a gendarme in the act could lose more than whole week’s earnings, become
crippled, or even lose their lives.
Apart from peddling and smuggling, children tried to earn their living
by physical labour. For some time, for example, ten and twelve-year-old
boys from the Point on Dzika were hired to push coal carts for Germans at
Transferstelle, where they received soup and minimum wages. However, they
soon gave that job up because their fragile bodies could not stand the extreme
physical effort, and some of those boys fell seriously ill as a result.
To sum up the situation of children who earned money in general, it
should be stated that although they were on a higher social level than, for
example, children who begged, and that in their work they were guided by the
desire to relieve their families in hard times, the occupation turned them into
young adults and deprived them of all the childhood charm, teaching them
too early about the cruelty of the struggle for existence.
5. The lives of better off children
As has been pointed out in the introduction, not all children have been
equally affected by the negative impact of the war, and not all children have
experienced the same demoralising consequences. There is still a large group
of children in the Warsaw ghetto who, to some extent, managed to save themselves from the devastating distortion that affected most Jewish children,
leaving the worst mark on their physical and spiritual situation, demoralising
some of them completely.
These are primarily children who were born in Warsaw into middle-class
families, Jewish merchants, and intelligentsia, who remained in their former
flats and lived under relatively bearable material and hygienic conditions.
This is not to say they are unaffected by the war, but it had less of an
impact on them and they were not as severely affected as children of refugees
and fire victims. First of all, children from such families had adequate
clothing, and thus were protected against the cold and disease. They were
not forced to endure hunger, although they had to make do with much worse
food than before the war. The most important thing is that children of the
more affluent strata did not experience all the mental distress that had a devastating and demoralising effect on children of the resettled, and thus they
were more able to enjoy their childhood and could avoid aberrant life in the
