Szopy w getcie warszawskim - próba analizy zjawiska
The Shops in Warsaw Ghetto – an Attempt to Analyse the Phenomenon

Summary/Abstract: The “shops” are one of the topics that come up most often in reminiscences from Warsaw ghetto. They had an immediate impact on the lives of thousand of their employees and indirectly on the perception of the whole Jewish district. In the first part of the article the author presents the economic situation of Warsaw’s Jews in the first year of the Nazi occupation against the background of the „Aryan” population and looks at the damage to the city and the orders of the occupational authorities pushing the people of Warsaw to the verge of poverty. Even in these circumstances, former Jewish businesses were revived and new workshops formed, exploiting the demand for army supplies, engaging in volume production of brushes, furniture and other materials the armed forces needed. Initially the new enterprises were under control of the Jewish Council, but soon the German industrialists took them over. These businesses were largely formed as a result of changes in the German’s economic policies, which made it easier to secure raw materials and reduced the levies on the ghetto products. This is followed by a review of organizational changes, whereby the previous German trading partners assumed direct control over the workshops. Despite these changes, the growth of the shops until March 1942 was rather slow as the low pay and tough working conditions effectively discouraged potential employees from seeking such jobs. Besides, a large part of ghetto manufacturing was done on cottage-industry basis, and that was not included in the statistics illustrating the work in the shops. However, the news about the Holocaust reaching the ghetto and the increased bread allowance for shop workers resulted in a rapid growth of the shops, peaking in June and July 1942. The start of the extermination campaign in the ghetto produced a surge of interest in the shops, seen by the Jews as protection against deportations. However, the sudden growth of the number of shop workers was short-lived as successive selections conducted in the shops reduced employment back to the mid-July 1942 level. This was a deliberate scheme engineered by those in charge of the liquidation drive for the purpose of ensuring only the necessary number of employees to the workshops. A further part of the work shows the operation of the shops in the vestigial ghetto, where many of them resemble separate forced labour camps, and the repeated efforts to move them out of Warsaw, which began in the autumn of 1942. The final chord of the work of the shops is the ghetto uprising, when the evacuation of the shops from the district about to be3 destroyed was attempted, with efforts to takt the shops’ workers to labour camps, which, according to the sources, was a marked success of the Nazis.

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