Cakes and famine - life in the Warsaw Ghetto

[Knouterer]

The problem is the Jews were the wealthiest nationality in Poland. For example, Joseph Marcus writes:

Yet, notwithstanding the ravages of war and its consequences - inflation, disturbed markets and economic restrictions - the contribution of the Jews in Poland was comparatively of such a dimension that, between the end of the eighteenth century and 1929, the last year before the Great Depression, per caput real income of the Jews went up by 350 percent, while that of the non-Jewish urban population declined[/u].

Seriously? Who calculated that, and how, given that - among other things - Poland was not even an independent nation for most of that time?

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi GEBHK,

Thanks.

My full quote was "demonstrably died of starvation and its consequences". I was factoring what you say in, though not as knowledgeably as yourself.

Cheers,

Sid,

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

You post, "The problem is the Jews were the wealthiest nationality in Poland".

Why was this a "problem"?

Cheers,

Sid.

[Knouterer]

I very much doubt that Jews were "the wealthiest nationality" in Poland. What about the Germans? What about the big Polish landowners, for that matter? There were many dirt-poor working class Jews, in industrial centres like Lodz for example, where a quarter of a million Jews lived.
Also, in the 1880 and 1890s, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled to Poland from the pogroms in Russia, and as most of them brought few possessions apart from the clothes on their backs, I doubt that they drove up the average income.

From Adam Zamoyski, Poland. A History (2009), p. 306:

"The occupational breakdown of the 1931 census reveals that only 0.6% of those engaged in agriculture were Jews. They made up 62% of all those making a living from trade, and the figure for the town of Pínsk was 95. Their fortunes fluctuated dramatically during the economically unstable twenties and thirties. Every time a new peasant cooperative was founded or a village combined to sell its produce direct to the buyer, the livelihood of several Jewish families vanished. By 1936 at least a million Jews in Poland were losing their source of subsistence, and by 1939 just over that number were entirely dependent for their survival on relief from Jewish agencies in the United States."

[gebhk]

Hi Knouterer

But isn't that the point? Firstly, when Jewish families fell on hard times, there was a much better safety net for them than there was for the peasants and kudos to them for that - incidentally my years of work in the health service have shown that that this exceptional support for community members in times of need continues today. And, secondly, the Jews were virtually unengaged in agriculture which was where the really desperate poverty lay and in which over half the population was engaged. A review of the average diets of the military (which can serve as a gold standard of adequate nutrition) the towns and the countryside paints a very vivid picture of the distribution of wealth.

[gebhk]

Hi Sid

My full quote was "demonstrably died of starvation and its consequences". I was factoring what you say in, though not as knowledgeably as yourself.

Very kind of you to say so. Totally agree with what you have said too. The point I was trying to make rather ineptly is that in some cases the cause-effect can be easily demonstrated. For example, a patient develops a wound which becomes infected, they develop septicaemia, die and on post-mortem their blood is chok-abloc full of the same bugs that are in the wound. It is a reasonable deduction that the sequellae of the wound killed them. If they hadn't developed the wound they would not have died. Simple. However, let's say our hapless patient has a wound and then develops a wound infection AND a chest infection, before expiring. Can we say that is they hadn't got the wound they would not have died? In this case you could argue that the wound added to the burden of disease and therefore made the patient vulnerable to chest infection. However it's a very tough sell because the argument that the chest infection might have happened even without the wound is a valid one. That is why the sensible lawyer would argue that the infection control procedures at the hospital were crap and that is why the poor patient got both infections. I would suggest this pragmatic approach probably serves our purposes best - simply that the living conditions as a whole were responsible for a massive excess mortality in the Ghettos and were entirely the responsibility of the German administration.

[wm]

"The occupational breakdown of the 1931 census reveals that only 0.6% of those engaged in agriculture were Jews. They made up 62% of all those making a living from trade, and the figure for the town of Pínsk was 95. Their fortunes fluctuated dramatically during the economically unstable twenties and thirties. Every time a new peasant cooperative was founded or a village combined to sell its produce direct to the buyer, the livelihood of several Jewish families vanished. By 1936 at least a million Jews in Poland were losing their source of subsistence, and by 1939 just over that number were entirely dependent for their survival on relief from Jewish agencies in the United States."

That's absurd. As gebhk wrote, the Jews usually didn't live in villages. They lived in shtetls, and shtetls were malls and trade centers for the surrounding countryside.
I've never heard about cooperatives (not especially successful in Poland) selling products to the buyer; the idea was to combine resources and sell products to the wholesale buyer.

I wonder what is the source for the at least a million Jewish unemployed - the Central Statistical Office didn't collect statistics by tribal affiliation. It's most likely unemployment in the Second Republic (up to 30 percent) assumed to be correct for the Jewish minority too.

Structural unemployment was a huge problem in Poland; up to 8 million people were estimated to be permanently "useless" as they were called then.

[wm]

Seriously? Who calculated that, and how, given that - among other things - Poland was not even an independent nation for most of that time?

Joseph Marcus was a Jewish economist; this is how he explained his findings in 1978:

A note on income and progress.
It is of historical interest to establish in some measurable terms, however broad, the absolute and relative income of the Jews towards the end of the eighteenth century and to compare this with figures of nearly a century and a half later. This has never been done before. It is attempted here on the basis of figures for the year 1791, mentioned by Korzon in his fundamental Study of that period, and my own estimate of national income in 1929.

Tadeusz Korzon was a noted 19th-century Polish historian.

[wm]

Why was this a "problem"?

The problem with the idea that in the Second Republic, the Warsaw Jews starved and, as result, then starved even more during the occupation.

[Knouterer]

"The occupational breakdown of the 1931 census reveals that only 0.6% of those engaged in agriculture were Jews. They made up 62% of all those making a living from trade, and the figure for the town of Pínsk was 95. Their fortunes fluctuated dramatically during the economically unstable twenties and thirties. Every time a new peasant cooperative was founded or a village combined to sell its produce direct to the buyer, the livelihood of several Jewish families vanished. By 1936 at least a million Jews in Poland were losing their source of subsistence, and by 1939 just over that number were entirely dependent for their survival on relief from Jewish agencies in the United States."

That's absurd. As gebhk wrote, the Jews usually didn't live in villages. They lived in shtetls, and shtetls were malls and trade centers for the surrounding countryside.

Right. So as Zamoyski writes, when peasants and wholesale buyers tried to cut out the middlemen, as people will do in difficult times, many Jews lost their livelihood.

[wm]

It's hard to say because I don't understand his example.
Peasants could always sell directly; they traveled to the nearest town/city, there were open-air markets for that, and everybody was happy. Obviously, it was inefficient, and only the poor ones did it.

Cooperatives certainly bypassed the regional middlemen, the one that controlled the gmina and the other that controlled the county. So, in the end, the two guys got poorer, and what, a few thousand in the entire country? But only poorer - cooperatives weren't popular, efficient, and certainly weren't monopolists in anything.
There was lots of talk in the Second Republic about massive unemployment as a result of transition to the modern economy. But in the end, they ran out of time waiting for that.

The "useless people" were farmhands, landless peasants, sons of poor peasants, and Jews. Generally, the problem was those people (especially Orthodox Jews) produced way too many "no future" children.
Earlier, the ''no future" people were exported by hundreds of thousands to America, but in the thirties, it wasn't possible anymore.

[michael mills]

Reply to Sid Guttridge.

The figures you quote were the official ration supplied by the German authorities. In addition to that ration, there was the food aid from NGOs in the United States, channelled through the Juedische Selbsthilfe, the Jewish welfare organisation recognised by the German authorities. Under the agreement between the German authorities in the General-Government and the US NGOs, headed by former President Herbert Hoover, 14% of the food aid provided to occupied Poland was to go to the Jewish population, ie a percentage higher than the Jewish proportion of the total population, reflecting their worse condition.

As I wrote, the total amount of food entering the Warsaw Ghettp, consisting of the official German ration, the food aid, and the earnings of the employed Jews, was sufficient to keep all the inhabitants alive, if only just, provided it was equally distributed. The problem was that it was not equally distributed; the Jews with influence ate well in the cafes, while those at the bottom, the orphans, the unemployed, old people without relatives, gradually starved.

The crisis came when the United States entered the war against Germany and prohibited the private food aid to German-occupied Europe. The result was a drastic fall in the amount of food entering the Warsaw Ghetto, which may have been the trigger that set off the active killing of the inhabitants who were not employed in the German war effort.

[wm]

Unfortunately, the problem with that theory is that the only help worth mentioning the inhabitants of the ghetto ever received was bad-quality soup, and the numbers (soups in thousands per day) were:
1941
spring 60
June 68
July 118
August 112
September 128
October 100
November 87
1942
spring 80
autumn 80
The soup only prolonged agony anyway, especially since they had to pay for it.
For the increase in the autumn of 1941 was responsible the governor of the Warsaw District, SA-Gruppenführer Ludwig Fischer, who allocated additional food for the poor.

[gebhk]

The problem with the idea that in the Second Republic, the Warsaw Jews starved

Hi WM

I don't think there is any problem with that idea.

While what you say about average wealth being higher in the ethnic Jewish population than average for the rest of the population is probably true. However you seem to be suggesting the following assumptions.
1) That the higher average wealth was sufficient to assure adequate average diet
2) That the higher wealth was evenly distributed.
There is little to suggest that either of these is true. Alas, I don't have any data on the dietary distribution between ethnic groups in pre-war Poland. However, if we treat military consumption as a standard of 'good nutrition', to take just one parameter, meat consumption, that of the military man was of 90-110kg of meat per annum, at least twice as much as his town-dwelling civilian counterpart (45kg pa) and a phenomenal over ELEVEN times as much as the peasant farmer (8.5-9kg pa). Similar disproportions can be seen in other areas of food consumption. In other words, while the diet of the urban population (where the vast majority of the Jewish population resided), was significantly better than that of the peasantry, the latter was not exactly a high bar and 'better' cannot be equated with 'adequate'.

Secondly, a higher average does not necessarily indicate an overall higher rate of whatever it is we are measuring. Indeed wealth notoriously tends to be unevenly distributed making averages somewhat meaningless. While Jews were over-represented in many high-earning sectors of the population - business, medicine, law, etc, that does not mean that there were no poor Jews. In fact there were, in Warsaw as much as in the other major towns of Poland, significant enclaves of desperate Jewish urban poverty alongside the Polish ones. This meant lifelong poor diet and, as often as not, sharing the family home with the family workshop or two, thus exposing the family to various other health hazards. When these families were forced into the Ghettos not only were they less physically resilient but also had no money or valuable possessions to sell for food and so succumbed far more rapidly than their better-off counterparts. Consequently, the picture of pre-war Jewish life obtained post-war from witness-testimony is highly distorted because while pitifully few Jews from the better-off strata of society survived, virtually none at all of the urban poor survived to tell the tale. There is little to suggest life in the sztetls differed greatly to that in the larger towns albeit on a smaller scale

[michael mills]

Reply to WM:

What is the source of the statistics you posted about the daily distribution of soup to the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The information I posted about the food aid sent to Poland from NGOs in the United States, with 14% of it reserved for the Jewish population comes this book by the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer:

"American Jewry and the Holocaust : the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939-1945"

Published in Jerusalem by The Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University ; Detroit : Wayne State University Press, 1981.

I would consider that a reliable source.

Information about the "Juedische Soziale Selbesthilfe" in the General-Government can be found here:

http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte ... _06_29.pdf