Tag #108408 - Interview #88499 (Izaak Wacek Kornblum)

At the beginning, when there were the first blockades, Dad was involved in some backyard self-defense. Every house had a self-government. People helped one another, it was done both for social reasons and for the sake of maintaining order. And I remember that people came and demanded money, supposedly for the underground, but we all knew it was a plain robbery and theft, and Dad, somehow, for his money, bought knives, and gave it to some of the young people in the backyard, and the self-defense was created. People imagined some things could be arranged for this way.

Then the typhus epidemics broke out [the peak of the typhus epidemics in the Warsaw ghetto was between July and September 1941]. In the ghetto we had a Judenrat [23] decree and a so called ‘13’ [24] kept a close eye that anyone who came down with typhus was taken to a hospital, it was banned to be sick at home. They were afraid the epidemics would spread. Those taken to the hospital usually never came back.