physically, and workers were often subject to beatings. At the same time, however, going to a work detail involved leaving the ghetto, which for some people was an opportunity for smuggling.
WORKSHOP (Polish: SZOP)—a German company that had taken over smaller Jewish companies and manufactured products for the Germans. The first workshops were opened in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941. The largest of these, Walther Többens’s workshop, employed 18,000 people.
ZIONISM—ideology of the Jewish national revival, advocating establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, championed most memorably by Theodor Herzl in the late nineteenth century.
ŻSS (Jewish Self Help, German: Jüdische Soziale Selbsthilfe)—an organisation set up in Kraków in May 1940 by the German administration to coordinate aid for Jews in the General Government. It was dissolved in July 1942 and re-established in October 1942 as JUS (Jüdische Unterstutzungstelle für das Generalgouvernement), an organisation considered by the Jewish underground to be an attempt by the SS to take charge of relief supplies intended for the Jews, as well as to conceal the mass murder of Jews in Poland.
ŻTOS (also “Żytos”) (Jewish Social Welfare Association, from October 1940) and ŻOS (Jewish Social Welfare, from November 1941), also commonly referred to as ŻSS (Jewish Self Help), though separate from the ŻSS in Kraków—an organisation developed from the Coordinating Commission for Jewish Social Welfare Institutions in the Warsaw ghetto. Under the guise of such social self-help, many underground organisations operated in the ghetto.
IRENA ADAMOWICZ (1910–1973), scout activist and social worker before the war. During the occupation, a courier of the Jewish Fighting Organisation, she carried messages from the Warsaw ghetto to Vilnius, Kaunas, and Białystok. She was also an intermediary between the Polish and Jewish underground.
