not bode well! I tormented myself for about an hour and tried to lead
everybody to believe what my frantic mind was suggesting. I do not know
where that stubborn certainty of mine had come from. I was completely
convinced that I was right and I kept repeating that. Finally, after 10 p.m.
my father returned from a meeting of the Municipal Council [4] and put
those hallucinations out of my head. He told us that there was a plan to
make appropriate arrangements the next day, to collect money for the hospital,
and generally hold on. The mayor advised us not to leave town. More
importantly, my father had already seen six German prisoners of war at the
municipality. Oddly enough, the military men had been taken captive out of
town. Except for one, they had all persistently refused to answer any questions.
When the mayor had asked a German if he knew who he is, pointing
at my father, the German had said, “Jude.” In his excessive fervour, my father
had even wanted to punch one of the Germans, but the mayor had stopped
him. Nonetheless, everybody had taunted them as much as they could. When
the Germans had been given something to drink, they had not drunk even
a drop until the others had had a sip. That evening they had been escorted to
the prison in Sieradz, from where our relatives had come to us on that very
day due to a bombing.
That night I was woken up when somebody violently pulled my arm. An
alert! In a blink of an eye we found ourselves standing with our suitcases at
the gate. Screaming, squeeze, and press. The weeping of sleepy children, the
wailing of women, the running of men. As we were uncomfortable by the gate,
we went into a flat on the ground floor. The room was unbearably hot and
stuffy from all the people’s breathing. I remember that bleak sight perfectly
well: a room packed with people, a small candle on the table, and the refugees’
stories in particular, which were getting on my nerves. I do not recall
how long we sat there. All in all, we did not wait there until the end of the
alert, as we could not sit in that packed room any longer, so we went upstairs
to our flat long before dawn.
The next day, on Sunday, the alert began in the morning. In fact, there
was such chaos that when the siren wailed nobody knew whether it was the
end or the beginning of the alert. We switched on the radio, taking advantage
of a temporary supply of power. But we could not hear the information
we were yearning for and which, as it seemed, would change everything.
In the end I began to lose hope, that that promised help was only fictitious,
