On 28 June 1946, in Łódź, a member of the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes, Judge S. Krzyżanowska, interviewed the person specified below as a witness, without swearing him in. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations, the witness testified as follows:
| Forename and surname | Jakub Penson |
| Age | 46 |
| Names of parents | Samuel and Karolina |
| Place of residence | Piotrkowska Street 56 |
| Occupation | medical lecturer at the internal diseases clinic, University of Łódź |
| Religious affiliation | Judaism |
| Criminal record | none |
At the request of the Judge, I submit a testimony which I have written and signed by myself concerning the sanitary and health conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto which resulted from the orders issued by the Warsaw District Governor Fischer. It was read out that:
During the first weeks of the occupation, German acts aimed at the [Jewish] population in Warsaw can be characterized as disorganized; there were acts of violence such as beating passers-by, the obligation to take one’s hat off at the sight of soldiers, catching people in the street for forced labor, often completely pointless, and inhumane treatment while performing forced labor. Women were rounded up in order to clean windows, scrub floors and toilets. The Germans’ favourite practical joke was to force them to use their underwear to do that and then to put it back on. The Germans started visiting luxury Jewish flats, stealing Jewish possessions, beating, forcing older people to carry out compulsory physical exercises and women to dance naked.
Gradually, repressive measures intensified and became more and more organized and consistent in the typical German way.
Day after day, new orders were issued. A Jewish family was not allowed to have more than 2,000 zlotys, [...] had to be deposited. Jews were forbidden to work in state or municipal institutions, and in big industry. Jews were deprived of the right to work for and buy from “Aryans”; Jewish doctors were forbidden to treat “Aryan” patients, and the other way round, Jews were not allowed to be treated by “Aryan” doctors; they were not permitted to leave the city or travel on trains without a special permit. From November 1939 all Jews aged twelve or more had to wear on their right arms a white arm band with a blue star of David on it; stars of David also had to be put up on Jewish shops. Disobeying these orders was punishable by death, prison, or beating, depending on the whims of individual Germans, who could display their sadistic tendencies with impunity.
At the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1940, wholesale evictions began in Warsaw of families from various quarters of the city. People were thrown out within 10-15 minutes; they were sometimes mercifully allowed to take some of their possessions. At the same time, all considerable Jewish commercial establishments, banks, [...], cinemas and fixed properties were confiscated. There were frequent, often fatal, cases of Jews being beaten up. Soon, the Jewish population met with the principle of collective responsibility. In November 1939 all the men from the building at Nalewki Street 9 were executed, supposedly because a blue police officer had been beaten up by one of the residents of the building. In January 1940 the Germans discovered the first radio station of a Polish underground organization; the person in charge of it, whose name was Kot, managed to escape, shooting his way out and supposedly wounding a few gendarmes; [...] that Kot was of Jewish origin, the Germans arrested several hundred Poles and the same number of Jews from among voluntary workers, freelance occupations and the intelligentsia. All of them were murdered.
The population, oppressed, beaten and kicked around, lived in constant fear and panic.
At the beginning of December 1939 Jews started to arrive in Warsaw from towns and cities that had been annexed into the so-called Greater Reich – they had been completely robbed and were chilled to the bone, haggard, beaten up, dirty, louse-infested. They were placed in cinemas, schools and factories. People hurriedly organized a collection of clothes, underwear, bedclothes and food. However, Jews were not able to take control of the situation and to solve the problem of tens of thousands of homeless people, which cropped up suddenly. There was starvation and louse infestation in transit camps – they were the places with the first cases of typhus. In January 1940 a little epidemic broke out, only in the transit camps, and it continued until May that same year.
About 10,000 people fell ill, with the death rate of 10 per cent. This epidemic was relatively easy to contain and during the summer and autumn of 1940, as well as throughout the winter of 1941, only individual small foci of typhus were reported.
It is necessary to emphasize that before the war there had been no typhus epidemic in Warsaw [...]. The disease had appeared occasionally, brought from the eastern regions, where it was also rare. It is enough to say that during my work in the hospital [in Czy]stem for a dozen or so years, there had only been two cases of typhus before the war.
In the spring of 1940, despite the fact that the epidemic had completely died out, the Germans launched a great propaganda campaign. In Warschauer Zeitung and Nowy Kurier Warszawski – the so-called "rag" – there appeared pseudo-scientific articles with high- sounding titles: “Threat of a Typhus Epidemic to Poles,” “Jews Should Be Separated From the Aryan World.” The authors, the German doctors who were in charge of the health service in the General Government, stereotypically repeated their own totally mendacious disquisitions: Jews were a breeding ground for typhus; they themselves were immune to this disease, could fall ill with it only lightly and rarely died of it; in contrast, “Aryans” suffering from it would face certain death. It is necessary to avoid and separate from the devilish Jews ([…]tan Juden) who threaten the “Aryan” world with annihilation. Large posters were put up in the streets showing a Jew with ghastly features; part of his face covered by a gigantic louse, with the sentence [in the background]: Jews, lice, typhus.
There were notices put up around Warsaw’s northern quarter, usually inhabited by Jews, saying: Senchensperrgebeit?? [Germ. incomprehensible]. These unjustified notices and barbed-wire barricades placed next to them stirred up anxiety among the Jewish population.
In November 1940 Fischer announced the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw with its boundaries appearing in the original plan [...] with barbed wire and the above-mentioned notices. All the Jews from Warsaw and Praga had two weeks to move into the specified area. The “Aryans” who had lived there were obliged to leave their flats. The deadline for workshops and shops was extended by 15 days.
The entire ghetto was surrounded, at the Judenrat ’s expense, with walls that were several metres high; [the order] of 15 November specified that no Jew was permitted to go outside the walls. As for the Jewish shops and workshops located outside the ghetto, another order was issued by Fischer in accordance with which all such buildings and facilities would be confiscated, which was just another cynical fraud committed by the Germans, and an opportunity to rob people.
The population of the Ghetto, which consisted of about 450,000 people placed inside a small area, was constantly [incre]ased by excluding more and more new streets from the area of the Jewish quarter on the one hand, and herding Jews in from the towns and cities of the so-called Warsaw District on the other. Thousands of families, ruined mainly by repeated resettlements and deprived of any possessions, beaten up and mistreated, arrived in the Ghetto again.
Due to its complete separation from the surrounding world, the Ghetto faced starvation. Food rations allotted to the population in exchange for [food ration coupons] only satisfied 10 per cent of one’s daily [cal]oric requirements. Getting food became an [urg]ent matter. On both sides of the boundary walls, there appeared masses of people smuggling on a large scale. However, the food provided by smuggling only minimally remedied 90 per cent caloric deficiency of the 450,000 Ghetto residents.
A large proportion of the Ghetto residents became unemployed, inefficient, started to live from hand to mouth, [...], in order to survive for yet another week, another month, awaiting a miracle. Gradually, they sank into abject poverty. Sanitation constantly deteriorated, louse infestation increased, starvation intensified more and more and became the all-powerful master in the crowded streets of the Ghetto. More and more people begged for a piece of bread; one could constantly see in the streets people of various ages felling down out of exhaustion and dying of starvation.
The undernourishment of the population was so severe and widespread that during post- mortem examinations [...] it was impossible to detect any subcutaneous or visceral fat.
It should be emphasized that in normal conditions people who die of cancer or another disease, even the most exhausting one, still have a fairly copious layer of fat. We did not see thicker layers of fat until, after a long break, we examined the corpses of the Jews who had freshly arrived from abroad and died of typhus, which was the event of the day in the post- mortem room.
There are laboratory tests conducted in America in the field of epidemiology in which spreads of epidemics among mice were observed in isolated places constructed specially for that purpose; a new healthy or infected animal was thrown into such a group of laboratory animals.
The Germans repeated this experiment with the population of many thousands people in the Ghetto.
From time to time, where the small foci of a typhus epidemic were smouldering, thousands, and later tens of thousands, of newcomers, initially from Poland and then from all Europe, were thrown by the Germans into the population that had been concentrated to an unbelievable degree, doomed to cold, starvation, filth, louse infestation and mental lethargy as a result of constant ill-treatment and beating. It was certain to cause the outbreak of a typhus epidemic on a large scale. And it did.
Another epidemic broke out in June 1941 and continued until June 1942. It spread not only in “transit camps” [for] homeless people, like the first epidemic had done, but it swept all over the Ghetto, infecting about 100,000 people. This epidemic was a lot more acute than the first one, with a death rate of 20 per cent (in the first one it was 10 per cent); during that time, about 20,000 people died of typhus. The second epidemic broke out at the time of the compulsory transfer of the hospital from Czyste Street to the Jewish quarter, into the buildings that had not been prepared for that purpose. Due to the large number of ill people who occupied the hospital it was impossible to delouse them or meet basic hygiene requirements. The ill lay on room and corridor floors, or in groups of two or three in a single bed at best. So, small wonder that in those conditions, all the admissions personnel and a considerable number of medical and auxiliary personnel fell ill with typhus.
The German authorities issued a number of trite orders, which were usually pointless in the conditions in which people lived in the Ghetto. Any case of typhus had to be referred to a hospital – it was a doctor and [...] his or her family that were responsible for disobeying that order. All the residents of the flat where typhus was detected had to go through a week’s quarantine. In accordance with this order, one should have quarantined all the population of the Ghetto at the peak of the epidemic, since there was no flat without ill residents. Any building where typhus had been detected was closed by a commission; sometimes the whole street was closed, with disregard for the provision of food for the residents. As a result, this led to abuse and bribery on the part of the people who were supposed to supervise the execution of the above-mentioned orders.
An extreme example of the pretence of the intentional [...], which was typical of the German administration of the Ghetto, was the activity of disinfection [...], who were headed by [...] Braun, so-called Oberdesinfektor; he was at work holding a whip accompanied by a large [...] and was the terror of the Ghetto; he extorted bribes, arranged drinking sessions with his subordinates, beat and humiliated people, and cared about disinfection and pest control the least.
The German administration intentionally unleashed the typhus epidemic in the Ghetto; the grotesque method of combating the epidemic in reality favoured its spread. Although the living conditions constantly deteriorated, the epidemic died out on its own. After a large proportion of the population had been ill with typhus (in this particular case 25 per cent), the [...]rulence of the germ decreased – this is a known biological phenomenon.
Typhus was not the only cause of the increasing death rate in the Ghetto. A considerably heavier toll was taken by starvation and tuberculosis. The doctors could examine pathological changes [...] on an unprecedented scale, something that had probably not been observed in Europe for centuries. Unfortunately, we were completely helpless as far as the treatment of [...] diseases was concerned, since fat and protein [...]ances and vitamins which were indispensable for such cases, [...] unavailable for us; at our disposal were only [dr]y bread, groats and potatoes.
German dignitaries and military doctors [...] often toured our hospitals [...] displayed no sympathy or feelings; they were only interested in the [...] rash and in the diseases caused by starvation; they turned the dying people over and asked the [...]llowing matter-of-fact questions: how long one had to starve to reach the condition in which our patients [...]re or in how many days a given child would die of starvation, etc. It [...] an indisputable [mat]ter for Germans of any sort that Jews [...] should not have been dying of starvation and typhus.
In parallel with starvation, tuberculosis spread alarmingly. An exhausted body is unable to develop any immunity. It was especially children who, being more sensitive to [...], died in large numbers. Mild or chronic forms were almost not observed; tuberculosis developed as an acute infectious disease, [pu]tting an end to the life of an ill person within a few or a [doz] en or so days.
The death rate in the Ghetto reached such proportions that the cemetery overflowed with decomposing corpses; the personnel overburdened with work could not keep up with burying them. In accordance with an order issued by the German authorities, the dead were buried in mass graves, each consisting of 500–600 dead people, with the corpses layered. Tours for German sol[diers] called “Rundfahrt durch das Juden [ghet]to” also included the cemetery; they saw the mass graves and listened to propaganda speeches given by their guides. After the tour was over, the tour guide asked in the cemetery administrative office how many Jews had died that week, and having received the figures, he was in the habit of adding: Viel zu weng.
Those who might have thought that the Germans allowed the people in the Ghetto to peacefully die of starvation, tuberculosis or typhus were wrong. People lived in constant uncertainty and fear of new forms of persecution and surprises.
Every day, killed and wounded people were in the streets. A car travelling through the Jewish quarter to the Pawiak prison was the terror of the Ghetto; aiming to reduce the vigilance of passers-by, the car would frequently change route; on its way, especially in narrow streets, its passengers would shoot and beat passers-by with iron clubs and boards.
At night, the Germans would bring those Jews discovered on the “Aryan” side to Orla Street in the Ghetto; they were murdered with shots to the back of their heads and left on the street, which, as a result of this, was called “the street of death.”
One could often see [...] heart-breaking scenes at the gates of the Ghetto. A sadistic gendarme, a monster, [...] a human called “Frankenstein”; every day during his guard duty he killed or wounded several Jews with impunity; he copied their personal details from the papers that he had taken out of their pockets into his notebook, [...] mit deutscher Ordnung; during a dozen or so months, he was guilty of killing or wounding several hundred people.
At the exits from the Ghetto German guards eagerly caught the children who slipped outside in order to get some food for themselves and for their families. These children were often given some extra food by Poles; they were also able to buy food for considerably lower prices than they could within the walls. In accordance with orders issued by the German authorities, a Jew that was found outside the Ghetto had to be handed over to the police and the Gendarmerie. Any German could shoot dead a Jewish child stopped outside the walls; it often happened that a gendarme or an SS-man caught a child by his or her legs, smashed the child’s head against the cobblestones and threw him or her into the gutter, to the joy of his brothers in arms.
Those Jews that were caught outside the Ghetto were brought in small groups to the Jewish prison on Gęsia Street supervised by the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst, naturally under the control of the German police. They were put on immediate trial, conducted in the prison courtyard, right in front of the eyes of hundreds of other people put there for the same offence. The “criminals” – usually half-[dead] skeletons – were sentenced to death. SA-man, Dr Auerswald, the Commissary of the Ghetto [...] in formalities: he required the presence of a Jewish gravedigger and rabbi at the execution. Auerswald used posters to inform Jewish people about carrying out a death sentence for leaving the Ghetto wilfully. It was usually the case that after such an execution, an article appeared in the daily press, published by the Germans, which used figures and charts to illustrate visually that every Jewish child who left the Ghetto infected several dozen “Aryans” with typhus; hence, the conclusion was do not help Jewish children, do not sell them anything, do not give them any extra food; instead, hand them over immediately to gendarmes or the Gestapo.
However, neither individual marking nor repeated mass executions were able to prevent children from making their trips to get a piece of bread – starvation is more terrible than the fear of death.
It is also necessary to mention so-called [labo]r camps, which, according to the assurances of the German Employment Agency, were supposed to serve an “educational function – to teach Jews how to work honestly”; they promised good housing conditions and excellent food. Small wonder, then, that several hundred young Jews, who were starving, volunteered. This recruitment proved insufficient; therefore, day and night round-ups in the Ghetto were started with the participation of the Germans, Ukrainians, and Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst. Those who were caught were sent to the camps located across the General Government. It turned out that they were extermination camps in every sense of the word, and their personnel was headed by leading degenerate Nazis. The most infamous one was the SS-man Duhle. The [cam]p prisoners were consistently starved, mistreated, humiliated and denied their human dignity, simply mass-murdered for the smallest negligence in following the rules. In almost all of these camps, a typhus epidemic soon broke out. Some commandants of the camps ordered the execution of all ill people on the spot, while others recommended sending them to the Ghetto. These ill people arrived at the hospital so starved and exhausted or mutilated and beaten that any treatment proved futile. This was yet another way to exterminate Jews fast – this time, it concerned young people who were sound in body.
Despite the constantly growing death rate, the [number] of people in the Ghetto was not decreasing – new transports of Jews from almost all over Europe were still arriving. The Warsaw Ghetto was chosen by the Germans to be one of the main places used to exterminate Jews.
Before the war, the death rate among Jews [...] was about 10 per mille, that is for each group of 350,000 Jews, there were 350 deaths monthly. Already in the initial stage [...] the death rate increased substantially as a result of poverty and deprivation among the resettled people. In the second half of 1940, it gradually reached 3,000 deaths, and in 1941 – 4,000 or 5,000 deaths monthly; at the peak of the typhus epidemic, at the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, it reached 9,000 deaths monthly. This way, the death rate increased by [10] and eventually 30 times the death rate before the war.
Thanks to the “care” of Fischer and his subordinate police and administrative apparatus, up to July 1942 about 120,000 died in the Warsaw Ghetto and at least one third of the remaining ones were in the final stage of starvation. Apparently, the rate of extermination was still too slow, as in July 1942 the Germans set about extermination on a large scale with the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.