Adam Czerniaków

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Adam Czerniaków (before 1939)

Adam Czerniaków (born November 30, 1880 in Warsaw ; died July 23, 1942 there ) was an engineer and a member of the Polish Senate . The German occupiers had forcibly appointed him chairman of the Jewish council of the Warsaw ghetto for almost three years . Czerniaków was forced by the Germans to have German suppression measures carried out against the Jews with its administrative authority. When, at the beginning of the Great Action on July 22, 1942 , he was supposed to have 6000 inhabitants ready for deportation to the extermination camps , he withdrew from participating in this crime against humanity by suicide . Until his death, Czerniaków kept a diary in which he recorded the crimes committed by the Germans against the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.

Life

Czerniaków studied engineering and taught in the Jewish trade school in Warsaw. From 1927 to 1934 he was a member of the Warsaw City Council ( rada miasta ) and in 1931 he was elected to the Polish Senate. One of his greatest critics throughout his life was Emanuel Ringelblum . On October 4, 1939, a few days after the city surrendered to the Wehrmacht, Czerniaków was appointed chairman of the 24-person “Judenrat” or council of elders and was thus responsible for the implementation of German orders and orders in the Warsaw ghetto.

On July 22, 1942, at the beginning of the “Great Action” as part of the Reinhardt Campaign, Czerniaków received an order from Hermann Höfle to have the Judenrat compile lists of 7,000 inhabitants a day for immediate “resettlement” “Should be deported. Otherwise, the shooting of several hundred hostages including his wife and members of the council of elders was threatened. The young ghetto resident Marcel Reich-Ranicki was a typist for the Judenrat and had to write down Höfle's instructions and translate them into Polish.

As it turned out later, “the East” meant the Treblinka extermination camp . During July 22nd, Czerniaków managed to get a few exceptions for hospital workers, the spouses of factory workers and some vocational students. For example, his advocacy for the orphans of Janusz Korczak was in vain .

The next day, July 23, 1942, Czerniaków committed suicide with a cyanide capsule . He wanted to show the ghetto residents a signal of the grave situation and hopelessness and not allow himself to be turned into an instrument of the National Socialists, that is, he did not want to participate personally in the drawing up of lists for the murder of the ghetto residents. Before he committed suicide, he left two farewell letters, one for his wife and one for his employees:

“They ask me to kill the children of my people with my own hands. I have no choice but to die ”and“ Worthoff and his colleagues [from the resettlement staff ] were with me and demanded that a children's transport be prepared for tomorrow. With this my bitter goblet is filled to the brim, because I cannot deliver defenseless children to death. I've decided to resign. Do not regard this as an act of cowardice or an escape. I am powerless, my heart breaks with sadness and pity, I can't take it any longer. My deed will make everyone see the truth and perhaps put it on the right path of action. I am aware that I am leaving you a difficult legacy. "

Adam Czerniaków's diary was published in 1979 in English by Raul Hilberg, with extensive commentary . A Hebrew translation had already been published in 1968, the original Polish text only in 1972. Based on this, an annotated Polish version was published which was edited by the Polish historian Marian Fuks. This version was the basis of the German version of the diary - see below.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki has dedicated a chapter of his autobiography to Adam Czerniaków. It is entitled An intellectual, a martyr, a hero .

For Claude Lanzmann's epic Shoah film documentary, Hilberg read and commented on excerpts from Czerniaków's diary. At the end of the sequence, Lanzmann remarked: You were Czerniaków . Lanzmann saw Hilberg as a relative of Czerniaków, the sober chronicler of the downfall.

Movies

In 2001 Czerniaków was embodied in the documentary-oriented feature film The Uprising by Donald Sutherland .

In Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah (1974–1985), Raul Hilberg read and commented on excerpts from Czerniaków's diary.

Publication of Adam Czerniaków's diary

  • 23.7.1942-ומן גיטו וארשא: 6.9.1939 . Ed. Nachmann Blumental, original edition in Hebrew with facsimiles of the Polish original, published by Yad Vashem , Jerusalem 1968. Yad Vashem acquired the manuscript in 1964 from Canada.
  • Dziennik Getta Warszawskiego 6.IX.1939-23.VII.1942 . A Polish version of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw , published in the bulletin of the institute in 1972.
  • The Warsaw diary of Adam Czerniakow. Prelude to doom. Ed. Raul Hilberg ; Stanislaw Staron; Josef Kermisz (co-founder of the Warsaw Jewish-Historical Institute and employee of Yad Vashem), in English In collaboration with the Yad Vashem Memorial. Stein and Day, New York 1979, ISBN 0-8128-2523-3 , 420 pages, ill. (English), reprinted by Ivan R. Dee Publisher 1999, ISBN 1-56663-230-7 , 444 pp one edition with a scientific introduction by Josef Kermis and one by Raul Hilberg and Stanislaw Staron. The edition is based on the Polish version from 1972. Explanations by Hilberg and his co-authors are appended to the text.
  • Adama Czerniakowa Dziennik getta warszawskiego: 6. IX. 1939-23. VII. 1942 . Staatlicher Wissenschaftsverlag, Warsaw 1983. Ed. Marian Fuks (employee and later director of the Jewish-Historical Institute Warsaw), scientifically annotated Polish version with a foreword by Israel Gutman .
  • In the Warsaw Ghetto. Adam Czerniaków's diary 1939–1942. German edition, Beck, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-406-31560-7 . (Various editions, most recently as a paperback Beck Verlag, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-62949-5 ). Based on the Polish version edited and edited by Marian Fuks with a foreword by Israel Gutman in Warsaw in 1983. In this German edition, as the German translator Silke Lent writes in her preliminary remark, Marian Fuk's very detailed remarks have only been taken over in abbreviated form.

Web links

Commons : Adam Czerniaków  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On July 22, 1942: Speech by Marcel Reich-Ranicki before the Bundestag in 2012 on bundestag.de
  2. ↑ In the Warsaw Ghetto. Adam Czerniaków's diary 1939–1942 (“Dziennik getta warszawskiego”). Beck, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-406-31560-7 , p. 285. (New edition with foreword by Israel Gutman and afterword by Marcel Reich-Ranicky, Beck, Munich 2013).
  3. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki : An intellectual, a martyr, a hero . In: Ders .: My Life, Vol. 2: From 1938 to 1944 . Edition Pantheon, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-570-55186-8 , pp. 243-252.
  4. ↑ Sequence listing in Shoah , see cassette 4, 03.
  5. ↑ On the trail of the perpetrators . In: Berliner Zeitung , August 7, 2007
personal data
SURNAME Czerniaków, Adam
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Engineer and Chairman of the Council of Elders in the Warsaw Ghetto
DATE OF BIRTH November 30, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw
DATE OF DEATH July 3, 1942
Place of death Warsaw