32.6 GOLGOTA
the communique was false, and that they had committed their precious army to
sacrifices that were strictly unnecessary. This was not the last time that Stalin
was punished for taking the Nazis at their word. As a result, he created 993
Soviet heroes, who would otherwise have lived to fight another day.
The division of the spoils was arranged by a German—Soviet convention
signed on 28 September. A demarcation line was fixed along the rivers Bug and
San, to which the W'ebrmacbt now withdrew. For practical purposes, this line
was regarded as a permanent frontier. Both zones of occupation were subjected
to the unrestrained political engineering of their respective conquerors.
For Warsaw, the outbreak of the Second World War bore little resemblance
to the outbreak of the First. The Germans of 1939 showed none of the cir-
cumspection of their predecessors in 1914-15, and the Varsovians showed
none of their previous inclination to collaborate. The defence of the city in
September 1939 set the tone for later defiance. Abandoned by the Government
and President on the 5th and by the Commander-in-Chief and part of the
General Staff on the 6th, the capital's defenders, headed by General Walerian
Czuma (1890-1962) in the first instance, and the city President, Stefan
Starzynski (1893—1943), battled on against the odds, and under incessant aer-
ial bombardment. Subsumed after 8 September under the Army 'Warszawa'
under General Juliusz Rommel, they continued their unequal struggle. The act
of capitulation of 27 September was imposed by the German General Johannes
Blaskowitz on a mutilated city whose victims already numbered scores of
thousands and whose most ancient monuments - the Royal Castle, the
Cathedral of St. John, and the Old City Square - had already been reduced to
rubble. The immediate separation of the Jewish population governed by its
Judenrat (Jewish Council) from the Aryan population governed by the Urzqd
Miejski (Municipal Office), enabled the Nazi administrators to obstruct all
thoughts of mutual assistance from the start. The Terror, which included the
shooting of 106 hostages in Wawer on 27 December 1939, steadily mounted in
intensity. The Ghetto, whose gates were finally closed in November 1940, was
used as a collecting centre for Jews from all over Poland. For two years, dis-
ciplined by its own Jewish police force and headed by the ill-starred Adam
Czerniakow (1880-1942), it was forced to toil for the Wehrmacbt in concen-
tration camp conditions. The main deportations to Treblinka and Auschwitz
took place in July 1942, and following the Ghetto Rising, in April 1943.
Thereafter, it was used as the Gestapo's principal place of execution. By 1943,
mass killings were commonplace amongst the population at large. Price
inflation of over 300 per cent nullified the value of wages, while food rationing
and food shortages reduced the average diet to starvation levels. Resistance
was offered most typically by economic sabotage, by deliberate underproduc-
tion, by administrative devices such as the printing of bogus ration cards by the
Urzqd Miejski, by an elaborate black market, and, increasingly, by violence.
On 14 December 1943, Governor Frank roundly blamed Warsaw for the ills of
his General-Gouvernement. 'Warsaw', he said, 'is the source of all our misfor-