two hard-boiled eggs at once and upset his stomach, and now the whole house is in uproar. It was only in March that I had several confirmed cases of typhus. I noticed that the disease put an entire family to bed at once, and that it was almost exclusively new tenants—refugees from neighbouring villages, who had only just arrived in Warsaw with their possessions. In general, they were people who were quite well-off materially. However, for all deportees [2], coming to Warsaw was a difficult experience. They had been completely packed weeks before setting off on the journey. Bedding had usually been sent separately, so they had slept in their clothes until it was their turn to be deported, without changing, living like nomads—or rather refugees—while still at home.
Even then, I already felt the impending danger. Walking down the street, I saw peasants’ shaky carts passing by, filled with people worn out by the hardships of travel; I thought that those were the classic conditions for the onset and development of an epidemic.
It was not until I started working in a shelter for refugees at Dzika Street 3455 that my fears were confirmed. It was mid-March when I first set foot in that horrible building. It was only a few days after this small but well-maintained school building had been opened, having recently been incorporated into the Jewish quarter and given to refugees newly arrived from the countryside. In not even ten rooms some 500 people had been placed—I remember that every second room was a meticulously filled chamber. I knew that once plague sets in, it would not leave the house until the last of its residents was afflicted. And from there, through [3] the punktowcy,456 who were spilling into the entire district, it would spread across the city. It was not only the overcrowded rooms and poor sanitary and material conditions that seemed to me a dangerous factor, but also the state of mind of the residents. That entire cluster of people had been thrown to the bottom of life within just a few days; robbed of their previous existence, they were overcome with despair and misery. I do not know whether and to what an extent epidemiology scholars have ever researched psychological conditions as a factor in the spreading of plague.
