To be given twice a week.
Before you see your wages
You strain your eyes out.
Before you see the postman,
You’ll surely peg out.
What’s to be done, Jews,
In such a damnation
What’s to be done, Jews?
You’ve got to eat every day.
The stomach doesn’t want to know
About the ghetto business.
It shouts and demands
Food, lots of food.
[9] Warsaw, late January 1942
The booklet contains three poems written by unknown authors or one
author.
One poem is written in Yiddish “On nine marks…,” two in Polish,
“Ojciec [x]⁵⁴¹ zażydzonych” [“Father of the Jew-stricken”] and “Biją dzwony”
[“The bells ring”].
Just as grey and primitive the life in the Łódź prison is for the Jews,
which bears the name: Litzmannstadt-Getto, so grey and primitive is the
quasi-poetry of the poets there.
The first poem refers to the monthly allowance that Rumkowski gives
every ‘citizen’ of his ‘state,’ in the amount of nine marks. That allowance, it
is known, is not enough to survive, and too much to die. And so the author
puts it.
[10] In the second poem, written probably in the autumn of 1940, the
author in a very gentle way portrayed the rule of Rumkowski and his Jewish
supporters in the ghetto.
1. Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski.
541 [x] zadżumionych.
