Several days later Mrs Z. received a letter from her girlfriend who had miraculously avoided death at the very last moment. It turned out that three days after Mrs Z.’s escape the German gendarmes deported all Jewish women in an unknown direction in locked-up lorries. At the end of the letter the friend asked Mrs Z. and her sister to pray for their mother and sister-in-law, who had been deported with that transport.
Over the first few days in Warsaw Mrs Z. lived in a kind of hypnotic bewilderment. The memory of her own experiences and the thoughts about her family who had remained in Krośniewice overwhelmed and oppressed her. Terrified, she sat in a corner, holding her baby girl in her arms. She refused to answer when her sister’s visitors bombarded her with questions. But she then began to slowly overcome her depression, feeling an approaching flush of energy and will to live.
Every man’s life consists of, so to say, several existences. Life can be divided into several stages, when you have to start anew in some sphere, as if completely from scratch. Not everybody is able to start afresh. But it has to be admitted with genuine [99] objectivity that during this war the Jewish woman has showed an extraordinary ability to regenerate. Uprooted by the hurricane of events from her hometown and tossed from one level of the struggle for survival onto another, she lifts herself to surge again and again, resilient, her energy inexhaustible. “I took a risk to survive. I need to stay alive,” Mrs Z. kept thinking. And she began to look for a job. Her sister, a dressmaker, was not faring well. Her clients brought dresses, blouses, and coats only for alteration, which brought little money. Her husband, a policeman, was earning little money too. Mrs Z. did not have any savings or valuables. Hence, she had to start supporting herself, and immediately.
She started working as a “housekeeper” at her relative’s. She got food throughout the day, very small portions, and 3 zlotys per day. It was too little to buy porridge and milk for her baby. Making matters worse, work from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. exhausted her to a great extent. And after her return she still had to do the laundry for herself and her baby and help her sister with housework.
She began frantically to look for a new job.
Mrs Z. has been working for two weeks as a cashier in a certain sweet shop. She got that job thanks to a kind word put in for her by her sister’s “influential” client. She works eight hours a day—before and after lunch,
