from the city by the authorities. A week earlier, rumours had already spread
around the city that the entire Polish and Jewish middle-school system was
to be shut down shortly, but people had not expected it to be done so ‘simply’
and undramatically.
The manner in which the Jewish and non-Jewish teachers were arrested
was the same almost everywhere. This is what happened to the writer of
these lines:
I came home from school around half past four. Our high school had actually
been closed down by the authorities three weeks previously. The splendid
building with its enormous school library was requisitioned for German
post office workers. We had tried to save the benches and other school equipment
and move them to another place. However, they were simply stolen on
the street by Volksdeutsche dressed in various ways, or were dragged away
to the new German offices, where Jews seized on the street were made to chop
them up into firewood for the stoves. One of the German guards declared:
“You Jews are still deluding yourselves that you can save anything from your
total ruin and rebuild what we are now destroying. Forget it. You will never
be able to rebuild what we Germans now destroy.”
[2] Unwilling to surrender to the designs of the hateful authorities, we
shared the premises of another Jewish high school and taught there from 1 to
4 p.m.⁴¹ At that time Jews were allowed to circulate in the city only from 8 a.m.
to 5 p.m. In addition, a very vexatious restriction had been imposed, prohibiting
Jews from crossing Łódź’s main thoroughfare, Piotrkowska Street. As
a result, we had to make a long detour around Wolności Square if we needed
to get from one side of the city to the other, and that was the case for almost
all our students and teaching staff.
As already mentioned, I came home from work at school exhausted, both
physically and mentally. By 8 o’clock in the evening I was already finished
with supper and we were getting ready for bed. My wife was feeling weak and
had gone to bed early, and I was busy with my year-old son, changing him into
his nightclothes and putting him to sleep. Around a quarter to nine, I heard
a heavy banging on the door. My heart was pounding as I went to the door to
41 Two all-boys lower secondary schools belonging to the Association of Jewish Secondary School located at Magistracka Street 21 and 22 were moved to the building of the all-girls secondary school on Piramowicza Street.
