from old materials, leaving only the casings. Over time, casings were also used as material for coating new “commissioned” materials.
More or less the same thing happened with baskets, carpet beaters, and reed sticks, which were used as replacement raw material in the brush-making business.
The last item on our list is old watches. It is perhaps ironic old watches are in the same purchase category as rags or carpet beaters. Life, however, put this “raw material” in the same registry. Between October and December 1941, Jewish watchmakers noted an enormous interest in “repair services”. The Aryan district sent watches to be repaired en masse. Many of those timepieces came from soldiers. They were entrepreneurs who undertook mass repairs of watches, and Jewish watchmakers were swamped in work. Since, however, no parts were available, large-scale purchases of old watches were launched; these were later dismantled and used for repair.
[8] Of course, in other areas of ghetto production we could have found various methods of obtaining raw materials. We focused only on such phenomena that were most relevant to mass export, and the most typical for our lead question: “How did the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto make their living?”
The areas described constituted a source of income overlapping with other “wartime” professions practiced by the Jews of Warsaw.
[9] III. From raw materials to production
The economic agencies of Warsaw’s Jewry were concerned about resources from the very beginning of the ghetto, or even before. It should first be noted that the Germans were led to believe that:
1) the ghetto did not have any pre-war stocks of raw materials;
2) if such materials were delivered, the ghetto could expand output in a number of branches.
Why was this so? Why in this case were dozens of letters sent in defence against German attempts to seize goods in the ghetto?
The economic life of the ghetto runs along two tracks. One track is the official economy, born out of a conference of green desks and round tables, an economy whose results—in relation to official efforts—are less than scarce.
