Czerniakow appealed to the Germans for exemptions from the
deportation, particularly for orphans. He received no assurances of
such an exemption. The following day the Germans increased the daily
quota of deportees to 7,000. When he asked the number of days per week
on which the operation would be carried out, Czerniakow was informed
that it would be seven days a week. Höfle's deputy, Hauptsturmführer
Hermann Worthoff, ordered Czerniakow to provide 10,000 deportees,
including children, for the transport leaving on 24 July. Czerniakow
realised that if he could not be the guardian of the children, the
future of the community, then all was lost. He confided a final entry
to his diary: "It is three o'clock. So far 4,000 are ready to go. The
orders are that there must be 9,000 by four o'clock…" He wrote two
further letters, one of which was to his wife, saying: "They demand
from me to kill the children of my nation with my own hands. There is
nothing left for me but to die." The second was addressed to the
Judenrat, in which he wrote: "They demanded (of me) to prepare
transports of children. I cannot take it any longer, I cannot allow
(the) death of innocent children; this is why I decided to do away
with myself. This is not cowardice or escape. I am powerless, my heart
is splitting from sorrow and compassion and I cannot bear this any
longer. My deed will show the truth to all and maybe it will encourage
(the) right actions. I am aware that I am leaving you with a difficult
legacy". That evening, alone in his office, Czerniakow requested a
glass of water and swallowed one of the twenty four cyanide pills (one
for each member of the Judenrat) that he had kept in his desk.

Mary Berg wrote about his suicide in her diary, amongst the earliest
historical records to emerge from the Warsaw ghetto:

"24 July 1942:
The head of the Community, Adam Czerniakow, has committed suicide. He
did it last night, 23 July. He could no longer bear his terrible
burden. According to the news we receive here, he took this tragic
step when the Germans ordered him to increase the contingent of people
to be deported. He saw no other way out, except leaving this terrible
world."
In common with many other members of the Judenräte, particularly the
chairmen, Czerniakow was by no means universally popular. Individuals
such as Emanuel Ringelblum and Itzhak Katznelson regarded him with
disdain as a man out of touch with the Jewish masses. Stefan Ernest,
who was employed for a time in the Employment Office of the Judenrat,
considered him incapable of meaningful resistance, a view shared by
many young people. Some believed he was a pawn of the Germans, others
that he was too indecisive. Stanislaw Adler, a member of the Judenrat,
wrote : "Adam Czerniakow was an experienced social and community
worker and a model of the well read, hard working, good willed man,
but he was simply unable to make a decision." Another ghetto resident,
Marek Stok, noted that most people considered Czerniakow honest but
weak-willed. Apolinary Hartglas, a former member of the Polish
parliament who had escaped from Poland to Palestine in 1940, described
Czerniakow an ambitious man who had sought German approval as Chairman
of the Judenrat. This claim appears to overstate Czerniakow's motives;
he did not exploit the arrival of the invaders in order to make
himself the leader of the Jewish community. But it is true that he was
not averse to occupying the position, and was by no means reluctant to
accept the appointment. Czerniakow was a vain man; he liked official
parties, parades, pompous speeches, official openings, the cutting of
ribbons. The ceremonial aspect of being in power - he was the only
inhabitant of the Ghetto allowed to have a motor vehicle - gave him a
good deal of satisfaction. Until approximately September 1941, he held
a dual title, being named as both Chairman of the Jewish Council and
President of the Council of the Elders of the Jewish religious
community in Warsaw (Obmann des Judenrates und Präsident des
Ältestenrates der jüdischen Kultusgemeinde in Warschau.) From mid-May
1941, his position was deemed to correspond to that of the mayor of
Polish Warsaw. In time, Czerniakow came to realise that being chairman
of the Judenrat was no sinecure, but rather a heavy burden that would
ultimately claim his life. He could hardly have been said to occupy
his position for material gain. He worked a seven-day week almost all
year round and drew no salary as chairman. He commented to his diary
that he owned nothing except his furniture and clothes. And he was
arrested and physically assaulted by the occupiers more than once.

Many of the leading members of the various political parties and of
the Jewish community had left Warsaw in the first month of the war,
while it was still possible to do so. Czerniakow also had this
opportunity, but he refused to leave, and was critical of those that
had. Despite his other strictures, it should be noted that Ernest also
commented: "Czerniakow was undoubtedly a man of the best will, the
finest intentions, the highest devotion… He was clearly willing to
sacrifice his life for the sake of the community… Wounds inflicted on
his person did not hurt him, but he was truly tormented by the
suffering of the ghetto as a whole. He was a pure symbol of his
oppressed people." Jan Mawult (Stanislaw Gombinski), a lawyer who
directed a department of the Jewish police force, wrote:

"… Even if he wasn't entirely immune to gestures of servility, he was
by no means excessive in this regard… And though he was occasionally
criticized for this, he played the role of tribal chief far less than
certain others… Everyone who came into contact with him, whether
personally or on official business, saw that he was frank and direct,
without the slightest sign of bluster… His acceptance of a Byzantine
atmosphere was not an indication of his private personality; rather it
stemmed from his need, being a man in public office, to put up with
this or that despite his inner preferences.
Maybe this is where he was wrong; maybe this was his mistake. In his
effort to avoid any despotic tendencies, he erred in the opposite
direction: he was not decisive enough. He followed no political line;
his only mission was to survive… If `politics' is defined as the art
of ruling, he (was) not a politician and (had) no aspirations to be
one. He (tried) with all his might to help as many people as
possible."

Even Czerniakow's suicide aroused conflicting opinions. Mawult
believed that "when he saw the end was near, he decided to end it
himself, not a minute too soon or a minute too late." Ernest
considered that Czerniakow's death could be regarded by some as an act
of protest, that perhaps he wanted to teach the ghetto to assert its
right to choose its own death. As Chaim Kaplan put it:

"He followed the Talmudic law: if someone comes to kill me, using
might and power, and turns a deaf ear to all my pleas, he can do to me
whatever his heart desires, since he has the power, and strength
always prevails. But to give my consent, to sign my own death warrant
– this no power on earth can force me to do, not even the brutal force
of the foul-souled Nazi."
The poet Yitzhak Katznelson considered that Czerniakow's death was " a
sign of his desire to free himself of guilt feelings, to expiate a sin
that weighed on his conscience." Ernest, however, was more critical:

"But in this [his suicide] the President committed a major error,
possibly even an act of cowardice. Perhaps at the very last moment he
lost the courage, the strength, the nerve… Believe me, in our
circumstances nothing was easier than choosing to die; deciding to
survive was harder by far. Czerniakow should have lived and led the
rebellion… He should at least have told people what was in store for
them before he took his leave… Because Czerniakow now knew the whole
truth. In the end, though, people went to their death leaderless,
submissive and ignorant of the fate awaiting them… [He] was simply
unable to grasp the need for a course of action that required
bloodshed… But Czerniakow was not a man of active resistance."
For Marek Edelman, Czerniakow's final letter should have read: "Jews!
We are taken away to meet death. Defend yourselves!" Edelman and Antek
Cukierman, both members of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB),
considered this to be the most serious accusation: that of possessing
and hiding knowledge concerning the future fate of the Jews. Edelman
wrote:

"(Czerniakow) knew beyond any doubt that the supposed "deportation to
the East" actually meant the death of hundreds and thousands of people
in gas chambers, and he refused to assume responsibility for it. Being
unable to counteract events he decided to quit altogether. At the
time, however, we thought that he had no right to act as he did. We
thought that since he was the only person in the ghetto whose voice
carried a great deal of authority, it had been his duty to inform the
entire population of the real state of affairs, and also to dissolve
all public institutions, particularly the Jewish police, which had
been established by the Jewish Council and was legally subordinate to
it."
Perhaps the most generous and sympathetic tribute to Czerniakow was
that paid by Chaim Kaplan in his diary entry of 26 July 1942:

"He did not have a good life, but he had a beautiful death… There are
those who earn immortality in a single hour. The President, Adam
Czerniakow, earned his immortality in a single instant."
Adam Czerniakow was born in Warsaw in 1880 to a middle class family.
He obtained a diploma in chemical engineering at the Warsaw
Polytechnic, and a second at the Industrial Department of the Dresden
Polytechnic. In addition, he attended the Trade School in Warsaw, and
spoke several languages. He completed his chemical engineering studies
in 1908, subsequently teaching at the Jewish vocational school in
Warsaw, as well as serving in other positions in Poland. In 1909, he
was imprisoned by the Tsarist authorities for his participation in the
Polish independence movement. Czerniakow was an assimilationist who
considered himself to be both a Jew and a Pole, and was concerned
about the problem of integrating the two peoples. He once said:

"Whoever thinks that the problem of two peoples living together in one
country is easy to digest, assimilate both elements and create from
them a conglomeration comprising a valuable alloy—is wrong." But easy
or not, assimilation remained a lifelong goal. Czerniakow was a
cultured man, an introverted book lover and poet, described by a
Zionist leader as "a gifted man, lacking any political or public
ideals, but a decent man."
He was a co-organizer of the Central Union of Jewish Craftsmen.
Between 1927 and 1934 he was a member of the Warsaw Municipal Council
and was also a senator from the Non-Partisan Block for Cooperation
with the Government during the years 1931-1939. He was the author of
many scholarly studies, one of which received an award in 1919, as
well as texts on the sugar industry, bakeries and many other subjects
in the field of industrial and practical chemistry. Shortly before the
First World War he had become involved in Jewish public life. As a
member of the executive council, for many inter-war years Czerniakow
was an advisor to the Jewish Community in Warsaw, although he was not
considered to possess leadership material, since he was not a member
of any political party and lacked fluency in Yiddish. By 1939 and the
outbreak of war, Czerniakow occupied the position of deputy chairman
of the Jewish Religious Community (Kehillah; Zydowska Gmina
Wyznaniowa). In the absence of Maurycy Mayzel, chairman of the
Council, who had been appointed by the Polish government, and who had
fled from Warsaw at the beginning of the conflict, Stefan Starzynski,
the mayor of the city, appointed Czerniakow "head of the Jewish
religious community in Warsaw". Czerniakow began to keep a diary from
the very first week of the war, an almost daily habit he maintained
until the afternoon of the last day of his life. It was to the diary
that he poured out the frustrations of his daily struggle to keep the
largest Jewish community in Europe alive. In 1939, when other Jewish
leaders had left Poland, he had been offered a visa to Palestine. He
refused it, choosing instead to remain in Warsaw, serving the Jewish
population to the best of his abilities in the most difficult of
circumstances.

According to the reports of Apolinary Hartglas, Sipo-SD (Security
Police) men raided the headquarters of the Jewish Community on 4
October 1939, and upon asking who the chairman was, were informed by
the caretaker that the position was occupied by Czerniakow. Szmul
Zygielbojm recorded how the Warsaw Judenrat was created by
Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Batz and Czerniakow appointed its chairman:

"… The Gestapo ordered the deputy chairman, Adam Czerniakow, to appear
at its office (Szucha Boulevard). For two days he was abused and then
ordered to deliver the names of rich Jews, as well as other
information about the activities of Jewish organizations and
individuals active in community affairs. He also had to listen to
anti-Semitic speeches and Nazi propaganda oratory before he was
informed that he had been nominated chairman (`Obmann') of the Jewish
community. He also received an order to present a list of 24 Jews to
be nominated members of the Jewish Council and as many names of
persons to serve as deputies…"
Hartglas commented: "It was not the duty of this Council to manage the
affairs of the Community, but – as was set out in the document
appointing the members – to carry out Gestapo orders. It was thus not
a body representing the Jews, but one carrying out Gestapo [orders]
with regard to Jews. This Supreme Council [did] not represent the
community and [could not] supply the needs of the Jews… In general the
Council was not permitted to do anything. Every time it began some
action, the Gestapo came and interfered."

Much of the subsequent criticism of the Judenrat was the product of
the population's impotent rage and frustration in the face of
intolerable circumstances, a position deliberately cultivated by the
Germans. By utilising the Judenrat as the conduit through which they
controlled the ghetto, the regime deflected much of the blame for the
appalling conditions of ghetto life onto the supposed representatives
of the Jews themselves. With the establishment of the ghetto, the
responsibilities of the Judenrat had also expanded enormously, so that
at one point it employed 6,000 individuals, compared to the 530 of the
pre-war Jewish Religious Community. By July 1942 there were 95,000
working Jews, including those employed by the Judenrat, out of a total
population nearly four times as large.

There was no doubting Czerniakow's personal courage and his dignified
behaviour. On 24 November 1939, the Gestapo demanded that the Judenrat
hand over 17 hostages. When Czerniakow instead offered himself as the
sole hostage, the demand was withdrawn. In an attempt to ameliorate
the unbearable conditions of everyday life, in January 1940 Czerniakow
negotiated an agreement with the Sipo-SD, whereby the Judenrat would
supply and pay for a regular labour workforce numbering 8,000-9,000
people, rather than continue with the existing system of random
roundups. The workforce was mostly made up of refugees and the
impoverished, for whom the pittance paid was their sole source of
income.

Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary entry for 17 September 1940 that a
rumour was circulating to the effect that Czerniakow had committed
suicide because of the seventeen edicts about to be imposed on the
Jewish community. The rumour proved false, but in describing
Czerniakow's character, Kaplan was hardly flattering: "… He is a
mediocre man whose education and intelligence combine to make him
something of a nincompoop; it is only through the misfortune of his
people that he has risen to such eminence." But later Kaplan revised
his earlier judgement. He was scathing in his criticism of the
Judenrat, but not of its chairman. In April 1941 he wrote: "The
Judenrat…is an abomination in the eyes of the Warsaw Community…
According to rumour, the President is a decent man. But (with some
exceptions) the people around him are the dregs of humanity…
Everything is done in the name of the President. But in truth,
everything is done without his knowledge and even without his consent,
and perhaps also against his decisions and wishes…"

On 20 September 1940, Czerniakow was ordered to establish a Jewish
Order Police (Ordnungsdienst), to be responsible for the policing of
the proposed ghetto. The Ordnungsdienst peaked at a membership of
2,000-3,000, with a leadership consisting of people with police
experience under the command of Josef Andrzej Szerynski (Szynkman), a
convert to Christianity who had been chosen by Czerniakow and not by
the Germans. The role the Ordnungsdienst were to play was to prove a
source of constant complaint by the ghetto population and of unending
concern to Czerniakow.

In March 1940, the Germans began to refer to the Jewish residential
district as "A Plague-Infected Area" (Seuchensperrgebiet). The
Judenrat was ordered to erect a wall around the "infected area." By
early June, twenty sections of the wall had already been built. On 1
July, Czerniakow was informed by Mende "That the war would be over in
a month and that we would all leave for Madagascar." All work ceased
at this time on two planned ghettos on the outskirts of Warsaw (at
Kolo-Wola and Grochow). The concept of a ghetto had first been mooted
in November 1939, but the idea took a year to reach fruition.
Czerniakow had hoped for an "open" ghetto, but at a conference held on
12 September, Hans Frank, Governor of the Generalgouvernement,
announced that the 500,000 Jews of Warsaw posed a threat to the rest
of the population on health grounds, and that they could no longer be
permitted to "roam around." On 12 October, Yom Kippur, a German decree
formally announced the establishment of the ghetto. On 18 October,
Czerniakow recorded in his diary: "Today our own and city officials
from the housing exchange are touring the ghetto. Bargaining for
specific streets… I abhor this haggling, anyway I do not take part in
it." The ghetto was sealed on 16 November 1940.

Within the ghetto, Czerniakow organized fund raising drives and
created playgrounds for children, as well as organizing raids on
premises containing black market goods which were confiscated and then
distributed to children either in orphanages or living homeless on the
streets. He had estimated in December 1941 that there were about
10,000 inhabitants in the ghetto with capital, 250,000 who could
support themselves, and 150,000 who were destitute. Those at the
bottom of this pyramid of misery were naturally the most vulnerable.
As early as 8 May 1941, Czerniakow had written: "Children starving to
death." He would make weekly rounds of various German functionaries,
describing his problems and sometimes requesting that they pass on his
petitions to their superiors, pleading and appealing for their
support, but only rarely arguing with them. Czerniakow had asked to be
relieved of the chairmanship of the Judenrat in January 1940, but was
advised to withdraw his request "for his own good." In November 1940,
he was arrested by the Gestapo after a refugee from Germany named
Sacksenhausen, who had been employed as a clerk in the Judenrat before
being dismissed by the Chairman , lodged a false complaint with the
Germans. Fortunately, after a few hours detention Czerniakow was
released, unharmed apart from the beating he had received at the time
of his arrest. Czerniakow's everyday humiliations should not be
minimised. The first head of the Transferstelle (the German
administered economic office that acted as the intermediary between
the ghetto and the outside world), Alexander Palfinger, refused to
talk to Jews. Heinz Auerswald, Kommissar (Commissioner) of the ghetto,
complained to Czerniakow that Judenrat officials stood too close when
they spoke to him. There were even some German officials who not only
refused to converse with Jews as a matter of principle, but ordered
that the windows of the Transferstelle be kept open because of the
stench the Jews made.

In December 1940, Czerniakow complained to the District Governor,
Ludwig Fischer, about the lack of provisions for ghetto inmates; in
the previous month each person in the ghetto had received little more
than half of the bread ration allocated to "Aryans", nor had the
ghetto been allocated any sugar, potatoes, flour, noodles, meat,
marmalade, eggs or coal at all. Czerniakow warned that " the great
majority of the Jewish population, which has no steady income and no
assets, will not be able to satisfy even the most rudimentary
necessities of life and will be condemned to death by starvation." His
plea fell on deaf ears. However, by May 1941 there appeared to be a
change in the German attitude toward the ghetto. On 21 May, Czerniakow
met with Fischer, and was told that there was a possibility that food
rations would be increased and orders placed for the workers in the
ghetto. But first the corpses lying in the street had to be quickly
cleared away because of the bad impression they created. Now it seemed
that the ghetto was to become productive, rather than the source of
death through starvation it had been since inception. Unfortunately,
the apparent change in policy was a chimera. In the following days the
mortality rate in the ghetto climbed to 1.5% per month.

In the summer of 1941, Czerniakow received an order to set up a Jewish
prison. The death penalty for leaving the ghetto was announced on 6
November 1941. The first executions were carried out two weeks later.
Through Czerniakow's intervention, Auerswald agreed to work for the
release of a number of those sentenced to death, with some success. In
return a ransom of 1,500 fur coats was paid. Rather than immediate
execution, the condemned were sent to the Treblinka penal camp, where
they either died or became among the first victims of the adjacent
death camp when that became operational a few months later. For a
loyal Nazi, it would appear that Auerswald's relations with Czerniakow
were unusually cordial. Auerswald even released Czerniakow from the
obligation to wear an armband, and allowed the Judenrat Chairman to
address him in a surprisingly frank manner. But Auerswald ultimately
proved to be as deceitful and dishonest as his colleagues. If
Czerniakow believed he had found a sympathetic ear, he was sadly
deluded.

Although Czerniakow maintained contact with the Jewish underground, he
considered it a threat to the survival of the community; he was
opposed to plans for armed resistance. Thus the underground remained
critical of Czerniakow personally, and of the Judenrat in general.
Notwithstanding their differences, Mordechai Tenenbaum, a leading
member of the underground, considered that there were only three
honest people among the leaders of the Judenrat, one of whom was
Czerniakow, whose primary concern was to keep the Germans out of
ghetto affairs and to organize internal Jewish matters with the
maximum of autonomy, insofar as either of those objectives was
possible.

Czerniakow's diary entry for 27 October 1941 referred to "alarming
rumours about the fate of the Jews next spring." It was around this
time that Karl Bischoff, then head of the Transferstelle, told him
that the ghetto was only a temporary solution – without specifying
what its successor might be. On hearing that Auerswald had been
summoned to Berlin on 19 January 1942, Czerniakow's concern increased:
"I cannot shake off the fearful suspicion that the Jews of Warsaw may
be threatened by mass resettlement." Although Auerswald did not
attend, the Wannsee Conference took place the next day. David
Wdowinski, a political and underground leader in Warsaw related how he
broke the news of the Lublin deportation to Czerniakow in April 1942:
"… Czerniakow… considered the report an exaggeration. He also said
that General Governor Frank had given assurances that three ghettos
will remain [intact] – Warsaw, Radom, and Krakow." On 29 April,
Czerniakow was told to provide statistics of the ghetto population as
well as ten maps of the ghetto itself. In his diary he wondered: "Is a
decision in the offing?" By 3 May he was beginning to think that
perhaps all unproductive elements in the ghetto were to be deported.
His diary note of 18 May read: "… Persistent rumours about
deportations. It appears that they are not without foundation." In
July, the rumours and suspicions had become more tangible. On 18 July
Czerniakow informed the Judenrat and the Jewish police that he had
received assurances that the Germans had no plans to "resettle" the
population. However, eye-witnesses reported that at that very moment a
train made up of a large number of goods wagons was being assembled in
the railway sidings at the northernmost point of the ghetto. On 20
July, as panic swept through the ghetto, Czerniakow enquired of the
Gestapo if there was any truth in the speculations, but was fobbed off
with a series of lies. In a conversation with Czerniakow the same day,
Auerswald similarly pretended to be completely ignorant of impending
events. Two days later Höfle and his cohorts arrived in Czerniakow's
office with their horrifying orders. Over the next seven weeks, a
total of 265,000 Jews were transported to Treblinka and death.

Czerniakow's diary is an invaluable source of material concerning the
events that took place in Warsaw during the period from the earliest
days of the war to the commencement of the deportations. The diary
disappeared for many years, and it was thought that it had vanished
forever. However, Czerniakow's widow, Dr. Felicja Czerniakow, had
saved it. With the help of friends, she managed to leave the ghetto
after her husband's death, and hid for ten months in the home of Dr.
Grabowska, and then with Professor Apolinary Rudnicki, the director of
the First Lyceum of the Union of Polish Secondary School Teachers. A
Warsaw ghetto survivor, Rosalia Pietkiewicz, purchased the diary from
an unknown source in 1959. The diary became available in Canada in
1964, and was purchased by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem. It
consisted of eight notebooks, containing a total of 1,009 pages. The
notebook covering the period 14 December 1940 – 22 April 1941 (number
5 of 9) has never been recovered; the surviving diary entries have
been published in a number of languages.

It is impossible to arrive at any judgement of Czerniakow and his
actions without attempting to recreate what was known during his
lifetime and to imagine oneself in his position. It is also necessary
to consider his alternatives without utilising the benefit of
hindsight. Of necessity, his evaluation of the situation was based
solely on the available evidence. Aktion Reinhard had not yet begun
and despite his apprehensions, Czerniakow was unable to appreciate the
true magnitude of what was approaching. How could he? Only now are we
aware how it was to end. Whatever his other failings may have been
(and like all humans he lacked perfection), when he realized that
every Jew was condemned to die, he took the only ethical and
honourable choice open to him and decided not to be their executioner.