who made up the core of the workshop, the best professionals impossible to
replace. Interventions of the German managements proved effective only in
a small number of cases, as most of the time the factory workers went directly
into the boxcars departing to death in Treblinka.
Throughout the month of August all nurseries, dormitories, boarding
and day schools, crèches, pupil’s hostels and orphanages were liquidated. The
children – the future of the nation – were destroyed with utter ruthlessness
and meticulousness. Almost every group sent to the Umschlagplatz included
larger or smaller groups of children from various children’s institutions. The
children walked with their heads shaved, wearing shirts, short trousers, or
skirts, their tiny bare feet shod in wooden clogs. All the children were resettled,
without baggage and sometimes even without food.
Throughout the whole second stage of the Aktion the Germans gave
nobody any time to rest or think. The blows were dealt one after another.
Consequently, the Jews’ fear of the Germans grew greater than their fear
of death.
The work on the Umschlagplatz changed character entirely. All pretence
of selection disappeared. Aside from a few exceptions, everybody was loaded
into boxcars.
In late August it seemed that the Aktion was ending. The Jewish hospital
received an order to move back to Stawki Street. Apart from the fact that
the seriously ill people were treated inhumanely, it should be stressed that the
Jews were misled again. The Germans were trying to “prove” that the return
of the hospital to Stawki Street indicated the end of the Aktion. The “registration”
period from 6–10 September, when virtually all patients of the hospital
(approximately a thousand people) and the entire medical and technical
personnel were loaded into boxcars with thousands of other victims, revealed
the illusoriness of the Jewish hopes for the end of the resettlement.
[19] The table below shows the intensification of the Aktion in the month
of August.
