A Writer at War (51 page)

The ghetto was established on 1 May 1940. They had three bloody days there every week – Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. On these days, Germans (
Volksdeutsche
)
⁶
killed Jews in their homes.

At first, there were 165,000
ód
Jews in the ghetto, 18,000 Jews from Luxembourg, Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia, 15,000 Jews from Polish Jewish settlements – Kamish and others – 15,000 from Chenstohova. The biggest number of Jews at the ghetto at one time was 250,000. A famine started. One hundred and fifty
people died every day. Germans weren’t satisfied by such a low mortality rate.
⁷

In the first
Aktion
of December 1942, 25,000 healthy men and women were taken away, allegedly to work, and were killed. The first
Kinder-Aktion
had taken place in September of the same year. All children, from babies to fourteen-year-olds, as well as all old people and ill people, were killed (a total of 17,000 people). Trucks which took the children away returned two hours later for a new lot. They would systematically take eight hundred to a thousand people away ‘to work’ and kill them. By 1 January 1944, there were 74,000 people left in the ghetto. A trader in tea, Hans Biebow, was the chief of the ghetto.

Before the annihilation of the ghetto,
⁸
Oberbürgermeister
Bratvich and Hans Biebow gave speeches and announced that to save the
ód
Jews who had worked for the state for four years, the leadership had decided to evacuate them to the rear. Not a single Jew turned up at the railway station. Biebow called a meeting once again and arrested lots of Jews, but then let them go back, saying he relied on their consciences. After that, they started taking away, by force, 2,000–3,000 each day. Notes found in the empty wagons revealed that they had been taken to Maslovitsy
⁹
and Oswencim [Auschwitz].

After the final annihilation of the
ód
ghetto, 850 people had been left there. The breakthrough of our tanks saved their lives.

Organisation of the
ód
ghetto. It had its own banknotes and coins, post and postal stamps. Schools. Theatres. Printing works. Forty textile factories. A lot of little factories. Sanatoria. A library of photographs. A history bureau. Hospitals and medical emergency aid. Farms, fields, vegetable gardens. One hundred horses. Orders and medals for labour had been introduced. Chaim Rumkowsky, the director of the ghetto, an educated Jew, [was a] specialist in statistics.
¹⁰

Rumkowsky had proclaimed himself the Chief Rabbi. In luxurious prayer robes, he conducted services at the synagogue, issued marriage licences and divorces, and punished those who had mistresses. He married a young lawyer
¹¹
when he was seventy, and had mistresses who were schoolgirls.
¹²
Hymns had been composed in his honour. He proclaimed himself the leader and saviour of Jews. He was the Gestapo’s main support.

In fits of fury, he used to beat people with sticks and slapped them. He had been an unsuccessful, ruined tradesman before the war. The story of his death: when his brother was also put on the train, he, confident of his power, declared to the Gestapo that if they didn’t set his brother free, he would get on the train together with him. Rumkowsky boarded the train and was sent to [Auschwitz]. His young wife travelled to her own death together with him. Rumkowsky had been very proud about the following incident: once, a letter was sent from Berlin to Chaim Rumkowsky, the city was not indicated, and this letter reached him in
ód
.

ód
– the Polish Manchester. Fifteen thousand tailors had been sewing clothes there for the German Army. They were given four hundred grams of bread every day and nine hundred grams of sugar per month. At that time, people in the Warsaw ghetto were given eighty grams of bread per day.