I don’t know who ordered that the notice be placed on the barristers’ room door. It had no signature nor seal. It never happened, however, that a fellow barrister would invite his Jewish colleague into the room, even though there was no supervision on the part of the German authorities. The notice on the barristers‘ room door [6] bears a certain testimony to the Polish Bar, and I suspect that the notice was placed there by the Bar Council usher, Mościcki, and was received with absolute passivity and silent acquiescence on the part of the Polish barristers.
As I have mentioned before, I often came to the courthouse. I often met my colleagues, barristers, clients, and friends from the Aryan side. As far as my fellow barristers were concerned, they often pretended that they could not see me or recognize me. The situation was clear for them. Others behaved kindly towards their former colleagues, but kept conversation restricted to personal issues and exhibited hardly any interest in the state of affairs in the ghetto. I noticed a greater interest after the decree on the repossession of fur.589 Then I was very often asked if it was true that the Jews refused to give away fur garments and destroyed them instead. You could say that one felt something like [7] a warm current flowing from the other side then.
It was unheard of that fellow Polish barristers would in any way want to come to the aid of their Jewish colleagues, even in secret.590 The Polish Bar remained utterly passive towards their Jewish fellows, although barristers had the most opportunity to inform and meet their colleagues. Only certain barristers, when handing over a case through a Jewish colleague, would, as per the old tradition, give him half of their fee.
ARG I 436 (Ring. I/480).
Description: duplicate (handwritten, pencil, 146x210 mm), duplicate (two copies, handwritten, pencil, 150x210 mm), Polish, 19 sheets, 19 pages.
Edition based on duplicate (a), 7 sheets, 7 pages.
Published in: Palestra [The Bar], XXXVI, issues 423–424, pp. 4–5 (fragments).
