Notes
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[*]
The author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their enriching comments.
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[1]
Lewin refers to places of mass extermination. News about them reached Warsaw ghetto. Chełmno (Kulmhof am Ner) was the first death camp that had operated since December 1941. Jews of Slonim and Vilnius were being murdered in mass executions since 1941.
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[2]
Jutrznia, newspaper, signature: ARG I 1312, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw.
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[3]
Report on number of people in Warsaw ghetto, signature: ARG I 572, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute.
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[4]
Until the deportations to Treblinka death camp started. Data cited here do not include people deported to Treblinka, but only those who died or were murdered in the ghetto until the end of July of 1942.
1The period of the Holocaust scarred the lives of Jewish families in all of Europe in many ways. One of them was a dramatic change of the demographic structure of Jewish society. Researchers usually focus, quite understandably, on the demographic impact of the genocide on Jewish community (Della Pergola, 1996; Stankowski & Weiser, 2011). In this article, however, I will analyze demographic transformation, which could be observed even before the mass deportation of 1942 and the start of direct extermination of Jews by the Nazis. I will take a closer look at this problem based on the example of the Warsaw ghetto. I will focus on three consequences of the anti-Jewish persecution: mortality, women and children social positions in the ghetto.
2Existing research on Jewish families during the Holocaust stresses the importance of role-changing as an adjustment to critical situation under which Jews found themselves under Nazi rule. Most of all, women, but also children started to participate in money gaining more actively and on much bigger scale than before the war. This phenomenon influenced not only familial economy, but also power structure and emotional sphere (Ofer, 1998a; Ofer, 1998b; Chaitin, Bar On 2001; Hodara, 2004; Kangisser Cohen, 2006; Engelking 2007).
3Many good examples of war-time women’s involvement in familial economy were described by Cecylia Słapakowa, who interviewed women whose life changed dramatically due to conditions in Warsaw ghetto. Among others, she described stories of Mrs. C. and Mrs. F., both of whom before the war had shared to some extent the burden of earning a living with their husbands who nevertheless had been main breadwinners for those families. After the war broke out, men fell ill, felt powerless and were too scared to leave the house – they were afraid of being caught and sent to work-camps. Their wives had to take over entire responsibility for families’ existence. Mrs. C. sold goods from her pre-war lingerie workshop and became a smuggler. This is how she met Mrs. F., who also was a smuggler. Unfortunately, Mrs. F. was caught outside of the ghetto, sent to prison and sentenced to death. She left four children (Epsztein, 2016, 197-203).
4Many children became orphans during the ghetto period and suddenly, they had to become more responsible for their own – and their families – survival, which was a heavy burden. One of them was Moshe Nadel who killed his disabled sister. 16-years-old Moshe was a sole breadwinner for his two sisters after both their parents died of typhus a few months earlier. Moshe could not bear responsibility, he did not earn enough money, suffered hunger and one day, overwhelmed and anxious, he started to beat 9-years-old Perele and eventually, he choked her to death (Polit, 2017, 455-456).
5Changes in the roles of family members were an attempt at functional adaptation to the new situation and a defense mechanism against increasingly chaotic events that were beyond the control of the Jews confined in the ghetto. One of the aspects of life in the ghetto, which determined those adjustments, was the dramatic change in the demographic structure of the Jewish community, which was the basis for the changes in the way that families functioned. Generally speaking, it can be concluded that the social change that took place in the way families functioned in the ghetto, had a noticeable demographic basis. The phenomenon of changes of family roles in the ghetto connects micro-level of individual lives with the macro-level of demographic changes concerning the entire population of Jews living in Warsaw ghetto. The most important objective of this article is to show how demography impacted lives of thousands of Jewish families.
6In order to do so, I will analyze available statistical data for Warsaw ghetto and I will combine them with examples from micro-level. I will demonstrate what demographical changes translated themselves into dynamics of changes of family and economic roles, which were not specific for Holocaust only, but bore similarity to other critical situations. I will also compare demographic transformations of Polish and Jewish populations in Warsaw during the war.
Sources
7In this article, statistical data is combined with an analysis based on documents presenting more individual, subjective, and intimate standpoints.
8The most important body of sources on which the present article is based is the Underground Ghetto Archive (Ringelblum Archive). The archive, created by members of the informal group Oyneg Shabbes, established by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, contains documents created at the initiative of Ringelblum and his collaborators, as well as existing documents (Kassow, 2009). As Ringelblum wrote, “Oyneg Shabbes strove to recreate a comprehensive image of the lives of Jews during the war” (Ringelblum, 2018, 501).
9The archive contains, among other items, formal actuarial documents (birth and death statistics and demographic data) that were used in the analyses of the demographic changes in the Warsaw ghetto community, contained herein. This particular data was gathered during surveys of Judenrat and Jewish Social Self-Aid (legally operating union of caring institutions in the ghetto) as a part of their regular functioning, not by Oyneg Shabbes members. Some institutional documents were contained mostly in the second part of the Archive, but the preserved documentation is not complete. Nevertheless, they make it possible to reproduce the changes in the demographic structure of the Warsaw ghetto residents in the period before the start of the deportations to the Treblinka death camp in the summer of 1942.
10Ringelblum Archive contains also large body of original materials produced or gathered by Oyneg Shabbes members and many personal documents (letters, diaries, memoirs, testimonies). Other materials used for my analysis here are diaries of Oyneg Shabbes members, I also refer to articles from the underground press published by various organizations (also preserved in Ringelblum Archive) that commented on my issues of interest, such as mortality, demography and changes of family roles.
11The documents collected by Oyneg Shabbes were buried in 1942 and 1943 in the ghetto. After the war, two parts of the collection were found; the third part, despite efforts to locate it, has never been found and historians still argue whether it actually existed (Bańkowska, Haska, 2016). The documents are now located at the Archive of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
Demographic grounds of social changes
12The Warsaw ghetto was isolated from the rest of the city on 16 November 1940. Before that date, Jews living in other parts of Warsaw were forced to move to the future closed district. The sealing of the ghetto was a huge economic shock to everyone who found themselves inside the walls. The loss of jobs and, in many cases, a large part of property clearly resulted in a deterioration of the material situation of many families, increased their sense of insecurity and hopelessness, but also forced them to adapt and find their place in the radically changed circumstances (Engelking, 2007, 173-174). Depending on the individual situation, every family looked for ways of survival. In order to survive, families had to adapt to the situation functionally so as to, even to a minimum extent, cover the basic needs of all members. Such adaptation involved broadening and expanding the duties of individual family members and, more generally speaking, redefining their roles.
13The sealing of the ghetto marked the start of a new era: in the opinion of Ruta Sakowska, this was the first stage of the Holocaust, described as “indirect extermination.” In the new conditions, the residents of the ghetto would become sick and die on a massive scale: between 1940 and 1942, approximately 100,000 out of more than 450,000 people died in the Warsaw ghetto due to hunger and various diseases, mainly typhus (Engelking, Leociak, 2013, 305-319; Sakowska, 1986, 8-14). The majority of the deceased were men - heads of families and main breadwinners who bore the brunt of forced labor and the struggle for survival. Due to the sharp increase in the death rate in the ghetto, more and more families lost their ability to function in a way that even resembled the way they functioned before the war.
14On 3 July 1942, less than twenty days before the start of the deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the death camp in Treblinka, Abraham Lewin, a Hebrew language teacher and member of the underground group Oyneg Shabbes wrote in his diary: Today […] on every street in the ghetto there are several funerals and the black carriage for the corpses keeps circulating all the time, literally all the time, above the isle of death called ghetto […]. In the ghetto, you die or you are murdered. Nobody is born here. The death and birth statistics are terrifying. It is easy to estimate right away when the last Jew will die in the ghetto, even if the Germans do not use the methods they used in Chełmno [Kulmhof am Ner], Vilnius, Słonim, and so on, if the war and occupation continue, God forbid, for many more years (Person, Trębacz and Trębacz, 2015, 92-93) [1].
15In order to apprehend the scale of the transformation that took place in the Warsaw Jewish community, one must analyze the demographic changes. Statistical data, mostly concerning mortality, gathered by ghetto administration and preserved in Ringelblum Archive make this task at least partially possible.
16In a relatively short time, between 1939 and 1942, the Jewish community in Warsaw underwent deep structural changes. In 1938, about 300 Jews died in Warsaw per month. In 1941, this number increased to 3,603 persons and in the first half of 1942 it went up to average 5,674 persons a month.
Deaths of Poles and Jews in Warsaw in the years 1938-1942
Deaths of Poles and Jews in Warsaw in the years 1938-1942
17As the above diagram shows, in 1938 Jews were a little over 1/4th of all persons who died in Warsaw, while their share of the city’s population was a little higher and was on the level of approximately 30%. In 1939, this imbalance increased. In 1940, the trend was reversed but the number of Jews who died in that year was still two times lower than the number of Poles. Only in 1941 when the ghetto had already been sealed, the death rate of Jews increased dramatically. Compared to 1938, the number of deaths among Poles increased nearly twofold and the number of Jews - nearly twelvefold. The number of deaths among Poles remained stable and the number of deaths among Jews continued to rise until the big campaign of deportation of Jews to Treblinka, which started in July 1942. In 1941 and 1942, the Jews were 69% of all persons who died in Warsaw, even though ghetto residents constituted some 30% of all Warsaw’s residents. The reason for this was the terrible living conditions in the closed district: overpopulation and hunger, which were conducive to development of communicable diseases.
Number of deaths of Poles and Jews in Warsaw per 1,000 residents
Number of deaths of Poles and Jews in Warsaw per 1,000 residents
18If we compare the relative numbers presented in the diagram above, it turns out that, in the case of Polish population of Warsaw the number of deaths per 1,000 residents of this nationality continued to decrease after the peak in 1939, even though it must be emphasized that it exceeded the pre-war level (Szarota, 2010, 69). The data concerning the Jewish population - which covers only those persons who died in the ghetto and does not include those who were murdered in Treblinka and in other camps - shows a continuous increase in the number of deaths per 1,000 residents. Both in 1941 and in 1942, approximately 10% of ghetto residents died, mostly from hunger and of various diseases. In some months, e.g. in May and June 1941, at the peak of the typhus epidemic, the number of deaths approached 1% of ghetto’s population per month.
19“Warsaw is dying”, wrote Mordechaj Szwarcbard, a member of Oyneg Shabbes, in his diary (Person, Trębacz & Trębacz, 2015, 223). The underground newspaper “Jutrznia” [Morning prayer] published by the Zionist youth organization HaShomer HaTzair, reported that when comparing the data for 1940 and 1941 one can see that in one year the death rate in the ghetto increased by 92.04% [2]. On the other hand, the editors of the “Biuletyn” [Bulletin] published by the socialist Bund, wrote that “terrible death of hunger and diseases is the result of brutally cynical German policy in relation to Jews. They want to uproot and destroy us” (Rusiniak-Karwat, Jarkowska- Natkaniec, 2016, 161).
20The above data clearly indicates that the period of ghettoization was in fact the first stage of the Holocaust, which consisted in indirect extermination of the Jewish population (Sakowska, 1986). It must be added that between July and September 1941, when the residents of the Warsaw ghetto were decimated by typhus, the number of deaths per 1,000 residents among Jews exceeded 150 [3].
21The high death rate meant personal tragedy to thousands of families who lost their members, to widows and widowers, to orphaned children, and to parents who lost their children (DellaPergola, 1996, 37). All those families had to find a way to, in some respects, replace the deceased by redefining and extending the duties of the remaining members of the family so that the family could continue to function. The reason for the universality of this phenomenon, which caused groups that had not worked previously, mostly children, but also women who mostly performed household chores before the war, to start working to earn some income, was the huge death rate in the ghetto. According to my calculations done on the basis of original statistics from ghetto period, the largest group among the deceased were men (“the number of orphans is increasing most of all because adults, especially men, are dying,” noted Emanuel Ringelblum) (Ringelblum, 2018, 284), which resulted in a change in the sizes of the different segments of the society and in a disturbance of the previous proportions among them.
22As the below death rate tables for the years 1941-1942 divided into population groups indicate, men died in greater numbers than women and children. The difference is more significant than it first appears, because it was expressed in absolute numbers when more women than men lived in the ghetto in that period.
23Raul Hilberg believes that the higher death rate among men was due to the fact that they performed work that required more physical effort and were placed in forced labor camps (Hilberg, 2007, 192-193). According to Abraham Melezin, the causes of the lower death rates among women included their higher physiological resistance which in normal conditions is expressed in longer average life expectancy. It also appears that, due to their higher energy demand, men more easily became ill with hunger and more often died of starvation, even though there is no accurate data on this topic available. It is also known that higher death rates occurred also in other ghettos, e.g. in Łódź (Melezin, 1946, 21-22). In 1942, the share of men among all deaths decreased. In that period, fewer people were sent to labor camps, more and more residents of the ghetto were employed in the factories located in the ghetto, the so-called szopy, which manufactured products for the Germans and where conditions were better.
Deaths in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941, divided into population groups
Month | Total | Adults | Children [1] | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Men | Women | (% of all deaths) | ||
(% of all deaths) | (% of all deaths) | |||
January | 898 | 454 (50.5%) | 350 (38.9%) | 94 (10.4%) |
February | 1,023 | 587 (57.3%) | 378 (36.9%) | 58 (5.6%) |
March | 1,608 | 838 (52.1%) | 641 (39.8%) | 129 (8,0%) |
April | 2,061 | 1,206 (58.5%) | 709 (34.4%) | 146 (7,0%) |
May | 3,821 | 2,536 (66.3 %) | 1,111 (29,0%) | 174 (4.5%) |
June | 4,290 | 2,614 (60.9 %) | 1,321 (30.7%) | 355 (8.2%) |
July | 5,550 | 2,809 (50.6 %) | 2,101 (37.8%) | 640 (11.5%) |
August | 5,560 | 2,592 (46.6%) | 2,249 (40.4%) | 719 (12.9%) |
September | 4,545 | 2,196 (48.3%) | 1,907 (41.9%) | 442 (9.7%) |
October | 4,716 | 2,511 (53.2%) | 1,803 (38.2%) | 402 (8.5%) |
November | 4,801 | 2,452 (51,0%) | 1,939 (40.3%) | 410 (8.5%) |
December | 4,366 | 2,183 (50,0%) | 1,737 (39.7%) | 446 (10.2%) |
Total | 43,239 | 22,978 (53.1%) | 16,246 (37.5%) | 4,015 (9.2%) |
Deaths in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941, divided into population groups
Deaths in the Warsaw ghetto until July 1942, [4] divided into population groups
Month | Total | Adults | Children | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Men | Women | (% of all deaths) | ||
(% of all deaths) | (% of all deaths) | |||
January | 5,123 | 2,433 (47.9%) | 2,111 (41.2%) | 579 (11.3%) |
February | 4,618 | 2,147 (46.4%) | 1,827 (39.5%) | 644 (13.9%) |
March | 4,951 | 2,274 (45.9%) | 2,019 (40.7%) | 658 (13.2%) |
April | 4,432 | 2,338 (52.7%) | 1,593 (35.9%) | 501 (11.3%) |
May | 3,636 | 1,995 (54.8%) | 1,402 (38.5%) | 239 (6.5%) |
June | 3,356 | 1,649 (49.1%) | 1,268 (37.7%) | 439 (13%) |
July | 3,672 | 1,812 (49.3%) | 1,519 (41.3%) | 331 (9%) |
Total | 29,788 | 14,648 (49.2%) | 11,739 (39.4%) | 3,391 (11.4%) |
Deaths in the Warsaw ghetto until July 1942, [4] divided into population groups
24In the above tables, of note is also the smaller percentage of children in the number of recorded deaths compared to the share of this group in the entire population. This phenomenon was observed in the document drafted in the ghetto on the statistics of the Jewish population in Warsaw and was interpreted in the following manner: “parents do everything they can to protect their children against starving to death. Also, the social care in this area is particularly active” (Epsztein, 2016, 6).
25The elevated death rates resulted in a change of the demographic structure and of the proportions between the populations of men and women. Even before the war, in Warsaw, like in other big cities, the feminization index was higher than the average index for the entire country. In 1931 in Warsaw, there were 110 Jewish women for every 100 Jewish men. In October 1939, this proportion was 119 women for 100 men (Janczewska, 2014, 443). This trend was also reinforced by emigration in the first months of the war. Mostly young people capable of working left Warsaw and travelled mostly to the east; men were a large majority in that group5 (Bańkowska, Ferenc Piotrowska, 2017, 394). As a result of the elevated death rate of men, in 1942 the proportion was as high as 134 women per 100 men; in the working-age population the disproportion was even higher: for every 100 men there were over 147 women (Janczewska, 2014).
26The feminization indicator increased between 1939 and 1942 – from 119:100 in 1939 to 134.3:100 in 1942. It was even higher for persons in the working-age group (16-59 years): in 1942, for every 100 working-age men there were nearly 150 women). The consequence of this change in the proportion was social change: the roles of women were redefined during their time in the ghetto, their burden caused by gainful employment increased, and a part of this burden was imposed on children (Elder, 1977, 297-298).
27Another important characteristics of the ghetto’s demography was a reduced birth rate and an increase in the death rate of small children. The percentage of babies dropped from 1.4% of the population in 1931 to 0.71% in 1942. In 1931, kindergarten-age children (under 7 years old) constituted 12% of the Jewish population and during the war their number dropped to 9% (Sakowska, 1993, 32). The natural growth was negative but the number of residents of the ghetto increased due to the positive balance of population change which, included an increase in the number of immigrants: the ghetto’s population grew because of an influx of refugees and displaced persons from other locations. “The population is growing constantly as a result of influx of Jews deported by force from provincial towns” wrote an unknown author (Kermish, 1986, 147).
28The gradual decrease in birth rate is shown in the fig. 3. The last significant increase in the number of births was noted in May 1941 (it concerns babies born from pregnancies that were conceived before the ghetto was sealed). The data leads to the hypothesis that birthrate reflects the public sentiment from several months before – the time when the pregnancies were conceived. The decrease in the number of births between May and November 1940 could thus be the result of the unrest of the defensive war and the first months of the occupation and the rebound could result from the adaptation to the wartime conditions after the initial shock.
Changes in the number of births of Jews in Warsaw in the years 1940 and 1941 (until the end of July)
Changes in the number of births of Jews in Warsaw in the years 1940 and 1941 (until the end of July)
Jewish residents of Warsaw, according to the census conducted on 28 October 1939
Jewish residents of Warsaw, according to the census conducted on 28 October 1939
Residents of the Warsaw ghetto by sex and age, according to the residence registration survey of the Jewish Population Records Department, January 1942 (categories aggregated for the purpose of comparative analysis; the numbers are approximate due to the non-equivalent categories)
Residents of the Warsaw ghetto by sex and age, according to the residence registration survey of the Jewish Population Records Department, January 1942 (categories aggregated for the purpose of comparative analysis; the numbers are approximate due to the non-equivalent categories)
29The dynamics of birth rate for Jewish population was decreasing already in the interwar period, although the differences were not as dramatic as during the war. Birth rates were dropping gradually throughout 1920s and 1930s and for the period of 1936-1938 birth rate for Jews in Warsaw was around 450-500 births/month (Zalewska, 1996, 89; Marcus, 1983, 168).
30The average monthly number of births of Jews in all of 1940 was, according to official statistics, equal to 306 births/month and in 1941 – 229 births/month; in 1942 (in the months between January up to and including May), it was equal to just 85 births/month (Berenstein, Rutkowski, 1958, 83; Szarota, 2010, 67). Thus, going back to the hypothesis mentioned earlier, it can be stated that the systematic decrease in the number of births observed in the annual average for 1941 and the first half of 1942 is the direct outcome of the fatal living conditions in the ghetto. It must be emphasized that after the aforementioned peak in the number of births in 1941, which was observed in May, the following months brought a continuous decrease.
31Moreover, even though partial data concerning the period between August and December 1941 is not available, aggregated data and partial data for the first half of the year clearly indicate that in the second part of the year there was a sharp drop. As demonstrated by the data that constituted the basis for this diagram, in the first seven months of 1941, the average monthly number of births was as high as 294. The fact that the average for all of 1941 for the entire Warsaw ghetto was 229 births per month leads to the conclusion that in the last five months of that year the average was just above 138 births per month. This trend continued in the next year. There is no detailed data available for individual months, but the underground newspaper “Der Weker” [Wake Up] published by the socialist Bund reported that in January 1942 only 68 babies were born in the ghetto (Rusiniak-Karwat, Jarkowska-Natkaniec, 2016, 309).
32The conditions in the ghetto were certainly not conducive to increasing the size of a family, but an analysis of the specific causes leads to the conclusion that the change of the social roles was also a factor. A pregnancy and child rearing would certainly force women to stop working outside of their homes, which they were doing on a massive scale. The increasing feminization ratio also inevitably affected the number of births. It cannot be excluded that parents hid their children so they would not be registered, which also reduced the official numbers of child births (Melezin, 1946, 8).
Social change
33What were the consequences of the demographic changes described above to the shape and division of labor in Jewish families in Warsaw?
34The ghetto’s society was heavily degraded: many people lost their jobs and their pre-war sources of income. Food prices were very high and the rations available with ration cards did not give any chance of survival. According to calculations of Stanisław Różycki, another Oyneg Shabbes collaborator, average upper middle-class family (with a father working for Judenrat, son being a courier, mother working at home and one 10-years old daughter) could have actual monthly income of 435 zlotys. In the same time, their expenses were 810 zlotys a month, out of which more than 70% were spent on basic foods (bread, potatoes, pork fat) (Epsztein, Person, 2016, 70). According to anonymous statistical study preserved in Ringelblum Archive, if inhabitants of Warsaw ghetto were to eat meals that would actually reflect human energetic needs, a family of 4 people would have to spend almost 63 zlotys a day on foods alone (due to fluctuations of prices, this amount went to 103 zlotys a day in June 1941). In 1941 prices of all kinds of foods went up at least 3 times (Epsztein, 2016, 21-22).
35In this dramatic situation, household budgets were saved by selling property, from valuable items (for example wooden wardrobe sold by the family described by Różycki costed 400 zlotys which was a sum that could save a budget – but just for a short while) to the smallest household utensils and clothes. Refugees and people relocated from other cities, approximately 150,000 in number, were in the worst situation. They had neither any material means nor the support of relatives and, as a result, they quickly fell into the depths of poverty (Engelking, Leociak, 2013).
36For many residents of the ghetto, the family was the most important community that allowed them to think about themselves in the context of group interest and solidarity; it was a source of a sense and motivation to live, social bonds, and intimacy. On the other hand, during a war, a family could be a serious burden: hunger, poverty, and restricted intimacy caused conflicts and survival was most of all an individual thing (Ofer, 1998a). Every family had to find a new way to function in this crisis situation. In a majority of families, people who did not work outside of their home previously, mostly women, but also children, had to contribute more than before to earning money.
37Glen Elder and Jean Lipman Blumen who studied the changes of family roles in extreme situations demonstrated that higher flexibility of roles and blurred boundaries between previous opposing roles are characteristics typical of changed family structures during crisis (Lipman-Blumen, 1974; Elder, 1999).
38As demonstrated by Glen Elder in his work on changes in families during the Great Depression, adaptation to a dramatic reduction of income and efforts to regain control over the loss of resources by changing the family roles (and redefining the family structure) increased the family’s chance of survival in crisis situations (Elder, 1991). Loss of income shifted the household economy toward the most intensive use of labor by imposing money earning roles on children as well as by increasing the burden on the mother.
39Like during the Great Depression, the changes in the family roles of the residents of the Warsaw ghetto affected women and children. This was largely due to the change of the demographic structure of the ghetto, which resulted in social changes (Okólski, 2004, 125). This article is trying to capture them by studying demographic data that allows to analyze basic indicators such as number of births and deaths. Unfortunately, further data, for example on the number of marriages and divorces, that could certainly shed more light on the described phenomena, was not preserved.
40The traditional division of tasks and labor was eliminated even in many families. That was the case for Mrs. Kr., another woman described by Cecylia Słapakowa in her study. Before the war, she sold fruits and vegetables from her own stand in the market and her husband was a tailor. After their apartment and all their belongings were destroyed during the bombing in September 1939, they had to move in with her brother. Mr. Kr. was then unemployed, he tried trading, but with no success. Eventually, it was his wife who became main breadwinner for their family, while he took care of their children and helped with housework (Person, 2011, 276-277).
41Many families lost their fathers and husbands (Engelking, 2007, 184-185). It was for this reason, among others, that many families experienced a major change in the roles of different members and a disintegration of the pre-war order (Kangisser Cohen, 2006, 279). The change of the previous roles in families of ghetto residents reflected the need of a family to survive as a structure that functions in a certain way, even when the persons who played those roles were missing. A large number of families adapted to the situation and built new structures that continued to ensure mutual support and interdependence (Ferenc Piotrowska, 2017).
42Certainly, the most important element that determined the shape of daily lives in the ghetto was the need to change from the previous sources of income (Engelking, 2007, 164). This change was also manifested in the redefinition of the previous roles, and the division into women’s and men’s skills and jobs during the war was blurred (Hilberg, 2007, 191). The economic effort shifted to other family members, mostly women, but also children (Ofer, 1998a).
43This reconfiguration revealed the interactive nature of the relations between family members who responded, both as individuals and as a network - to the changes taking place in their surroundings. Before the war, 27,7% of Jewish women were professionally active, which was slightly smaller than 31,3% women active in general population. This data, however, does not reflect the fact that women (and children) helped in many family-owned businesses, for example smaller stores, because they did not consider this kind of work as professional activity (Garncarska-Kadary, 2001, 49-51). Moreover, most women performed traditional roles associated with management of emotions in the family: care for others, etc. (Hyman, 1998; Bacon, 1998). When they started working more independently during the war, their relative position in family hierarchy could become more important (Elder, Liker, 1983, 344-345).
44In the period before the war, in most cases it was women who took care of children, bought and prepared food, and took care of the home. After the ghetto was sealed, more and more of them started working outside home and assumed financial responsibility for their families. They no longer were only ‘helpers’, and sometimes became main, or sole, breadwinners (Kangisser Cohen, 2006, 279). This additional responsibility was a serious burden to many women and not all of them managed to deal with it in the same way.
45Phenomenon of women’s increased participation in familial economy and shift of their roles in hierarchy is not reflected in statistical data from ghetto period. Employment data only took into consideration those were legally employed and omitted those who earned their living for example by selling properties or smuggling food. According to statistical study from 1941, only 8,3% of Warsaw ghetto inhabitants were legally employed, which means that there were 13 professionally inactive people for every working person (Epsztein, 2016, 4). This problem shows how the very meaning of earning money was changed in ghetto conditions. Having this in mind, researchers have to rely on the picture of reality depicted in narrative, rather than numerical sources.
46One of them was a special report on the situation of Jewish women during the war. It was ordered by Ringelblum and his collaborators from Oyneg Shabbes who were well aware of these almost revolutionary processes that redefined the structure of Jewish families. It was prepared by Cecylia Słapakowa who attempted to describe cases of women from various environments and social classes who experienced radical changes of their lives and their position in families due to ghetto conditions (Ofer, 1998b). In her text, she reported that:
47"Women, with their active approach in all, even the most demanding, aspects of life, and with their ability to adapt to sudden changes, resulting from their subtle self-preservation instinct (…). The unique economic and cultural conditions that were forced upon our lives put Jewish women in a position that was much higher and much more responsible than the position of women in other societies – at the forefront of the struggle” (Epsztein, 2016, 195).
48In fact, the responsibility of women for the material aspects of family life increased (with the scope of duties related to taking care of the home, children, and other family members unchanged) and they accepted their new roles.
49Many other sources mention this phenomenon. In the beginning of 1940, Emanuel Ringelblum wrote in his chronicle: “Persistence of women. Women as head of households”. In June of 1942, shortly before deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka started, he added: “Future historian will have to devote a separate chapter to Jewish woman during the war. She will take an important place in Jewish history for her courage and resilience, thanks to which thousands of families could survive those horrible times” (Ringelblum, 2018, 364).
50In conclusion, it must be stated that the universal expansion of women’s involvement in work outside of home was due to the decrease of the number of men in the ghetto and to the fact that many of them lost their jobs. The income of those who continued to work was insufficient to support their families and, as a result, women had to become involved in efforts to gain income. The authority of men decreased because other family members became more independent. Women and children, who had not worked previously, went to work and this had a fundamental impact on the way that families functioned (Elder, 1999, 14).
51As Glen Elder had observed in his research, the downward transfer of part of the responsibility from parents to children is a part of the economic adaptation of families to extreme conditions. Quite often children are forced to learn how to perform new roles without a significant mental support from their guardians: they have to act like adults without being fully prepared for this (Benson, Elder, 2011, 1648). Nusen Koniński, Oyneg Shabbes collaborator wrote in his perceptive study entitled ‘The face of a Jewish child’: “More and more children had to look for income in the streets (…) Among the lower class of the Jewish society in Warsaw, the death rate increased significantly, as a result of which a large number of children were left without care and without any means to make a living (…) Children, who were forced to live in the streets by the extreme circumstances” (Sakowska, 2000, 365). For such children, begging, smuggling, and performing small jobs was a necessity. Child labor became an acceptable norm in the ghetto and working children became a nearly inseparable element of the ghetto’s public sphere.
52In the Warsaw ghetto, children stopped being children because they were affected by the biggest change in the division of labor within families. They became more independent and self-reliant (Kowalska-Leder, 2009b, 55). After the ghetto was sealed, when the economic situation gradually deteriorated, the money earned by children became more and more important and, in the end, crucial for survival of their families. The factor that accelerated the maturing process and forced children to assume responsibilities that so far had been restricted to adults was often the death of one or both parents (Kowalska-Leder, 2009a, 53).
53Child labor was an existing phenomenon among Jewish population in pre-war Poland, but it concerned only the lowest strata of the society. In some branches, for example textile industry, the proportion of youngsters among all workers was particularly high (Garncarska-Kadary, 56-57). Research made in 1930s suggests that majority of home-workers’ children worked part-time. They participated in familial economy and if parents ran businesses at home (for example, had a workshop), kids were usually helping there. Researchers estimated manpower composition of home-workers at 68% of total time worked by men, 24% by women and 8% by children. Manpower figures for entrepreneurs (half of which were self-employed) were respectively: 64% men, 26% women and 10% children less than 15 years old. Also for the category of shop-owners, helping by family members was a mass phenomenon (Marcus, 1983, 54-60).
54Ghetto brought this situation to the new level as the phenomenon started to concern children who beforehand belonged to upper strata of working class and to middle class. Children gained responsibilities more than strictly work hours. Another aspect was the fact that even very young children (under the age of ten) were forced to work full-time in low-pay jobs struggling to add any sums to the family’s budget, for example as smugglers or selling smaller items (such as cigarettes). Some children provided income for entire families (Sakowska, 1993, 95-96). According to Stanisław Gombiński, policeman and acute observer of ghetto society: “Jewish children know that they have to work, make money, and sometimes take care of entire families (…) Children work at making brushes, mattresses, and toys. They creep through exits, they smuggle, they beg” (Gombiński, 2010, 45-46). Gombiński described children who prematurely became adults, burdened with responsibility for themselves and their families and working very hard. He also emphasized their acceptance of their responsibility for the incomes of their families, their engagement in the work, and their dedication to their families. Gombiński indicated areas where children earned income, which were also mentioned in other reports and publications, such as trade, smuggling, and begging.
55Situations where children were the only bread-winners were quite frequent. There were cases where children worked while parents, for various reasons, did not. Children were involved in smuggling (their abilities in this area were greater than those of adults), begging, and sometimes theft (Engelking, 2007, 186-189). In the war-time conditions, children had to perform roles intended for adults, which involved responsibility and dedication, which affected their socialization (Liker, Elder, 1983, 343; Ferenc Piotrowska, 2017).
56“In the streets, ten or twelve-year-old kids appeared, with boxes containing saccharin, candy, or cigarettes hanging on their necks. On street corners and at house gates, there were children with baskets of pretzels or boxes with several cookies inside… The earnings of those children were minimal,” (Sakowska, 2000, 366-367) wrote Koniński. Children often worked in streets (e.g. as peddlers), in fields where their earnings were equal to just a few zlotys a day, which was not enough to survive.
57The universal nature of child labor during the war is confirmed by the numerous mentions in documents from that period. “My mother did not earn any money and then I started smuggling and I earned a pretty penny. My sister worked in a distribution store” (Sakowska, 2000, 15), said Cyla Rozenblum in her testimony. Abram Brajtman reported: “My father got ill, and we had no source of income. Mom sold a lot of things to save my father, but my sister and I started selling bread and buns” (Sakowska, 2000, 16).
58A very frequent thread in reports of working children is unemployment, illness, or death of a parent, which dramatically worsened the material situation of the family and forced one or many children to start working. Another aspect of child labor, besides the functional adaptation aimed to supplement family income, was a change of emotional roles: parents were helpless while children not only worked but also tried to take over the burden of their responsibility.
59In the Warsaw ghetto, many children had to replace or even assume the roles of adults who died or were unable to perform their previous functions. Thus, it can be said that working children were an indication of the transformation of the status of children in the ghetto: their childhood was more and more often considered to be arbitrary and they had to become adults. The last process resulted in decreased authority of parents who were unable to provide their children with safety, care, and survival and who felt helpless.
60Along with the increasing death rate, the number of orphans increased in the ghetto. Adults died more often, as children had slightly better access to social care and feeding them was a commonly accepted priority. Also, adults were more burdened with exhausting manual labor. Moreover, parents often gave children food as they put the survival of their children before their own. In November 1941, writer Perec Opoczyński described in his reportage:
61When children who are left alone die, it is better for them. But when parents die, there are only more children who are left alone. This is how the problem of children becomes the most important issue of the day in the ghetto: one can say that it is the main issue related to the survival of Jews in the ghetto (Polit, 2017, 432).
Conclusions
62Ghettoization was the first stage of Holocaust, which dramatically transformed the demographic structure of the Warsaw Jewish community. Over 100,000 people died in the ghetto due to hunger and disease. The majority of them were adults, mostly men. Because even before the war the indicators of feminization in Warsaw were very high, the wartime death rate resulted in a further increase of the earlier imbalance in the number of women and men, but also created new phenomenons that were the direct outcome of the unique conditions present during the war. The above analysis shows that ghetto period and its demographic consequences were a turning point in the German anti-Jewish persecution in Poland during World War 2.
63The case described above shows intertwinement between macro-level of demographic processes and micro-level of individual lives. People confined in the Warsaw ghetto had to rapidly adjust to very dramatic changes of society’s structure. One can say that the demographic transformation described herein became a catalyst of a social change that affected many Jewish families in Warsaw, which consisted in a dramatic redefinition of the roles of family members. They had to adapt to new conditions by, among other strategies, engaging persons who have not worked before, namely women and children, in the efforts to supplement family income. Those individuals took small jobs that did not pay well and were often illegal, but their contribution to household budgets became more and more important.
64This shift reconfigured the relations and the power structure in the family: the mother, in addition to playing the role of the family’s emotional anchor, earned money, which increased her authority. The mother’s gainful employment often resulted in involvement of other family members in household chores that previously, in most cases, were performed most of all by women. The mother’s and the children’s’ work reduced the position and authority of the father and reduced the broadly defined control of parents over the children. Such changes had certain emotional consequences: tensions would become more frequent (due, in part, to the flexibility of roles in the family and the resulting distribution of power).
65Also children had to become mature faster, both physically and mentally, and assume roles for which they would otherwise not be ready. Children became the only breadwinners in families, helped with household chores, took care of younger siblings, and looked for ways to get food. Sometimes children had to accept some of the emotional burden borne by their parents, who found it harder to deal with the continuous humiliation and the radical change of the living conditions (Kangisser Cohen, 2006, 280). In the ghetto, parents overwhelmed by their duties no longer provided support for their children who became disappointed or even angry at parents’ attitudes and helplessness (Kowalska-Leder, 2009b, 53). Observation of helplessness and despair of their parents, with a simultaneous need to participate in the responsibility for the family’s survival (e.g. by working to earn money) caused children to prematurely become “pseudo-adults” who were not always psychologically ready for their new roles (Benson, Elder, 2011, 1646).
66Earning money changed the positions of those two groups in the family hierarchy, the way that families functioned, and the distribution of roles, thus having serious emotional and functional consequences.
67Described changes of family hierarchy and roles were not analyzed before in relation to demographic changes during the Holocaust. Above analysis took into consideration available statistical data from Holocaust period that shed a new light on phenomena described before: new roles of women and children. However, there are still aspects that need further research, for example transformation of men’s emotional and professional roles. The data from 1930s and ghetto period could also be compared further.
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Notes
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[*]
The author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their enriching comments.
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[1]
Lewin refers to places of mass extermination. News about them reached Warsaw ghetto. Chełmno (Kulmhof am Ner) was the first death camp that had operated since December 1941. Jews of Slonim and Vilnius were being murdered in mass executions since 1941.
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[2]
Jutrznia, newspaper, signature: ARG I 1312, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw.
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[3]
Report on number of people in Warsaw ghetto, signature: ARG I 572, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute.
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[4]
Until the deportations to Treblinka death camp started. Data cited here do not include people deported to Treblinka, but only those who died or were murdered in the ghetto until the end of July of 1942.