we had on us, including glasses and handkerchiefs. I can recall that after he
left, one of us remembered that he had a pocket knife in his pocket. We were
terrified. We did not know what to do about that. If we called a guard and
turned the pocket knife in, we would be punished for ‘hiding a weapon.’ But
if we threw it out the [14] window, somebody in the courtyard might see it and
figure out where it had come from. In the end, after a long debate we decided
to hide the troublesome knife in the stove, which we did with expressions of
conspirators planting a bomb on a railway track. Only then did we sigh with
relief as if we had avoided a grave danger. That trivial and insignificant incident
depicts perfectly the psychic condition we were in at that time.
Taking advantage of the fact that the German had stopped pestering
us, we began to wonder about the reasons for and the purpose of our arrest.
Nobody had heard Cramer’s speech given in our courtyard (as I have said, he
began when we were leaving), so we were unaware of how dire our situation
was. Most of us thought that we had been captured to perform forced labour.
That assumption seemed probable, as the Germans had already been rounding
up [men] on Friday and Saturday.
A few hours went by. The sun set. Suddenly, we hear heavy soldiers’ footsteps
in the corridor. The door to our cell opens and an SS officer walks in.
He approaches the table, leans on it with one hand, takes out his revolver with
the other, reloads, and orders us to lie face down by the wall. He then turns
toward the door and shouts: Herein!¹⁰²³ 30 Jews with their hands up walk in
a row upon that signal (they have been apprehended as a result of the roundups,
which have been organised in the whole town). The officer kindly lets us
sit up and he leaves. A few hours later another thirty men are let in. One man
is carried on a table top. He was pushed or kicked on the street and [15] he collapsed in such an unfortunate way that he broke his leg. Human language is
unable to describe the conditions in which we spent that night. I will only say
that a few men slept on a cot and two men slept underneath. The rest slept
literally lying on each other. I remember that I was lying under three men.
After we switched places, I was the one on top.
Day II. The second day of our detainment began in a pretty discouraging
way. At six a.m. the same Volksdeutsche who had frisked us the day
before came and announced that we might walk out into the corridor to wash
1023 (German) In here!
