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At last, I said to myself: what the hell, why should I live in such conditions, when there are Jews around here – and so I went to the ghetto [14]. Voluntarily. Once I was there, it was another story entirely. I lived in a passageway, there was sort of hole there, maybe you could even call it an apartment. There were rags lying around, so I would sleep on them. I was close to a kitchen [one of the communal soup-kitchens ran by Jewish Social Self-Help], where they gave away food, and I would always get a bowl of soup there. So I was glad that my stomach was not empty, that’s all. I don’t even know what street this was on. There was some sort of life going on in the ghetto, some announcements, but none of this interested me; only one thing mattered to me – to have a place to lie down, and something to eat. No matter where. I was being eaten by lice, there was no place to bathe, and of course no question of changing my clothes. I kept living in the same place. I was an outsider, I was not part of that community.
I stayed in the ghetto almost until the uprising [15]. Quite a chunk of time. Later, when I escaped from the ghetto, I went back to the train station again. I ran off right before the uprising, or maybe it had already began by then. I think so because you could hear the Germans, and some shouting. A lot of moving about, some sort of selection again [between January and April 1943]. They were leading us off to work [16] in groups of 150, 200 – overseen mostly by the Navy-Blue Police, and by one or two Germans. I look around, I see a gap. A lapse of attention... and I ran away again. Just me alone. It was even like this that some of the Poles threw a piece of bread once or twice, but that was outside the ghetto. And so I managed to run off. And again, I headed straight for the station.
I stayed in the ghetto almost until the uprising [15]. Quite a chunk of time. Later, when I escaped from the ghetto, I went back to the train station again. I ran off right before the uprising, or maybe it had already began by then. I think so because you could hear the Germans, and some shouting. A lot of moving about, some sort of selection again [between January and April 1943]. They were leading us off to work [16] in groups of 150, 200 – overseen mostly by the Navy-Blue Police, and by one or two Germans. I look around, I see a gap. A lapse of attention... and I ran away again. Just me alone. It was even like this that some of the Poles threw a piece of bread once or twice, but that was outside the ghetto. And so I managed to run off. And again, I headed straight for the station.
Period
Location
Poland
Interview
Stanislaw Wierzba