use of that second room, but the stove was broken and gave off a great deal of
smoke. One day, I went to a meeting of the aid committee early in the morning
and around midday, as I was heading home, I was grabbed for work. I did
not return home until evening. That day there was a lack of midday meals in
the committee kitchen, the children stayed in the cold without any warm food
all day. I began to prepare a midday meal on the broken stove in the empty
room. At that point, the frost was so severe that I could not even put [as much
as] a hand in the room because of the cold. It was dark and the stove began to
smoke a great deal, so much that it burned my eyes. I opened the door to let
the smoke out and it was so cold that I began to shiver violently. I gradually
became accustomed to the smoke and the cold, but there was no solution for
the darkness. I wanted to create some light with a splinter of wood, but the
wood was wet and did not burn, even inside the stove. Seeing that I would not
manage to cook anything that day, I went to my neighbour to ask for a piece
of dry wood. The neighbour had forgotten the favour I had done him in helping
him rent the apartment and made such a face that you’d think the tiny
bit of wood was worth a fortune. At that point, I actually became hot from
extreme agitation and my heart began to pound. Because of my neighbour’s
scowl, I stopped feeling the stinging smoke and the burning frost. [35] Even
the darkness ceased to bother me. I consigned my cooking to fate which took
pity on me this time, and finally, in the darkness, in the cold, in the smoke
from the wet wood, my little pot of food finished cooking.
That little pot of food and the expression on my neighbour’s face when
he was too stingy to give me a few sticks of wood made me decide to leave for
Warsaw. All my plans to arrange my affairs in Biała went up in the smoke
that burned my eyes as I cooked. Also, my community work began to seem
foolish and laughable to me. In short, yesterday I was handing out authorization
slips to the refugees for bread and a mid-day meal; this took place
on the street and I thought that my hands would fall off from the cold and
I asked myself why I was doing this. For whom was I working? Did I get more
bread and a bigger bowl of soup than my neighbour? I don’t make demands
and have never demanded a reward for my community work. I had always
regarded community work done by an individual for his fellow man as something
holy, something from which one must not derive pleasure; anyone who
did so failed the poor. Nevertheless, my neighbour, someone from my town,
should have shown me some understanding, even the tiniest bit, like the
