One Jewess was captured in a club in the company of a uniformed German.
Another Jewess was a hostess in a restaurant owned by a Volksdeutsch. She was popular so the owner protected and tolerated her as long as her employment contract was binding. He denounced her the minute it expired.
These shared accounts flowed like a depressing confession of the times. Mrs K. listened carefully as resignation and despair welled up in her as a wave of tears. With her back to the wall she sat motionless for many hours.
On April 30, 1940, the third day of her detention, Mrs K. approached the window at the sounds coming from the courtyard. Prisoners were standing in two rows and a German officer was carrying out an inspection. Mrs K. spotted her husband at the end of the second row and she called out to him. He heard her, looked up, and smiled. New hope revived Mrs K. She would surely be released. But she continued to wait in vain.
Early in the morning on 2 May 1940, the prison courtyard filled with people. The medley of voices burst out with menacing intensity. Mrs K. clung to [35] the window. She saw her husband again. He was among the prisoners being sent to a concentration camp. The former President of Warsaw Stefan Starzyński371 was deported with the same transport. Heart-breaking scenes accompanied their departure. The convicts were brutally thrown into locked-up lorries. The last person to get into each lorry was brutally kicked. The door was then closed so quickly and carelessly that many prisoners lost their fingers or hands or suffered trauma to their heads, etc. Before that German gendarmes threw bread and sausage into the air for the prisoners to eat during the journey. Some managed to catch something [. . .], but many departed without bread.
Mrs K. and her fellow inmates observed the deportation of the prisoners. A gendarme gestured at them from the courtyard to step away from the window and threatened them with his revolver, but they did not move away. “We simply didn’t care anymore,” says Mrs K.
