For me, too, this day was full of misfortune. When the SS. arrived, I sent
my son for cigarettes. After a long time, he had not returned. I went to my
neighbour Mendel Zylbersztajn. A woman holding a Torah scroll rushed in,
threw it on the floor and sobbed terribly. It shocked me, too, and led to tears.
I picked up the Torah scroll and walked out in the street. Two gendarmes were
walking on the way, but they paid no attention to me. I brought the Torah
scroll to my cellar; meanwhile, I became so nervously shaken that I could not
sit still at home, fearing both for my son and for the Torah scroll, particularly
as shooting could be heard. I went out to find a ladder from M. Zylbersztajn’s
attic, but while in the street, I really do not know why, I went towards the
market square. An SS. man caught me, and only thanks to the dedication of
Mrs Reyzl Fajnzylber, who threw herself between me and the soldier, I was
miraculously saved. When I was already hidden in my cellar, my son arrived,
who had saved himself from the hands of the hangmen, although he was shot
at four times; he was no longer mentally normal.
[5] Łaskarzew was in shock, Jews despondent and resigned. Poles, both the
intelligentsia and the ordinary folk full of compassion, even Franek Poboży,
organiser of pickets, stood among the Jews and cried with them. It became
clear that the Jews must leave. Everything was abandoned. I, along with both
my sons, escaped out of town. The commune clerk Rapacz was afraid to take
us in. A Jewish woman, whose husband had escaped to the Soviet Union,
[upon] seeing us, started having spasms out of fear. And so, we wandered
through woods, fields and meadows, like cursed ghosts. The dread filled the
entire surroundings. First, a Christian friend (shoemaker) hid us at his place
for 3 days, and at an appropriate moment we stole away on foot to Sobolew,
and from there by train to Warsaw, where my wife, with the 2 youngest children,
already stayed.
Warsaw, 25 Dec[ember 19]40. Yeshayohu Sz.
See Barbara Engelking, Życie codzienne Żydów w miasteczkach dystryktu warszawskiego, in: Prowincja noc, p. 128. Mentioned is probably Paweł Abraham Lipsztat (1903–?), physician employed from 1940 by the Warsaw Judenrat.
