8 July 1940. The printing house was prosperous: it printed posters, leaflets, and forms for the power plant, gasworks, and various other private Jewish and Aryan companies. Even though her husband was still getting printing orders from Aryans and Jews, which he fulfilled in secret using some simplified method, they [142] could not get by on his earnings. Mrs R. handled it in the same way as many Jewish women did during this war: she sold their most valuable possessions and clothes—hers, her husband’s, and their children’s. The money did not last long though. They began to live in want again. And then she got over her inertia and took on the burden of the economic struggle with an heightened awareness of her new destiny.
It was the beginning of October 1940. At Yom Kippur Nowy Kurier Warszawski published the ordinance of the German authorities regarding the establishment of a ghetto for Jews. P. Street, where their printing house was located, became a part of Aryan Warsaw. Mr and Mrs R. irretrievably lost all their machines, their whole property.
With the oncoming transformation of the inner life of the Jewish population, the issue of tenement superintendents became highly vital. The Jewish Community began to register tenement superintendents and Mrs R. put forward her husband as a candidate for the superintendent of the tenement on L. Street where they lived. That registration clearly showed how tragic our struggle to survive was. People from all social strata applied for positions of tenement superintendents. They used whatever connections they had. Mrs R. too had a “contact” in the Community. Initially, she went to that woman every day and waited for hours outside her office door for a promise or a more concrete decision. At the same time she was trying get a letter from the House Committee that would express the residents’ consent to the R. family becoming the tenement superintendents. Mrs R had a chance of success, but in the meantime her husband became seriously ill and their elder son fell ill too. She had to stay at home to take care of them. Consequently, Mrs R. neglected [143] her cause and the position slipped out of her hands. Thanks to the sympathetic attitude of the House Committee she managed to make her younger son an assistant tenement superintendent.
The difficult struggle to survive dragged on for months. Mrs R. could sense that her family was slowly dying. She took any job she could but was unable to earn enough even to get bread for her whole family. Mrs R.’s rival—the new tenement superintendent, Mr H., a violinist by profession,
