The Warsaw Ghetto — the ration of hunger

The Warsaw Ghetto was sealed on 16 November 1940: a three-metre wall enclosed about 400,000 Jews within some 3.4 km², the most densely populated district in Europe. Supply was the responsibility of the German administration, via the Transferstelle, which controlled all flows between the ghetto and the city. In April 1941, the civilian Kommissar Heinz Auerswald was appointed head of the "Jewish district," a post he held until November 1942.

The official rations allotted to Jews were derisory — on the order of 180 to 200 calories a day in 1941, against around 700 for non-Jewish Poles and more than 2,600 for Germans. It was a deliberate famine. Survival required circumventing the system: large-scale smuggling, carried out notably by children, clandestine workshops, and soup kitchens run by mutual-aid organizations such as the Aleynhilf made it just possible to reach 1,000 to 1,100 calories, at the cost of a ruinous black market. The Jewish Council (Judenrat) chaired by Adam Czerniaków had no power over the overall volume: the Germans set it; it could only distribute the scarcity and plead with the occupier.

In the summer of 1941, famine and typhus killed more than 5,000 people a month; in all, more than 100,000 would die of hunger and disease before the deportations to Treblinka. The question put to the German administration, which held the levers: adjust upward to halt the slaughter, maintain the starvation level, or reduce it further.