The men are transported to Dęblin. The entire shtetl sees them off.
Among those escorting them are quite a few who will have to leave the next
day. Women weep and wail. The Polish police mercilessly beat women and
children who cling to their husbands and fathers. The police accuse them of
lack of patriotism because they cannot part from their menfolk. (The patriotism
of the Polish police during the German occupation is a chapter in itself...).
A melancholy quiet descends on the shtetl. People sense the coming
nightmare, they feel it in their heart and soul.... The more experienced besiege
the food shops and lay in supplies. Everyone feels the cloud hanging overhead
and the storm about to break...
[8] 3. All the Germans are sent to Bereza.⁶⁶²
Who didn’t know the shtetl’s “Yiddish-speaking goyim”? (Volksdeutsche
was a later term) They were on good terms with the Jews, as opposed to the
Poles to whom they gave a good deal of trouble. They would beat Polish farmhands, oppress Polish workers, and in general ignore all orders from the Polish government. They obeyed only their wójt,⁶⁶³ and the wójt was clear that he
answered to Berlin, not Warsaw... The Polish government had attempted to
be more accommodating to them, but that had produced the opposite effect:
The more rights they obtained, the more they demanded and the more they
neglected their obligations as Polish citizens.
They were on friendly terms only with... the Jews (in order to spite
the Poles) and when the Endeks proclaimed a “Jewish boycott” in the shtetl, the
first “boycott-breakers” were the... Germans. But in the last weeks before
the war, they suddenly began, as if under orders, to hate their Jewish neighbours,
stopped coming to see them, and under no circumstances would do business
with them, and only very grudgingly replied to a Yiddish “good morning”.
At the same time, they greatly provoked the local Poles...
[9] One fine morning, people noticed that all the chimneys in the German
estate had been painted red... and that the chimneys on the German houses in
the shtetl had also been painted red... It was realised that these were signals
662 Penal camp in Bereza Kartuska (now in Belarus, Brest region), established in 1934, where persons whom the state authorities considered a threat to public order were detained for 3 to 6 months without trial.
663 (Polish) village head.
