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We had to wear armbands [11]. I didn’t wear one, because it was from age 13 [Editor’s note: armbands had to be worn from age 10]. You weren’t allowed to walk on the sidewalk, only on the road. You weren’t allowed to leave the town at all. It was like a ghetto, only without walls, so food wasn’t hard to come by if you had money. There was just the ban on leaving town. It was easy to get around the rules, because there weren’t any Germans. In theory everyone had to have an armband, but Mother wore a peasant-type headscarf, which hid the armband.
We had to move out of the house we rented from the Lipnickis after a while, because they threw us out. We got one little room in one of Grandmother’s houses. There were five of us in that room, but you were happy anyway. Another Jewish family, that made shirts, was already renting there, and they had to squash up because of us, and that’s how we lived.
I remember this scene, I couldn’t tell you what year it was, but probably 1940 or 1941. Some German soldiers came to town, Wehrmacht, I think, not the SS. A lot of Jews still had beards at the time, and I remember that they hauled the barber out. The barber was a Jew too, but the Germans evidently didn’t know that. They ordered him to cut off beards. They caught the Jews, took them there, and the barber had to cut their beards off. On the Square. That’s how I saw it, because we were still living in the Square. And I remember the butcher, because they caught him too. I remember how one of the Germans held his machine gun in front of his ankles and another one made him jump over it. And then they forced a few more Jews to do it. They made the barber cut the butcher’s beard off too. He did it quite gently. And all the people whose beards he cut off had to pay – they’d put this basket out. At the end, I don’t know who, but somebody said that the barber was a Jew too. It wasn’t much money, so they didn’t take it, just scattered it across the Square, and people came and collected the money.
We had to move out of the house we rented from the Lipnickis after a while, because they threw us out. We got one little room in one of Grandmother’s houses. There were five of us in that room, but you were happy anyway. Another Jewish family, that made shirts, was already renting there, and they had to squash up because of us, and that’s how we lived.
I remember this scene, I couldn’t tell you what year it was, but probably 1940 or 1941. Some German soldiers came to town, Wehrmacht, I think, not the SS. A lot of Jews still had beards at the time, and I remember that they hauled the barber out. The barber was a Jew too, but the Germans evidently didn’t know that. They ordered him to cut off beards. They caught the Jews, took them there, and the barber had to cut their beards off. On the Square. That’s how I saw it, because we were still living in the Square. And I remember the butcher, because they caught him too. I remember how one of the Germans held his machine gun in front of his ankles and another one made him jump over it. And then they forced a few more Jews to do it. They made the barber cut the butcher’s beard off too. He did it quite gently. And all the people whose beards he cut off had to pay – they’d put this basket out. At the end, I don’t know who, but somebody said that the barber was a Jew too. It wasn’t much money, so they didn’t take it, just scattered it across the Square, and people came and collected the money.
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Emanuel Elbinger
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