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In the Warsaw Ghetto

Translated by Sara Mages

A night curfew, which forbade us to leave the house after seven in the evening, was imposed on the population of the ghetto in addition to the closure of its borders. It was strictly prohibited to listen to the radio and the electricity was also cut off. In the evenings we used carbide lamps. It's a gray stone–like material which creates a flammable gas, acetylene, when it comes in contact with water. The lamp was built from two tin cans that were inserted inside each other. The inner tin contained a lump of carbide and water, and a vertical tube with a special spout was welded on the outer tin. The gas that was generated came out of the spout and it was possible to light it. The lamp gave a very strong bright light, but at the same time also created a strong odor in the apartment. Over time we became accustomed to the smell and to the strong light of the lamp.

One day, my father's younger brother, uncle Mitek, arrived with his wife and their young son Stephan. It became more crowded in the apartment, but I didn't feel the change. My mother, together with aunt Rozia, cooked our meals. We didn't suffer from hunger, but we also didn't have plenty of food. The main beef was horse meat which was pretty easy to get. It turned out that it's possible to fry the horse's blood which congeals during the cooking and turned into something similar to liver. Hand carts full of small stinky fish, which were called “Shtinkes,” also appeared in the city. There were those who also ate them raw, but they didn't arrive to our table.

Activities began inside the buildings because of the early curfew and lack of occupation in the afternoon. The buildings in our neighborhood were big, 3–5 stories, and there were up to six apartments in each floor. People, who only knew each other from a chance encounter in the stairwell, began to get closer. Usually, the contact was by age groups – children separately, youth separately, and adults separately. In the building where we lived there were 8–10 boys and girls about my age, in the range of 3–4 years. We met in one of the apartments to listen to records, play social games and at times to conduct semi–serious discussions on various topics. Sometimes, one of the adults tried to give us a lecture on a subject that he was more or less proficient with, but most of the time these things didn't arouse our interest.

Once, we even organized a show with a similar group from the neighboring building – singing and readings. We rented a hall, sold tickets – it was an interesting operation which kept us busy for several weeks. This, of course, took place in the afternoon – until the seven o'clock curfew.

Another time I was invited by one of the members to join him for a children show. It was in a building not far from our building. The viewers were mostly young children and their parents, very few boys our age. The presenters were children who sang, recited, presented live images and ballet dancing. At the end, an older man got on the stage, a skinny short man with a very small beard and a long brown coat. He leaned on a stick and started to tell the legend of Puss in Boots. He had an amazing story telling talent. For a moment, it seemed to me that the cat was standing next to him, taller than him, in black shining boots, silver embroidered jacket and a wide–brimmed hat with a peacock feather. The story, and the man himself, were so convincing that the picture of the two of them, he and the cat, remained in my memory to this day.

I asked my friend who he was, and he simply said – Korczak – we're in his orphanage.

In my childhood Korczak was one of my beloved authors and I read most of his books. This meeting with my favorite author brought back the contents of the wonderful books that I've read in my childhood and I returned to them again and again.

I don't remember if my underground studies took place during the period of the ghetto or before that, but after I completed them and took the matriculation exams my father made sure that I wouldn't sit idle. He got me a job at ZTOS, the Jewish Social Welfare Office, not in the office but in the food distribution warehouse. I was a distribution clerk there. The supply was brought from outside the ghetto and funded by the Jewish community. It was also received from donations sent by Jewish institutions in the United States who haven't yet participated in the war. We supplied food – sugar, flour, margarine, peas etc. to communal kitchens, orphanages, soup kitchens and charitable organizations. My job was to receive a delivery order and give instructions which merchandise and what quantity to pack for each institution. The packing was done by two young men who were deported from Germany to Poland. A warehouse manager, an accountant and a secretary– a beautiful young woman– also worked there. I was in love with this young woman but I didn't dare to express my feelings to her. During my free time I sat and looked at her and her image is still kept with me. This was my first paid job and I always gave my salary to my mother with pride.

Besides preparing deliveries to organizations, our warehouse also provided special packages to a number of intellectuals who were in financial distress and the community saw it fit to help them. I recognized the names of some and some were completely unknown to me. They came every week with a special delivery form and usually received a package that included a kilogram of sugar, a kilogram of flour and a little margarine. My duty was to prepare the package and give it to them. From among those who came I recognized Professor Balaban, the historian whose books I studied in religion classes, the actors Jonas Turkow and Diana Blumenfeld, and other authors whose name I can no longer remember. Some received their package as a something they deserve, and some had special demands for extra food or special packages. There were many who felt very uncomfortable and I tried very hard to make them feel that they weren't receiving a handout. I prepared and delivered packages as a matter of fact.

After a few months of work at ZTOS I moved to work at the “Toporol” company. My father, who dreamt about agricultural work in his youth, was one of the initiators of this company. The company, whose goal was to bring Jews closer to agriculture, organized courses in agriculture and provided materials for turning backyards into vegetable gardens. The buildings in Warsaw, especially in the ghetto, were built in the form of a square with a large courtyard in the middle. Usually, this land was fenced off but not paved. In most of the buildings this area was neglected and the janitors only made sure that garbage didn't accumulated there.

Under my father's advice it was decided to convince the residents of these buildings to grow vegetables in these areas for self use. For a fee, “Toporol” employed instructors and provided seeds and tools. A group of five teenage boys, with me in the lead, were recruited for this mission. We walked from building to building, by the invitation of the building's committee, and prepared the planting area. It was a difficult work because the ground was very hard and it was necessary to dig it with shovels, crumble the lumps of soil and prepare the beds. I worked in this job for two to three months. In this period I also participated in a general course for agriculture. Among the lecturers were my sister Hela and her future husband.

In 1941, the Germans allowed organized groups from various Zionist youth movements to leave for agricultural work in Eastern Poland. I joined one of these groups. By chance, I was added to a group of members of “Beitar.” The matter didn't bother me because I had no definite political views. I wasn't involved and I also didn't understand the difference between the various Zionist movements.

Our group consisted of about 40 boys and girls, all of them around my age. We left Warsaw by train and after a long journey, from which I don't remember anything, we arrived for the night to the city of Belz. In Belz, which most of its inhabitants were Jews, there wasn't a ghetto and we also didn't see any Germans there. Some of the group members were scattered in the homes of the local Jews. I, together with the rest of the group, slept in a large sports hall. The next day they loaded us on horse drawn carts and took us to an agricultural farm not far from the city.

It was a large farm that its great part was intended for growing seeds. The farm owners were two Jews, brothers, who were religious. We didn't have a close encounter with them and I've no idea if they were single or married. The Gentile farm workers took care of us. We were given a very large closed shed to live in. A wide wooden bunk, which was covered with straw, was arranged along its two walls. We spread blankets on this straw and so we slept. The boys slept on half of the bunk and the girls on the second. Jokes circulated about the boy and the girl who slept in the middle, but, since we were all together nothing had happened between them.

 

dvi006a.jpg
 
dvi006b.jpg
With friends in the ghetto – walking in the ruins on September 1939
(I put the ink stains to hide the “Lenta”)

 

The whole group left for work every day at sunrise. We ate breakfast and lunch in the field. We worked the whole day until sunset as was customary in agriculture. Towards evening we returned to the shed for dinner and social activities.

Two girls from the group remained in the house to cook. The farm supplied us plenty of food which was a very good thing for the people from the ghetto, Indeed, I didn't suffer from malnutrition in the ghetto, but there were those among us who weren't able to obtain enough food there.

We worked in weeding sugar beets, wheat harvest, turnip harvest, fertilizing beets and similar works. The fields in the farm were very big. The furrows were long and in works, such as fertilization, a full day wasn't even enough to cover the length of one furrow. Peasants from the area also worked with us – especially the girls. The young farmers worked in professional jobs. The peasants were “Chulhulim” – something between Poles and Ukrainians – either way, they spoke Polish but in a strange accent. These girls used to sing almost the entire day. Their singing was highly correlated – as if they learned to sing in a choir in several voices.

As mentioned, in the evenings after the meal, and also on Sunday – our free day, we conducted social activities and the activities of the “Beitar” movement. Sometime our leader, a guy named Binyamin Shochat, gave lectures, from which I can't remember anything, and tried to arouse discussions but we mostly learned to sing. I sang with everyone – “Two banks has the Jordan – this is ours, that is as well,” and – “In blood and fire Judah fell, in blood and fire Judah will rise” – without, of course, understanding even one of the Hebrew words.

Occasionally, one of the farm owners appeared in the field during the work. He usually rode a horse from which he didn't get off, He treated us like the rest of the workers – meaning, he ignored us. He only talked to the foreman and left.

On Yom Kippur 1941, all the boys were taken to a makeshift synagogue at the house of the farm owners. We stood there the entire day without food. After the prayers we sang Hassidic songs and the farm owners enjoyed our singing. This was the only Yom Kippur experience in my life.

Several Jews from the area also came to the Yom Kippur prayer. It turned out that there were Jewish farmers in the area. I especially remember the image of one of them. A tall skinny man who was dressed in traditional clothing: “kapota” – a long black coat, “yarmulke” – a round cap with a visor and tall leather boots. Despite the holiday he came with a scythe on his shoulder

The work that I liked the most was collecting hay. We handed over hay, which already dried up the field, to a wagon with large wooden pitchforks. These were horse–drawn wagons with wooden wheels and ladders on both sides. A farmer stood on the wagon and arranged the hay that I handed over to him from below. He knew how to build a wagon to a height of three meters or more. Late, I also climbed on the pile and traveled home to unload the hay in the shed. This trip, high on top of the hay, gave me special pleasure.

During the wheat harvest, which was done by the farmers with scythes and sickles, we collected the wheat and tied it to sheaves. This work became a routine and it seems that even today I know how make a rope from the ends of wheat and tie a sheaf. We transported the sheaves and built field granaries from them – piles in the form of a big house with a sloping roof to protect from the rain – in the height of a two–story building of today. The construction was directed by the farmers who were expert in this work. We threshed the wheat in early autumn. The threshing was done with a huge threshing machine which was operated by a “locomobile” – a large steam engine that a long leather strap tied it to the threshing machine. The threshing day was long because it was necessary to finish the entire pile–building by evening. Since the work was very hard and almost without a break, we tried to create artificial breaks. We learned the method from the peasant girls who worked with us. This is how it was done – some of us worked on the pile and handed the sheaves to the worker who fed them to the opening of the machine. It was enough to put a piece of wood inside one of the sheaves to stop the machine. Most of the time it tore the belt which connected the steam engine to the threshing machine. The belt was repaired by sewing thin strips of leather and lasted about a quarter to half an hour. In the meantime, all of us rested – apart from the mechanic who repaired the belt and the foreman who cursed all of us together and anyone who was on the pile separately.

One day we were summoned to the nearby village where a fire broke out in one of the houses. The houses in the village were built of wood and the roofs were covered with straw. It's not difficult to describe how such a house goes up in flames. The house was already wrapped up in flames when we arrived with containers and water buckets. We tried to spray water on the nearby roofs to prevent their conflagration. There was also a large water hand pump, which was supposed to spray water on the fire, but nothing help and the house burnt to the ground.

The place that we were in was pretty close to the temporary border between the German occupied zone and the Russian occupied zone. When we left Warsaw we saw long columns of German armor moving eastward. The Germans' intention wasn't clear because there was an agreement between them and Stalin on the division of Poland.

A German unit was located in the farm close to the shed where we lived. Actually, they were young Austrians, peasants who were drafted, or maybe volunteered, to the German army after the “unification” of Austria and Germany. Ties developed between us and the soldiers. I think it was mostly due to the girls in our group the soldiers tried to woo.

Once, a young soldier arrived to our shed. He turned to one of the cooks and asked her to make him an omelet. To do this he brought about twenty eggs that he purchased in the nearby village. When she asked him in which container he wants to take the omelet, he answered – “there's no need for a container, I will eat it right here.” Only twenty eggs – I don't know exactly what happened next.

One day the soldiers left. The next day we heard artillery fire from a afar and very quickly learned that the German Army invaded the Russian occupied zone. This hasn't affected us because the front quickly moved eastward and we no longer knew what was happening there.

In the autumn, with the rainfall, we were transferred to a building with several rooms. We were separated from the girls because we lived separately in bunk beds. Heavy rain fell and we couldn't work for many days. Diseases, especially parasites, appeared with the cold. At first I was infected with Acari, a kind of a parasite that penetrates under the skin and digs a tunnel there like a mole. We tried to take care of it with the help of various ointments, but not always successfully. However, I really got scared when I found lice in my clothes and decided that I'd had enough and it was time to return to Warsaw. It wasn't simple to leave the group because I needed various permits that the group leader wasn't willing to get for me. But, I stood my ground and a few days later I said goodbye to my friends and traveled back to the city.

Over time I've heard from members of the group, who also returned to Warsaw, that at the beginning of 1942 the Germans decided to eliminate all the Jews in the farm, including the farm owners. According to rumors, several members of our group managed to escape to the city of Lublin, which was a few hundred kilometers away from there, and actively participated in the resistance during the deportations from the ghetto. However, these were only rumors and I don't have any qualified knowledge in the subject.

 

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