the carrier out of the river, and arrested them. Continuing the crossing was out of the question, so we returned to the village to wait for a more opportune moment. Meanwhile, German guards stationed in the village apparently learned about our return and at five in the morning surrounded the farm where we stayed, dragged us outside, and beat us. Then they ordered us to leave the village immediately and said that after one hour they would shoot every Jew they encountered in the village. That way, our intentions were thwarted and, willy-nilly, we had to collect our belongings hastily and run away. We were exhausted and weary after a week of sleepless nights and all those misfortunes. Our cash reserves had been already [12] drained, so we decided to return to Warsaw, rest there a little, and then go back and cross the border on the other leg. Here, the Russians had apparently figured out that mass-scale smuggling was taking place, and therefore probably reinforced guards and vigilance.
We arrived in Warsaw on the night of 2 December, and at the Wschodni Station we received a pass to enter the city. We wanted as soon as possible to be in our warm beds to rest after the journey, but another unpleasant surprise was awaiting us. As our group of thirty men with backpacks walked through the empty streets of the Praga district, we were stopped at the Kierbedzia Bridge by German gendarmes. We showed them the passes we had been given, but they did not even look at them. As soon as they ascertained that they were dealing with an exclusively Jewish group, they pushed us all to a nearby house and yelled at us, beating us because we were not wearing armbands (the regulation ordering Jews to wear armbands had been issued on 1 December, and we did not know about it). Our attempts to explain fell on their deaf ears, and the Germans demanded that we immediately pay a fine. They searched us all and checked to see how much money each of us was carrying, and depending on what they found, they took 100, 50, 20, or even 2 zlotys from each of us. That way, they collected quite a substantial sum. They ordered those who had several hundred zlotys to share it with those who did not have any money. In our group there was a musician who had tried to go to Russia with his instruments – a saxophone and a pair of violins. The gendarme who had searched our luggage put us all on the bridge, made us stand in a row, and then told the musician to come up and play a variety of tunes, with the comment that if he did not like the performance he would throw the instruments into the Vistula. It was a strange sight that night as the Jewish musician played alone on the
GENERA L SITUATION OF REFUGEES AT THE SOVIETO CC UPIE D TERRITORIES [ 1 ] 11
