98 Jewish Girls Taken from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 to a Brothel Committed Suicide

Ninety-three Jewish girls aged 14-22 who were abducted from their school in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 to a brothel for SS officers, committed suicide rather than submit to their captors. Details of that little known tragedy were revealed in a last will and testament written by one of the girls, 17-year-old Chaya Friedman, who said that all she and her companions hoped for was that someone would recite kaddish for them.

The letter, written in Yiddish, was found in Poland recently and was sent to the Nazi war crimes documentation center in Haifa, according to Tuvia Friedman who heads the center. He has sent it to West Germany where it will be used as evidence in the trial of Ludwig Haan an ex-Nazi who was in charge of the Warsaw Ghetto, Friedman said he received a copy of the letter via New York where it was read recently at a memorial meeting of survivors of the Jewish community of Radom, Poland.

The letter described how the girls were taken from their school in the Warsaw Ghetto–Beth Yaacov–on July 27, 1942 and held in four dark rooms for a day, given only water. In the evening they were taken to a house outside the ghetto where their clothes were taken away and they were given nightgowns and told that they would be visited by SS officers and men who they were expected to entertain.

“I do not know when or if this letter will reach someone sometime,” Chaya Friedman wrote. “But if it reaches anyone, we shall not be alive by then. Please recite kaddish for 93 clean, innocent Jewish girls who decided to take their lives in their own hands and not be mutilated and dishonored by the dirty SS officers.” According to the letter, the girls committed suicide by poison.