Józef Szeryński

Józef Andrzej Szeryński was a police-colonel in interwar Poland, inspector for the Lublin district and later - in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War - the commander of the Jewish Ghetto Police in the Warsaw Ghetto. Szeryński was viewed as a collaborator and traitor by the Jewish underground in the Warsaw Ghetto. The chairman of the Warsaw Ghetto's Jewish Council Adam Czerniaków selected Szeryński to create the Jewish Ghetto Police in 1940. Szeryński was arrested by the German Gestapo on May 1, 1942, for smuggling furs out of the Warsaw Ghetto for personal gain. He was released on the condition of leading the deportation action to Treblinka extermination camp in July 1942. The very next month Jewish underground attempted to assassinate him, unsuccessfully. He remained at the helm of the Ghetto Police until the end of the Grossaktion Warsaw which claimed the lives of over 254,000 ghetto inmates, men, women and children. He committed suicide right after the next wave of deportations in January 1943.