83 male and female Jewish labourers from the closed agrarian work detail in
Czerniaków (Warsaw suburb).⁷⁴⁸
All these people are in their prime. Still full of life not long ago, they are
a pitiful sight now. Ragged, dressed in rags, wearing tattered shoes or wooden
clogs, with sunken cheeks and a subdued stare, they walk along the streets of
the deserted district, [creatures] suitable for a city after pogrom. Quartered in
various labour camps – infamous places of torment – in conditions of physical
labour beyond human endurance, hunger and bestial treatment, they
performed works of a public or military character. The Oświęcim practice of
degradation, eradication of all humane impulses, stigmatisation of labourers
with the disgrace of slavery and cruel torture of the helpless people at the
mercy of the Germans is typical of almost all labour camps for Jews in Poland.
To better illustrate the conditions in the camps a handful of facts are provided
to show the Germans’ extreme barbarity.
And so, in mid-November 32 (thirty-two) Jewish labourers were tortured
to death in the Modlin shipyard for being five minutes late to work.
The men guilty of that “crime” were beaten to death with clubs by German
soldiers (not by SS-men). It is enough to say that after less than an hour
32 bodies of “criminals” were lying in puddles of blood, smashed to pulp on
the square of torture. Their arms and legs had been separated from their
trunks, their faces tragic masks of horror and torture while they were yet
alive. Their empty eye sockets were glimmering with blood and pieces of
brain. Their intestines had spilled out. And all that was witnessed by the
Jewish prisoners and the German personnel, who were clearly at ease with
such behaviour.
The event which took place in Siedlce can be comprehended only by those
familiar with the “ways of the Herrenvolk”. Reckermann – the German construction
company, which “normally” and on a daily basis eliminated those
Jews who were no longer able to work – indulged in the following novelty:
three Jewish labourers were concreted alive in one of the buildings under construction.
The screams of the suffocating victims put the murderers in a state
748 A Hehalutz farm (kibbutz) was established during the occupation on Bernardyńska Street in the area of Wojciech Zatwarnicki’s pre-war horticultural farm in Czerniaków (now the district of Warsaw). The Germans closed the kibbutz in December 1942 and made its inhabitants move into the ghetto.
