it all, but I quickly took it away and said “The horse doesn’t want any more.”
The sergeant ordered me to pour the water away. I begged him like a baby and
pointed to children crying for water. He let me give some to women and children
only. I went and gave a child a little water. When the crowd saw it, they
pounced like animals. The water spilled, and they licked the sand. Then an
order came for everyone to stand up.
The captain ordered me to line up all the Jews in rows of four, and we
started to march: at the front, Polish POWs, behind them the Christians, and
then the Jews. I said to the captain that I had a horse and cart, and a man
was lying there with a leg injury. He allowed him to be loaded onto the cart.
We all set off, heavy-hearted, heads down, with German troops armed with
rifles riding bicycles on either side, and the captain in front on a white horse.
He ordered me to announce to the Jews and Christians that anyone unable to
run would be shot like a dog. I went to the cart, took a hooded cape, a small
bag of underwear and a blanket, and gave them to my cousin. We didn’t walk
— we ran. It was six in the evening. At half past eight a Christian, a teacher
from Poddębice, collapsed. I ran to him and asked him to get up. He couldn’t.
A German came running and asked what had happened. I replied that he
couldn’t run any more. Without a thought, the German shot him on the spot.
He fired three or four times, and we ran on. The Germans on the bicycles kept
dealing out blows. We felt that we had to be strong so that what happened to
the teacher wouldn’t happen again. I saw that everyone was discarding what
they carried. My cousin, a healthy young man, kept close to me. He held onto
me tightly so as not to collapse. I encouraged him and saw that he had already
thrown away the blanket. We ran all night without stopping. Everyone was
beaten, including old people in their sixties and seventies.
Around five in the morning, we reached a village near Tomaszów
[Mazowiecki], I think on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. Everyone fell to
the ground, utterly exhausted. We had all forgotten about hunger, but we
were thirsting for a drop of water. We were all white with dust, our mouths
full of sand. Someone spotted some [8] forget-me-nots nearby, and everyone
rushed to them. I saw that people were scooping up water with their caps and
everyone was drinking it. I asked them not to drink because they could get
sick. I waited for an hour or two, and still couldn’t get near it. I got to it at
nine in the morning. I was rinsing my mouth when suddenly someone called
me. I quickly came running. There was a high-ranking officer there, possibly
