[43], and drove off, demanding ransom along the way. The banker had with
him only one 50-zloty banknote, which he handed to the SA man, who gave
him 44 zlotys change, explaining that he was short one zloty. An hour later,
the banker encountered the same car again. As he came near the car, the
German wanted to invite the Jew inside, but having recognised the banker,
he left him in peace.
After 10 p.m., our guests went home and a long, sleepless night began,
exhausting for the nerves, with my wife trembling at the sound of every car
horn, of each motorcycle stopping near our house, full of fearful thoughts
that the unwelcome visitors were coming for us.
When the provisional Board was appointed, there was nothing left for
me in the company, so I said goodbye to my colleagues and decided to leave.
Saying goodbye to colleagues, especially the Christians, I had tears in my
eyes, and they were weeping as well. I felt that I was turning into a homeless
dog, that I was going into the unknown, that my tragic exile was thus beginning,
and that it would bring countless worries and the uncertainty of tomorrow.
Also crying were some Christian messengers, who had trained under me
and who understood that the exile would be a horrible, and certainly undeserved,
fate. My wife stayed in Łódź until April 1940, i.e. until the sealing of
the ghetto, and I left Łódź on 18 December 1939 via Stryków. We avoided the
closure of the ghetto, [44] but instead of Łódź, we were imprisoned in Warsaw.
There was only one good thing about that, namely that we went through the
ghetto horrors together.
Although in the history of our Diaspora, a ghetto is by no means a novel
phenomenon, and Łódź had known a ghetto about 150 years earlier,¹⁵¹ the
ghetto into which [x]¹⁵² Jewish Łódź was forced [x]¹⁵³ by the Nazis is not
even a normal ghetto, but a ghetto combined with a wartime concentration
camp, a prison ghetto, lacking any basic conditions of a normal human existence,
a ghetto whose population was condemned by the Nazis to extinction at
a rapid pace. Only some mente captus¹⁵⁴ or a fascist cynic could claim in let-
151 In 1825 a Jewish district was designated in Łódź; the restrictions on Jewish settlement were lifted in 1862.
152 [x] Jewish ghetto.
153 [x] before.
154 (Latin) an insane person.
