holocaust, representing the single most substantial effort Jews made to push back against the Nazis.
The uprising ultimately resulted in the deaths of 7,000 Jews and the deportation of 49,000, but it nevertheless represented the strength Jews possessed even after years of being the Nazi’s prime target. Today, the uprising serves to remind us that the Jews did not submit to Nazis with their heads down – many died fighting for their lives.
While Rogulski’s mother might have witnessed similar deportations to the ones that led to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, people were not yet being captured in such great numbers. Until Nazis were committed to the Final Solution, a baby boy and his young mom did not interest them since they couldn’t be used for labor. For the time that the Rogulskis were under constant German supervision, they were not living in constant fear of deportation. In fact, Rogulski admits that he never thought he and his mother had risked death during their time in Warsaw.
Prior to being forced into the ghetto, Wünsche had helped all the Rogulskis (including the father) make fake identification papers. “Our original last name was Silberwasser,” Rogulski shared. “One of the first things [Wünsche] did – to him and to us – was make false papers that we could use to escape if needed. We took the name Rogulski, the most Polish name possible.” As the months went by, Rogulski’s mother began to notice that things were getting worse; more people were dying, disappearing, and beginning to hide in underground tunnels and cellars within the ghetto.
It was time to put the papers to use.
“Wünsche arrived, took me in his arms with my mother behind, and led us out through an unmonitored underground network of tunnels,” Rogulski said. “He found a place for us to stay in the suburbs of Warsaw where his wife was.”
“At one point he had found – a bit like in Schindler’s List – a whole house in which he brought the people he had saved,” of which Rogulski assumes there were around 100. “Overtime, he filled this house with survivors he had taken out of the ghetto or elsewhere in Warsaw, but it was not long before his whole scheme was discovered and a police raid occurred at the house. It was then that he, his wife, my parents, and I went into hiding in the mountains, and officially left the Warsaw region.”
Once they were out of Warsaw, the worst times were behind them – the Rogulskis lived with the Wünsches for several years in Zakopane – a village at the foot of the Tatra mountains bordering Slovakia – as Polish refugees (thanks to their false papers) until World War II ended and it was safe to return back to France. “We had become very close,” Rogulski said. “Like family.”
In 1947, the Rogulskis made their way back to France using visas obtained thanks to their fake papers. Because of this, they chose to officially adopt Rogulski as their new last name (rather than return to Silberwasser), and settled back into France to try to resume the lives they had led before. While the family had always been rather laic in their Judaism, and mainly chose to stay that way, the Holocaust still brought them closer to both the culture and Israel.
When asked whether Rogulski had ever thought of returning to Poland, he admitted to having been very hesitant over the years. “At the beginning I never wanted to go back – I didn’t want to return to Warsaw,” he explained. “But at one point, my parents had already died and there was the son of Jerzy and Zofia Wünsche with whom I had very close relations who told me, ‘Listen, come with us to Warsaw.’ When I went, the Warsaw that I had lived in was gone, every street.”
It is important to recognize that what happened in Poland set a precedent: many Jews who survived the ghettos or the camps took the opportunity to move away from the faith, and those who were never Jewish to begin with became even more antisemitic. As victims tried to return to Warsaw or other Polish cities after the genocide was over, many of them were turned away. In fact, only about 7,508 Polish people identified themselves as Jewish in 2011, that is, 0.22% of the 3.3 million Jews estimated to have been in Poland before the war.
At the same time as the Rogulskis returned to France, Wünsche and his family settled in London, maintaining relations with the Rogulskis over the years. “Wünsche had found his friends and colleagues who were distinguished communists, and obtained the position of Polish commercial attaché in London,” Rogulski explained. “He took his family and left for London where he worked at the Polish embassy. One day, he received instructions to come to Warsaw to deliver a speech, and so he understood that the war was truly over, but he still never returned to live in Poland.”
While Wünsche was living in London, Steven Spielberg was beginning to work on a new movie: Schindler’s List. Today, the three hour long movie (which is based on a true story) is recognized for it’s raw and heartbreaking depiction of the Holocaust that opened peoples eyes to the horrific nature of genocide.
In the film, German businessman and Nazi party member Oskar Schindler travels to Krakow, Poland, in search of a business opportunity. Like many German businessmen at the time, Schindler thought that World War Ⅱ provided a great opportunity to make money since the Nazi war effort demanded a lot of goods that required extremely labor intensive manufacturing. Therefore, many of these men started up their own factories where they employed cheap workers to make various products. When Schindler began to develop his factory, he decided to employ Jews. Though he initially made this decision because it was cheaper labor, the movie depicts Schindler’s mentality towards these people change drastically over time, to the point where he mourns the loss of Jews at the end of the Holocaust. The movie ultimately ends on a hopeful note, with around 1000 Jews having been saved due to Schindler’s efforts.
Steven Spielberg would not have been able to write such an extraordinary film if it were not for his intense research process. Before he started filming or even writing the script, Spielberg was determined to get as many personal testimonies of the Holocaust that he could in order to make his film more realistic.
“Spielberg hired some Poles and sent them to find Holocaust survivors in Poland or elsewhere and interview them,” Rogulski explained. “Amongst all of the people they set out for, there was the Wünsches – there is in the Spielberg archives the story of Wünsche and his wife.”
In the transcript of this interview, which Rogulski found and shared, lies confirmations of multiple aspects Rogulski’s story – Jerzy Wünsche describes the relationship between his own family and the Rogulski, the time they spent together during the Holocaust, and various anecdotes that occurred between the two families.
For example, Wünsche provides his own perspective of the moment where he rescued “Rysio” Rogulski and his mother from the Warsaw ghetto:
Interviewer: “And who led them out of the ghetto?”
Wünsche: “I think I did. I carried his son in my arms”
Interviewer: “And how old was the child then?
Wünsche: “Three”
When Jerzy Wünsche passed away in 2008, Rogulski was asked to deliver a speech at his cremation service in Monaco. “When I attended the service, I learned many of the names of the people Wünsche had saved and heard their written testimonies.” These same testimonies, Rogulski knew, were those that had earned Wünsche the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” earlier in his life, a title awarded to non-Jews who made consistent efforts to help victims of Nazi Germany during the Holocaust at their own live’s risk. Today, Jerzy and Zofia Wünsche are buried in the Yad Vashem Garden in Jerusalem alongside many other Righteous.
It’s hard to truly understand the magnitude of 6 million deaths, just as it is hard to understand the insanity of having tens or hundreds of thousands of people squished together in such small living spaces. We often forget that the Holocaust happened at more places than just Auschwitz – gas chambers were the final destination, but there were often years of other forms of torture that led up to this.
The Jewish experience in Poland had a lot of variation, survivors each having their own unique story to share; while some hid in the homes of their neighbors, others suffered miserable lives in ghettos; while some performed oppressive labor at Auschwitz, others were smuggled out of the country to safety. As we take the time to reflect on life in ghettos, it’s important to not forget that this also does not fully encapsulate the Holocaust.
In addition to this, not all ghettos provided the same experiences – spending weeks in the Warsaw ghetto, suffocating between tens of thousands of people, was not the same thing as spending just a couple days in one of the smaller spaces. As Rogulski shared, experiences also varied based on the time period in which a person was in a ghetto – life in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941 felt like living in regular town, but in 1943, it might’ve been the most unsafe place for Jews to be other than extermination camps.
While ghettos were different from concentration camps – where the sole objective was to exterminate Jews – people still did die in them. People who lived in ghettos are today regarded as survivors, a name that is not given lightly.
When I was speaking to Rogulski, he often blanked on certain details of his and his family’s experience during the Holocaust. For instance, when I asked him what street he and his mother lived on in the ghetto near the beginning of our discussion, he had no clue. Around ten minutes later, when we were talking about something completely different, he mentioned the name of that street as if he had never forgotten it. Similarly, I had asked him very early on in our interview whether he had any memories of his life during the war. Even though he was very young, I figured that he might have had a very vague recollection of something that had happened when he was four or five (when he was hiding in the mountains). Richard said that he had no memories of the sort.
Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel once said: “When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.”
I persisted.
After an hour of discussing difficult and heavy topics, I asked Rogulski again whether he ever had flashes of his life in Poland. I thought that, like the name of the street, something might come to him after having been discussing together for so long.
“I have one but I’m not sure if it’s true,” he told me. “I was in a room with several people, and there was a plate of potatoes, and I wanted potatoes. And I dreamed all my life about potatoes. And I don’t know if I saw potatoes or I heard them, but I was hungry.”
“At some point, we found myself with my mother in the part that the Germans would ultimately close off with a wall. [Wünsche] had managed to get his wife out beforehand and settle in the suburbs of Warsaw, but my mother and I were trapped.”