to the quarantine, from there we went into the ghetto and here we await
the end...
We have already related that the Tłuszcz rabbi, Rabbi Yakov Yosef
Brikman, went to Jadów a day before the expulsion and remained there.
On the day of the expulsion, several gendarmes from Tłuszcz went to Jadów.
They ordered that the Judenrat turn over to them the Tłuszcz rabbi and all the
other Tłuszcz Jews who were found in Jadów. The Judenrat had an opportunity
to buy them out with money, but they were afraid to do it. They threatened
that if the Judenrat did not turn the rabbi over to them, they would
shoot all children under 10 years of age. The rabbi presented himself in person.
The Judenrat produced his wife and child. When she came to the gendarmes,
the wife started to cry and turned to one of them [13] and reminded
him that several weeks earlier he himself had given her a przepustka to go to
Jadów to a doctor with her sick child. The gendarme remembered, confirmed
it, and freed the wife and the child.
They led the rabbi out into the market, ordered him to take off his shoes
down to his bare feet, and dance on one foot around the market. At the same
time, they beat him savagely. When the rabbi, wounded and bathed in blood,
fell on the ground, they shot a bullet into his foot, beat him again, and shot
a bullet into his hand, then another bullet into the soft flesh, and only then
in the head. They ordered the Jews to dig a deep pit in the middle of the market.
Water was poured into the pit. Then they ordered the Jews to throw the
holy martyr into the pit and stone the body, but not to fill it in. [13a] Then
they saw a Jew sitting, a refugee from Łódź, who was swollen. They shot the
Jew and ordered to throw him into the same pit where the rabbi was lying.
When the Jews did so, they ordered [them] to fill the pit, and the Jews were
[ordered] to dance on the grave.
Lord avenge their blood.¹²⁹⁷
ARG I 1027 (Ring. I/922)
Description: original, handwritten (HUB.*), notebook, ink, Yiddish, 153×198 mm,
minor damage and losses of text, missing pages [?], 14 sheets, 24 pages.
Published: To Live With Honour and Die With Honour!... Selected Documents,
pp. 201–209.
1297 In Hebrew.
