6. referring the sick to a doctor,
7. attempting to place orphans in a boarding house and many, many other
problems related to the daily life of the children at the Point.
A separate chapter should be devoted to the subject: the psyche of children
at the Point and various types of disorders associated with life at the Point.
[24] Report of the common-room care worker, J. Alfabet, from her
work between April and December 1941, Nowolipie Street 30
The central Point – Nowolipie Street 30, which housed the common room, was
located in the maternity home.
The common room – dark, damp, on the ground floor, served as both an
office and an infirmary.
The refugees, mostly craftsmen, small merchants and the pre-war poor,
were already past the third stage of the refugee’s life (Łódź – Skierniewice –
Łowicz).²⁷⁵
I started to work at a time when there was a sudden increase of prices
and a simultaneous slowdown in the activity of the Patronage. All projects
related to the work of the common room crashed because of of children’s terrible
hunger.
Children ran away to beg or stayed lying numbly in their bunks. Rushed
into the common room, they would sit sluggishly with their heads hanging
low, so that at times it seemed that nothing would get them to emerge from
that terrible apathy. Sometimes a few slices of bread would arrive from some
House Committee, so that each child would get maybe 10 grams, but most
often they did not have even that.
Children would come to the common room in the morning, driven by
the hope that they might get some breadcrumbs. They would sit, full of tension,
in anticipation of that miracle, to find out hours later that unfortunately,
there was to be no bread that day, because Mrs X or Y from this or that
Committee forgot or did not feel like dealing with the matter. Sometimes in
the first hours, when they still believed that there was a chance they might
275 Cf doc. 12.
