were not allowed to go along the main street, Piotrkowska, but only along the
streets parallel to it: Sienkiewicza Street, Piłsudskiego (Wschodnia) Street,
and Kilińskiego (Widzewska) Street. The columns were composed of Jews of all
ages: old people and little children, men and women. The seriously ill — and
there were a great many of them — were transported on a cart drawn by
a weak and wasted horse. They lay packed like herrings on a bed of straw
strewn sparsely over the planks of the cart, with hardly anything to cover
them. And, as I said, this all took place in minus 15 Celsius.
[3] In the course of those two weeks, approximately 20,000 Jews were
resettled. Flats for the expelled Jews were allocated by the Judenrat. How this
was done is a story in itself, a story soaked in the tears of the unfortunate
Jews who had been driven out of their homes, the story of a horrendous orgy
of bribery and corruption on the part of most of the Jewish officials of the
Jewish housing department set up in the ghetto. At the end of the second
week, an announcement appeared in the German newspaper stating that resettlement was being halted for technical reasons. Jews breathed more freely.
The optimists were triumphant, seeing the announcement as vindication of
their predictions that the Germans would be unable to carry their diabolical
plan through to completion. Others even believed that that there would be no
further implementation at all. In the meantime, however, those who already
had the knife of resettlement at their throats strove to rescue their belongings
from their flats and transport them to friends and acquaintances in the
ghetto. However, since the resettlement order stipulated that Jews must not
vacate their flats by themselves, they had at least to sleep there. As most of
their bedclothes were already in the ghetto, they had none at home and slept
on the bare floorboards in 15 degrees of frost!
On Thursday 29 February the Jewish population was seized by a terrible
panic when people were rounded up in the streets outside the ghetto
(a Razzia,³³³ the Germans called it). This went far beyond their normal way
of doing things. German police, SS, SA, and even German civilians wearing
swastika armbands, arrested all the Jews found in the street at the time: men
and women, schoolchildren, and even women walking their babies. They were
all taken to assembly points (there was, for example, one such point in the fish
market at Piłsudskiego Street). The women walking their infants had their
333 (German) raid, police roundup.
