4,500 Jews. In the first week of the war, masses fled to Russia,³⁹¹ but refugees
and exiles came from Włocławek, Łódź, and other places, so the number of
Jews reached 7,500 people.³⁹²
Several days after my arrival, the first “resettlement” (evacuation) of
about 500 Jews took place, mostly of the elderly and people living off charity;
but not necessarily those, because [. . .] people, who had simply wanted to settle
in smaller towns, came along. The campaign was [led by] the Judenrat –
generally the campaign can be considered a success: The Jews were resettled
in the adjacent small settlements, such as Grabowiec, Łaszczów, Komarów,
Tyszowce. [3] The everyday hustle did not allow for grieving over the fate of
the deported [especially] as the people knew where they were, and received
good news from them.
As a person from Warsaw, you are probably interested to know how these
people earned their livelihood: A small portion traded, namely supplied the
village with sweets, flypaper, soap, concealed, pardon me, in the bras, several
pairs of silken socks, and all good things were brought into town. Until
the April tragedy, the prices were significantly lower than here. However,
95 per cent of Jews, men, women and children worked for the Germans. They
were not embarrassed, but actually really worked, some in the Izbica camp
(the camp in its first stage consisted exclusively of young people from Izbica,
hence the name; it is an aerodrome), some in drainage work:³⁹³ Men, women
and children worked with shovels, pickaxes and hammers.
The attitude of the military authority (Wehrmacht) to the Jewish workers
had been, all the time, even after the tragic expulsions, more than correct.
People were often on familiar terms with them. Thus, for instance, my
391 Before the outbreak of war, Zamość had 12,531 Jewish inhabitants, who made up 43.3 per cent of the city’s population. In September 1939, between 7,000 and 8,000 fled to the territory occupied by the USSR. See Adam Kopciowski, Zagłada Żydów w Zamościu (Lublin, 2005), pp. 14, 209.
392 On 17 December 1939, over 500 Jews deported from Włocławek were brought to Zamość. In late December, there was an influx of 175 Jews from Koło and over 100 from Łódź. By late 1940, there were 2,500 refugees in the city. Ibidem, pp. 42–43.
393 In Zamość, there were three forced labour camps for Jews, engaged in railway construction, airfield construction, and water management (Wasserwirtschaft), where the prisoners worked on regulation of the Łabuńka River. Those camps also employed Jews from outside Zamość. See J. Marszałek, Obozy pracy, pp. 41–42, 156.
