Life in Ghetto After Warsaw 'Great Deportation'

The terrible events have engulfed me […] I have no words to express what has happened to us since the day the expulsion was ordered […] With one stroke of the pen the face of Warsaw was changed. They made an end to its peddlers; its beggars and paupers and dawn-and-outers were collected; its stores were closed; its streets were emptied. Everywhere there is the silence of the graveyard.
Chaim Kaplan, The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, p. 383, 390

After the conclusion of the Great Deportation some 60,000 grief stricken Jews, living in a number of enclaves, remained alive within the area of what had been the Warsaw Ghetto. They had lost parents, partners, children and friends who had been deported to Treblinka and murdered in the gas chambers. Knowing full well that the sword of Treblinka hung over their heads, these Jews came to the understanding that they could not rely on the Germans' promises that they would be sent to forced labor camps; they decided to disobey the orders of the German authorities, whatever these may be.

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