Tag #106275 - Interview #78209 (Apolonia Starzec)

One time there was an alert and we went down to the basement. In the apartment we had some food products - some flour, groats, things like that. We had an iron stove in the room, because it was terribly cold. And on that stove we cooked soup, [so thick] the spoon stood in it. We come back [after the alert] and the food's all gone, stolen. Because the Germans had the policemen go and check whether anyone had stayed back in the apartments. And on top of that those policemen stole from Jews. That was nasty. Poor guys, they thought they would save themselves that way. They didn't. Which doesn't mean that all of them were like that. Such situations can occur in any community. Those are difficult things. Unfortunately. I remember the actions undertaken by the head of the Judenrat [31].

Donations were organized to help the refugees because the ghetto was hugely overpopulated; people were being brought from everywhere. [The inhabitants of areas around Warsaw, so-called 'refugees,' were being brought to the Warsaw ghetto, and their material situation was extremely poor]. They placed them in all the synagogues, they lived in terrible conditions. You couldn't cross the street, not to rub against one and catch a typhus louse. The poor ones no longer cared about life. Even though it was after curfew, they went out into the street and cried, 'Drop us some bread!' It's the first time I'm telling anyone about it, I'm not sure I should be.

But we had friends [Poles outside the ghetto] who cared for us and at the right moment pulled us out. They told us to leave the ghetto, we obeyed. A lady came with messages from them. Her name was Rozalia Solecka. Much older than myself, she knew me. And she knew I was from Radomsko, like her, only she wasn't [in the ghetto] because she was married to a non-Jew and lived in Zoliborz [a Warsaw neighborhood].

In January I went out [to the Aryan side] and in April [1943] they started burning down the ghetto [32].