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With her back to the ghetto wall Mrs C has already been waiting for an hour for her client “from the other side.” She is on Nowolipie Street, a dead-end rapidly blocked by the ghetto wall. She comes here often, always at the same hour. She paces up and down the narrow sidewalk or hides in the gate of one of the nearby tenements. At other times she stands on [. . .] just like she is now. She is vigilant. She knows from experience how to behave and that she has to be careful.
Mrs C. is 36 years old. She comes from a lower-middle-class family. She was a corset maker before the war. She also had a smaller workshop at home. She then relocated it to a shop in Warsaw’s Powiśle district. The tenement her shop was in was destroyed during the bombardment. But Mrs C. managed to salvage some of the merchandise. She rented a new shop on the same street and worked there until the closure of the ghetto on 15 November 1940. She used to go to her shop without her armband. Her chance clients took her for an Aryan, but all her friends knew about her origin, and their attitude towards her was always loyal and even benevolent. She was faring pretty well until [the closure of] the ghetto. When the Jews were locked up inside the ghetto on 15 November, her store was sealed by order of the authorities, as were all Jewish enterprises on the Aryan side (somebody must have denounced her at the last minute). She learned about this from one of her clients. She was shocked. At home she had only a [small percentage] of her merchandise—her main capital [7] had remained in the shop. The rumours about the future in the ghetto were worrying her. Having no money or food supply, Mrs C. had to act quickly to survive. Hunger and fear are a powerful motivation. And the spectre of hunger was closing in on her. She decided to walk to the “other side,” no matter what. She put on a sheep-skin coat and a kerchief and walked through the gendarmerie post by the gate at the mouth of Elektoralna Street and Bankowy Square. [When the gendarme] asked her where she was coming back from and where she was going, she said that she had worked as a servant in a Jewish home and that she went for her due remuneration and that she was going to her new Aryan employers. She then went to Powiśle, straight to her tenement. The superintendent informed her that on Saturday [the Germans] had sealed the shop and made him responsible for the integrity of the seal.
