trying to get all of their household belongings, clothes, and so on, into the
ghetto, with great risk to life and limb. At that time, I was myself making
frequent visits to the Jewish gmina in connection with a private matter and
was an eyewitness to heartrending scenes: family members of those seized
in the big obława in February would come to the gmina bosses begging them
to do something for their arrested family members. With distracted faces
and eyes red from crying, they would stand at the doors of various ‘highly-
placed’ figures in the gmina and plead for help. Sometimes a young woman
with a kerchief on her head would run in and recount in a resigned tone of
voice that Gestapo agents had entered her flat at night, dragged her husband,
a baker, out of bed, and taken him away. She would beg the gmina
to try to intervene.
On Wednesday 6th, around half past four in the afternoon, a rumour
spread that Piotrkowska Street, from the junction with Nawrot Street, was
to be cleared of its Jewish residents that night. Apparently, they had known
about it in the gmina since the morning and the news had leaked out. Only
some individuals living on Piotrkowska Street took the rumours seriously
and began executing the evacuation order themselves. The majority, however,
did not believe the rumours, simply because similar rumours had been
circulating in the city for several days and had not materialised. Once again,
people discounted them and stayed put. But how tragic was their situation
on the night of 6 to 7 March! How much innocent blood — Jewish blood of
young and old, rich and poor, big and small — was shed that night by those
beasts in human form.
The next morning, Thursday 7 March, came news of a host of shocking
events that made the hearers’ blood run cold in their veins. During the
night, the Jewish residents of Piotrkowska Street, as far as Nawrot Street,³³⁴
had been evacuated. Human speech has no words to describe the cruelty, bestiality and callousness of the Hitlerite murderers, who killed innocent people
in sheer cold blood like practiced executioners. The survivors were stripped
of everything and left without even the customary 10 marks which had been
left them during previous requisitions and evacuations. Several children perished
that night at the hands of the murderers. The dead lay in pools of blood
in their rooms and on the staircases.
334 See Introduction and Docs. 14 and 41.
