Adam Czerniaków

Adam Czerniaków
Adam Czerniaków (before 1939)
Born	(1880-11-18)18 November 1880 Warsaw, Poland
Died	23 July 1942(1942-07-23) (aged 61) Warsaw Ghetto
Nationality	Polish
Occupation	Engineer, politician

Adam Czerniaków (30 November 1880 – 23 July 1942) was a Polish-Jewish engineer and senator; head of the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat during World War II. He committed suicide in the Warsaw Ghetto on 23 July 1942 by swallowing a cyanide pill, a day after the commencement of mass extermination of Jews known as the Grossaktion Warsaw.

He was born on 30 November 1880 in Warsaw, Poland (then part of the Russian Partition). Czerniaków studied engineering in Warsaw and Dresden and taught in the Jewish community's vocational school in Warsaw. From 1927 to 1934 he served as member of the Warsaw Municipal Council, and in May 1930 was elected to the Polish Senate. On 4 October 1939, a few days after the city's surrendered to Nazi Germany in the invasion of Poland, Czerniaków was made head of the 24 member Judenrat (Jewish Council), responsible for implementing German orders in the new Jewish Ghetto, closed off to the outside world on November 15, 1940.

As the German authorities began preparing for mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the newly built Treblinka extermination camp in July 1942, the Jewish Council was ordered to provide lists of Jews and maps of their residences. On 22 July 1942, the Judenrat received instructions from the SS that all Warsaw Jews were to be "resettled" to the East. Exceptions were made for Jews working in Nazi German factories, Jewish hospital staff, members of the Judenrat with their families, members of the Jewish Ghetto Police with their families. Over the course of the day, Czerniaków was able to obtain exemptions for a handful of individuals, including sanitation workers, husbands of women working in factories, and some vocational students. He was not, however, despite all his pleading, able to obtain an exemption for orphans from the Janusz Korczak's orphanage and other ghetto orphanages. The orders further stated that the deportations would begin immediately at the rate of 6,000 people per day, to be supplied by the Judenrat and rounded up by the Jewish Ghetto Police. Failure to comply would result in immediate execution of some one hundred hostages, including employees of the Judenrat and Czerniaków's own wife.