and I start preparing to bathe them again. The telephone rings. It is the doctor,
who says, “Nurse, please be careful when you bathe the children, they have a lot of lice.” I grit my teeth and set to work. The first little patient, Abramek, is 5 years old. I pick him up carefully and place him in the bathtub, thinking that one bite from the louse will infect me with spotted typhus. I don’t have far to look: his entire little head is encased in a (scabby) shell, and the lice come out from underneath it and [3] stroll around, those same lice which infect so many people with this dreadful disease. He is bathed once more and changed into clean linen. Now I have to clean his head and disinfect it. I cut around the scabs with a razor. He trembles in pain, but I have to remain indifferent:
I am under orders to eliminate the swamp of proliferating lice. His little head is now covered with blood and the shell has been removed. I now put on the proper dressing of sabadilla¹⁶⁷ and put my little patient to bed. I do the same with the remaining children, and then I register them and fill out the appropriate chart for each one. I take the opportunity to have each child tell me where he comes from. “We have already been driven out 5 times”, one says. “From Łódź to Konstantynów, from Konstantynów to Łowicz, from Łowicz to Głowno, from Głowno to Skierniewice, from Skierniewice to Warsaw,¹⁶⁸ and each time they took some of our things. On the way, my father was so badly beaten by the Germans that he had to be taken to hospital and has not yet recovered. While going from Skierniewice to Warsaw, my little sister fell off the wagon and died. We have been living in a refugee Point for a few days. There are no beds to sleep on, and for food we are given a little bread and black coffee [4] and my mother does not cook any meals.” I feed them, and their little hands tremble towards the bowl of soup. I would like to give them more, but unfortunately there isn’t any. The hospital is not in a position to quiet the hunger of all these driven out children who have not eaten their fill for many long months. When they set eyes on the bread and the pot of soup, dozens of little hands stretch out to me, and their little bodies shiver feverishly at the
sight of the food.
167 Sabadilla (Latin: choenocaulon officinale), highly toxic plant native to Central America. It is used to prepare delousing solutions and insecticides.
168 Probably the route of resettlements was partly different, see Dąbrowska, “Zagłada skupisk żydowskich w ‘Kraju Warty’ w okresie okupacji hitlerowskiej”, chart 2, p. 158; Brustin-Berenstein, “Deportacje i zagłada skupisk żydowskich w dystrykcie warszawskim”, charts IV and V, pp. 112–14.
