Thursday, 21 September [19]39. Thanks to considerable recommendation,
I went to work at the municipality building. The work wasn’t hard at first.
We poured cement, laid paving stones and swept the streets. Our Polish overseers
couldn’t bear to see how much freedom we had. Once they saw what our
work looked like under German overseers, they made it harder. They gave us
wheelbarrows to push with stones in them. The stones were very heavy. One
weighed 42 kilos and we had to push three of them in a wheelbarrow. Before
we went home, a Christian I knew told me that because the Jews were hiding
from work, a decision had been made to introduce special Jewish signs so
that they could tell whether Jews were working or not.
At night, turmoil. We didn’t know what was happening and in the morning
we found out that the Gestapo had dragged a few dozen Jews from their
beds and had taken them away in their nightshirts for a certain job. They
kept them there for hours, beat them murderously, and [then] freed them.
Friday, the eve of Yom Kippur 5700,⁷²⁹ 22 September1939. We didn’t go to
work, because there was an announcement in the street that all Jewish men
aged 14 to 60 were to report to the municipality where it would be determined
who was liable for forced labour and who was exempt.
We went and took with us all the documents we possessed, all the doctors’
certificates on the basis of which we hoped to be exempted. We went
up. The room was already packed with Jews [. . .] stood a long table covered
with [26] a green cloth, around which were sitting various members of the
Gestapo, SS, and SA.
At 10 o’clock precisely, on the basis of the first registration, they called
people one by one in alphabetical order and attached a patch to their breast.
This most terrible shame in all of its antiquity was suddenly renewed for us,
“the return of the yellow patch”.
The patches came in three colours: yellow, red, and violet. The yellow
ones, which meant 6 days’ work, bore the letter “J” and a Roman series number.
The red ones meant 3 days’ work and bore a “J”, with an “A” for people
working on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and a “B” for Thursday,
Friday and Saturday. People wearing violet patches were entirely exempt
from work. Only the chevra kadisha and members of the Judenrat received
violet patches.
729 In the original, 5701, apparently by mistake.
