The Community gave each man some cigarettes, bread, and several złotys
for the journey.
The gendarmes that arrived arranged them into fours. [89⁹⁶³]
They set out…
I watched them, tears trickling down my face. Their wives’ moaning and
the cries of little, hungry children, Tate! Tate!⁹⁶⁴ echoed in the forest.
The departing men were weeping. Even the Germans could not watch
the scene.
Lensky who happened to enter through the gate exactly when they were
setting out and witnessed the farewell, looked as if he was about to burst in
tears. He nervously slapped his whip on his boots. Finally, he ran off as he
could not stand that sight any longer.
The families ran to the gate as they wanted to follow their loved ones
onto the road. The children were cuddling up to their mothers, who were
pulling their hair out from despair. I had enough; I ran off in tears. [90] The crying
of the children and their screams, Tate! Tate! followed me long afterwards.
The ghetto population took a long time to recover. But gradually people
went out onto the streets and the young people returned from the peasants.
Life moved on.
Just as in any state, Głowno too was a scene of struggle for power in the
Community. The opponents used various means. They snooped, made various
accusations against the Community, and instigated popular dissatisfaction.
In Głowno, Rosenberg had been competing against Fas and Szer for the
position of the chairman from time immemorial. Fas and Szer were schemers
and thieves. They made a reputation for themselves as snoopers during the
[First] World War. They resorted to even the most preposterous means to overthrow the Community. Before the war, [91] Fas and Szer were the two greatest
enemies in the struggle for power in the Community but, when it came
to snooping, they were two friends. Before the establishment of the ghetto,
[they had been] smugglers, responsible for taking away the property of many
Jews passing through Głowno. They had also taken the property of the Jews
for whom they were smuggling things over the border. There were rumours
that they showed Sztyller the places where the Jews hid their merchandise
963 In the original, wrong page numbers from p. [89] to [100].
964 (Yiddish) Daddy! Daddy!; also a few lines below.
