serving window and stopped giving out goods. The communal kitchen was also used by, among others, a large number of beggars from the far corners of Poland, and poor people in general. Day and night, the front hall of the communal kitchens was filled up by them, their wives, children, and baggage. There the children also performed their bodily functions, vomited, and so on, and that’s where the bad smell came from. All those kitchens distributed soup without meat and a quarter loaf of bread a day per person.
[21] The “Red Gmina”90
As soon as Białystok was taken by the Soviets, the old kehilla was replaced by a “Red gmina”, divided into various departments and commissions – “provisions”, hygiene, registration. After registering and standing in a queue allday, people were allocated a place to sleep and a lunch card. Rozenberg, a wellknown lawyer from Łódź, worked in the registration department, in the committee for refugees, as did two friends of mine. They were up to their ears in work. […] had 8 synagogues and 11–12.91 Their task was to supervise and supply the synagogues with bread and lunches, ensure that the area around the synagogues was clean, despatch disinfection staff to apply a fluid against lice and fleas. (It didn’t help much. The vermin kept on multiplying.) My friends ran around for days till late at night, labouring and sweating for the goodof the refugees: for this one, a doctor; for that one, some milk for a child. And in the end, they themselves had nowhere to sleep, since there was no one tolook after the people who were caring for the refugees, even though they wererefugees too. The attitude of the gmina to the refugees was exactly the same asformerly to the poor. I recall that in December a few hundred people arrivedfrom the neutral strip with frozen feet and limbs swollen to four times theirnatural size. They still had to wait outside the doors of the gmina in the freez-ing cold, while Comrade Dobranicki and others sat in the spacious gmina hallseating tasty white-bread rolls with butter and ham and nibbling Crimeanapples. It was only when I drew my friends’ attention to the scandalous atti-tude to those unfortunate people that they did something about it, and only
