new ordinance, all passes were revoked and leaving the Jewish district was
strictly forbidden to everybody without exception. Only the members of the
Judenrat¹²³⁰ were to receive passes issued by the Kreishauptmann.
That day, we sent a suitable application to Warsaw by the agency of the
village head, but it was sent back to us unexamined. The townspeople immediately
sensed how serious the situation was and, disregarding the bans, they
spent the entire night on the streets. The anxiety was passed on to everybody,
so everybody immediately started packing their things. Here and there, you
could see people taking parcels to [2] their Aryan neighbours, but it was all
done in secret. Nobody confessed to it and the people calmed one another down.
The next day the newly appointed commandant (the gendarmerie
Hauptwachtmeister) came to town. Judging from his words, his only duty
was to supervise the closure of the ghetto. He would stay 14 days to that end.
We soon contacted him. He turned out a rather decent German. He assured
us that there was no resettlement order. Should he get one, he would surely
warn us in advance. In the meantime, he was taking measurements, which
only strengthened our conviction that the matter would end in surrounding
the ghetto with barbed wire.
The danger became more imminent on 22 January, when all the officers
of the Third Tax Office of the County Department came to town with a clear
order to remove all the most precious objects from the Jewish flats, regardless
of whether the Jews they visited were entrepreneurs and whether they
were in arrears with taxes. Body searches were conducted in all flats. Even the
smallest [2a] sums of money (a few zlotys) were taken away (against receipt).
Appealed to regarding this matter, the commandant intervened. We witnessed
his intervention come to nothing.
The anxiety was reaching its zenith. Our fate seemed predetermined.
We heard alarming news from Piaseczno that the evacuation of the Jews
had begun.¹²³¹ The news was often contradictory. Some said that the resettlement
affected only the 1,500 people who had once been resettled in Piaseczno.
Others talked about evacuation of all the Jews. Some hinted at an escape, as it
was unknown where the evacuated people were being sent, and whether entire
1230 Members of the Judenrat in Jeziorna: Dawid Szumacher, Grinstein, and Działowski. See AŻIH, Holocaust testimonies, 301/2980, Feiga Rotstein’s testimony, p. 1.
1231 The deportation of the Jews from Piaseczno to Warsaw began on 22 January 1941.
