ABSTRACT
On the afternoon of 3 August 1942, the liquidation of the ghetto in Warsawhad been underway for nearly two weeks. We know this because we have access to two sets of documents. There are those left by leaders and bureaucrats of the Polish General Government, Nazi officials, and those responsible for following out the policy of the Final Solution. And there are those written by Jews in the ghetto, including members of the Jewish councils, and the residents who had not died of starvation or violence and who frequently recorded the events in diaries. In a meeting in July of that year, Hans Frank, the governor of the Polish General Government, said
This record allows us today to see the logistics of the deportations: a train would run daily between Warsaw and the center at Treblinka carrying no fewer than five thousand Jews from the ghetto. The directives presented to the judenrat in early July, of which we also have records, made clear what was to follow: all residents of the Warsaw ghetto were to report voluntarily to the Umschlagplatz (literally, “transshipment point,” but understood by residents as “gathering place”), with the exception of those registered for certain kinds of “valuable” work in industry, the ghetto bureaucracy, and those who were not fit for removal. Those in
the ghetto were told that the deportations would total no more than about 60,000 people; in the end nearly eighty percent of the population of the ghetto-over 300,000 of the 380,000 Jews crammed into the corner of Warsaw-would be in Treblinka by the beginning of 1943.
