remained there because of the war... And they were accustomed to spending
the night in the Maggid’s synagogue...
First of all, they were beaten and tortured and not permitted to leave
the synagogue. Then they, the villains, spread explosive material throughout
the synagogue and ignited it.
The synagogue was immediately engulfed in flames. They woke up the
neighbours nearby, men and women, told them the synagogue was burning
and ordered them to bring water to put out the fire...
Everybody grabbed what they could, buckets, washtubs, saucepans. They
ran to the wells, filled them with water and ran to put out the fire in the
Maggid’s synagogue, so beloved and sacred to them...
But when they reached the synagogue with the water, the soldiers poured
it over them...[5] and soaked them from head to foot, laughing sadistically...
Then they brought the shtetl’s moreh hora’ah, the elderly Yoysef Szapiro,⁶⁸⁹
to the scene...
They threw him into the fire and… pulled him out… threw him in again...
until his clothes started to catch fire... and then they pulled him out
again... until he fainted...
While the old moreh hora’ah was lying in a faint, the screams of the
two unfortunate yeshiva students were heard from inside the synagogue.
The whole synagogue was in flames and the soldiers posted themselves around
it and began to sing, with wild fanaticism, “When Jewish blood spurts from
the knife.”⁶⁹⁰...
If savage tribes from the jungle had come to this European shtetl at
midnight, they would surely have said, “We too do this kind of thing...
but we use all kinds of drums so as not hear the screams of the tortured.
You do it even better – with no drums, no musicians, only song... and
inner passion.”
That same night they also burnt down the town’s bet hamidrash.
689 Josef (Josek) Szapiro (ca. 1880–?), assistant rabbi of Kozienice from 1904. In 1939, he lived with his wife Zysla and grandsons Szulim, Mordka Wolf, and Abram Chaskel at Pusta Street 12; see USHMM, Kozienice, p. 129.
690 A quote from the anti-Semitic version of the Heckerlied, a folk song of the 1848–1849 revolution in Baden.
