Czerniaków was born on 30 November 1880 in
Warsaw, Poland (then part of the
Congress Poland). He 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 Warsaw surrendered to Nazi Germany, Czerniaków was made head of the 24 member Jewish Council (
Judenrat), responsible for implementing
German orders in the new Jewish ghetto. The Warsaw Ghetto was closed to the outside world on November 15, 1940.
The Warsaw Ghetto deportations 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 council and the
Jewish Ghetto Police with their families. Over the course of the day Czerniaków obtained exemptions for a handful of individuals, including sanitation workers, husbands of women working in factories, and some vocational students. Despite pleading he was unable to obtain an exemption for the children in
Janusz Korczak's orphanage or other ghetto orphanages. The orders stated that deportations would begin immediately at the rate of 6,000 people per day, to be supplied by the Jewish Council and the Ghetto Police. Failure would result in the execution of 100 hostages, including council employees and Czerniaków's wife. Adam Czerniaków is interred in the
Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery in
Warsaw. In the 2001
Warner Bros motion picture,
Uprising, actor
Donald Sutherland portrayed Adam Czerniaków. Excerpts of his diary are featured in the 2010 documentary film
A Film Unfinished. The theatre company Voices of the Holocaust toured England during 2013–14 with the play
Fragile Fire based on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising which featured scenes depicting Czerniaków. In 2015 the actor and writer Tim Dalgleish (formerly of Voices of the Holocaust) wrote a full-length play based on Czerniaków's journals called
The Last Days of Adam: The true story of Adam Czerniaków. The play depicted Czerniaków as a conflicted character, torn between the need to ameliorate the worst excesses of the Nazis and the danger of being manipulated into becoming a collaborator. American composer
Arnold Rosner's
From the Diaries of Adam Czerniaków, Op. 82 is a half-hour classical music work composed in 1986 and scored for full orchestra and a narrator, who reads selected diary entries. The work was commissioned and later recorded by the conductor
David Amos. According to the work's only commercial recording, made in 2015, the English translation of Czerniaków's words was made by Raul Hilberg and Stanislaw Staron, in collaboration with Josef Kermisz of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
Personal life Czerniaków was married to Niunia (dr Felicja Czerniakówa) on 24 July 1912. They had a son named Jas, who became a lawyer and economist. Following the
invasion of Poland, Jas fled to
Soviet Kyrgyzstan, where he died on July 18, 1942. Niunia survived the war and lived in poor financial conditions till her death in 1950. She was buried next to her husband at the Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw. == In popular culture ==