The only legacy of the dead child – a pot of clay, which sometimes filled
up with donated soup or a few coins, is now set up by the enterprising agent
in the middle of the pavement.
He covers the child with a sheet of paper and, assuming the pose of
a preacher, calls in flowery Hebrew quotations upon passers-by to fulfil their
last duty to the deceased.
It is not long before he achieves the desired effect – those who yesterday
passed the dying child so indifferently, today, moved by the pathos-filled
words of the preacher, throw grosz after grosz into the pot.
A little more and the fund will be collected, the child will be buried, the
funeral parlour will make a profit, the passers-by will perform one of the many
mitzvot,¹⁷⁷ the shop owner will start to trade, and life will go on on Miła Street.
ARG I 581 (I/277)
Description: original, drawings (quill – India ink, charcoal, pastel):
(1) 200x158 mm; (2) 163x189 mm; (3) 178x255 mm; (4) 183x156 mm;
(5) 178x209 mm; 5 sheets, 5 pages; commentaries: handwritten, ink, Polish,
210x297 mm, 5 sheets, 7 pages. Attached is a note by Hersh Wasser in Yiddish:
“Drawings by the painter Rozenfeld”.
Probably January 1942, Warsaw ghetto. Outline for the subject “Dzieci
ulicy” [“Street Children”] with guidelines for interviews, developed in
preparation for Oyneg Shabes’s planned research project “Two and a half
years of the war”.
[1] Street Children
The war has brought many issues into the present day’s every-day life, which
had either already existed in pre-war times to some extent, but have now
177 (Hebrew, sing. mitzvah) a commandment of the Jewish law; also often: a good/worthy deed.
