20 Groszy Warsaw Ghetto

The Judenrat scrip issued in the Warsaw Ghetto was not a voluntary monetary system — it was compelled. German occupation authorities forced the Jewish Council to issue its own internal currency, effectively sealing the ghetto's economy from the outside and making it harder to extract wealth through informal trade. This denomination, the smallest in the series, would have handled the most ordinary daily transactions at the worst possible moment: 1943 is the year the ghetto was liquidated.

The near-square format was not a design choice so much as a paper economy — materials were scarce. Notes from this issue that survived did so almost entirely outside the ghetto walls.