The Stars Bear Witness [Illustrated Edition] by Bernard Goldstein Leonard Shatzkin

Author:Bernard Goldstein,Leonard Shatzkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: INscribe Digital
Published: 2015-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

In the morning Abrasha left for the factory.

Everyone at 23 Karmelitzka was in a state of extreme anxiety. The Germans were fencing in each remaining factory as a separate ghetto. No movement from one factory to another was permitted. Workers who had permission to live outside the factories, employees of the Judenrat, the police, the hospital, and other institutions were limited to specified streets for living quarters. No one was allowed on the streets. The workers marched to and from their factories in groups under police guard. Even the sick were escorted to the hospital by police. All streets outside factory limits or not assigned to specific groups as living space were shut off. They were now forbidden territory.

All the ghetto gates were closed. The Germans had moved the boundary inward, past the few isolated boarded-in factories standing amid rows of empty, deserted tenements, past Leshno, Solna, Orla, Ogrodova, Karmelitzka, Pzheyazd, Novolipya, Novolipky, Pavia, Djelna, Smotcha. A new gate was set up at the corner of Gensha and Zamenhof. Only in the little island factories of this no man’s land was there life — elsewhere, the heavy silence of death.

In the center of the former ghetto was a small area set aside for the few Jews of various categories who did not live in the factories. Mila Street was reserved for the platzufkazhes, the few thousand Jews who worked at various tasks on the Aryan side. At dawn each day they marched in military formation through the new Gensha-Zamenhof Gate, through the ghostly stillness of the deserted streets and out through the old Leshno-Zhelasna Gate. Every evening they returned the same way to their beds.

After removing every human being from the closed sections, the Germans, with typical Teutonic efficiency, began the salvage of every usable article. For this purpose they organized a Wertverfassungstelle, the task of which was to gather everything from the abandoned houses. They kept a thousand Jews busy collecting the material, sorting and packing it at the depots in the Tlomatzky Synagogue building and in the Catholic Cathedral on Novolipky, whence it was trucked out of the ghetto.

The Wertverfassungstelle had some competition. As the remaining Jews recovered from the ordeal of the deportations, the need for food revived the smuggling trade. The Gentiles no longer considered money acceptable, but they gladly took the goods which smugglers collected from the deserted homes, in exchange for bread. Daring smugglers crept into the forbidden districts to compete with the organized ghouls of the Wertverfassungstelle.

In the tailoring establishment at 23 Karmelitzka lived Benek Weitzman, a young tailor, member of the Warsaw committee of our youth movement, Zukunft. He was a devoted Socialist, an intelligent young man, even an accomplished speaker. He came to me and asked in troubled seriousness, “Comrade Bernard, is it permissible that we, party members, idealists, and Socialists, may also take something from the unoccupied buildings to exchange for something to eat?”

Benek had already lost everyone. His wife and two-year-old child had been taken. Now he waited, hungry and alone, for his turn.

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