Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service During the Nazi Occupation by Katarzyna Person (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service During the Nazi Occupation by Katarzyna Person Gary Bruce Person, Katarzyna–Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service During the Nazi Occupation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021. 232 p. In the late summer of 1942, the Jewish Order Service of the Warsaw ghetto brought roughly 6,000 people a day to the Umschlagplatz, where German authorities then deported them to Treblinka. The Service was savage in their rounding up of adults and children alike, many of the latter from Janusz Korczak’s orphanage. Jozef Szmerling, who oversaw the Umschlagplatz, was bestial. How it came to pass that Jews ruthlessly helped to dispatch other Jews to their deaths is the central question of Warsaw Ghetto Police. The Warsaw ghetto police was established in September 1940 when Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the Warsaw ghetto Judenrat (Jewish council), received orders to form a Jewish police force to assist with keeping order in the ghetto. Although the Service had some room to maneuver, it was never fully independent, reporting to the Judenrat, Polish Blue Police, and, the ultimate authority, the German civil administration. Czerniakow appointed Jozef Szerynski, a Jew who had converted to Catholicism, to oversee the roughly 2,000 strong ghetto police. It became immediately evident to ghetto residents that a position in the new police force would be advantageous. The author, Katarzyna Person, makes [End Page 232] a compelling case that the Service did not represent a cross-section of Jewish society, but was tilted towards the wealthy. The majority of the force had been office workers, merchants, or industrialists, as they were able to bribe their way into an organization that allowed them to avoid the roundups to labour camps. Although historians refer to the ghetto “police” as a shorthand, many of its tasks were more mundane than those of a police force, typically involving sanitation. They maintained general cleanliness in the ghetto, removed debris from pavement and roadways, monitored carts for safety, ensured horses were not overburdened, checked the ghetto walls for holes made by smugglers, and the like. Significantly, they were forbidden from conducting criminal cases, which remained the purview of the Blue Police and the German authorities. As time passed, their duties evolved to become more expansive and grislier. They established checkpoints in front of Judenrat buildings, collected debts from shops, and dealt with children who lay in the streets abandoned or dead. During “typhoid checks” on random dwellings, they beat Jews mercilessly and stole their money. In the spring of 1941, they began to round up Jews for labour detail and even furnished some of the guards at the labour camps. Such actions earned them the derogatory nickname “catchers” by other Jews and comparisons to officers in tsarist Russia who delivered Jews to the Russian military authorities. A tipping point in their duties came in November and December 1941 when the Jewish Order Service was used as an auxiliary in the execution of other Jews being held in a German prison. “For many,” Person writes, “these executions became a symbol of the final moral collapse of the Jewish police” (p. 74). Because of incidents like this, the service’s excessive use of force, and its terrible corruption, the service was vilified by ghetto residents, who described the force as “a collection of smugglers, Gestapo informers, and war profiteers” (p. 76). Oneg Shabbat, the underground group that ran the Ringelblum Archive, denounced the force as collaborators and betrayers of their own people. Emanuel Ringelblum himself was very critical of the force as well. Person is careful to point out that the force was not an “outsider” force of Jews who had converted to Catholicism, as might be implied by the situation of the Service’s leader. It was primarily composed of unassimilated Jews. This book is driven by a strong chronological narrative, with the occasional pause for analysis. Because Person’s analysis is so thoughtful, readers would no doubt desire more of it. One of the most intriguing sections of the book, for example, is her discussion of the concept of violence. As much as the Jewish policemen hid behind the standard refrain that “round ups carried out...