a safe place just in case. We made provisions too. My aunt and I took some of
our things to our relatives living on Old Market Square.
My father arrived one Wednesday, which was a total surprise in that situation.
I had just returned with my aunt from the Community, where I had
been waiting in queue to see a doctor, whom I did not manage to see though.
I had had a feeling that my father would be waiting in the flat. He began telling
us about his journey. As he was travelling by car to Warsaw he had his
bandaged finger squeezed so tight by a gendarme in Głowno that blood and
pus flowed out. But aside from that, his journey proceeded without any major
problems, as the car was driven by Germans and Poles, and the vehicle was
let through at the border. The journey to Łódź was [. . .] too. [34] He set out
from Warsaw by car, planning to change in Głowno. But a certain Polish
couple, whose acquaintance he had made during the journey, stopped him.
They squeezed him in between themselves and when the gendarme asked,
Sind noch hier Juden da? Herunter!¹²³⁴ the woman said in a confident tone and
in perfect German that there were no other Jews there. My father arrived in
Łódź an hour later, instead of creeping in at night and arriving at his destination
as late as the next day.
My last journey to Warsaw began the next day, on Thursday. It was very
long, because we took a detour. But I was happy about that. It was impossible
to depart from either Łódź Kaliska or Łódź Fabryczna train stations.
Moreover, one had to have a pass to go by car. Meditating on how and which
way to travel, we decided to go via Częstochowa. But to do that we needed to
go to Zduńska Wola first. Our merry company, a few uncles who were travelling
with us, set out willy-nilly towards Łódź Kaliska train station. On the
tram I saw a few men being dragged down from a platform even though
the tram was going at full speed. Totally unexpectedly, we managed to reach
Zduńska Wola by train. All the compartments were packed with German
peasants from Volhynia. We spent several days in Zduńska Wola. We learned
about the terrible days the locals had endured there recently. The newly-arrived
gendarmes kept devising new forms of oppression. One night [. . .] they
had been ordered to escort horses on foot to Szadek, located [. . .] a few people
had frozen to death.
1234 (German) Are any Jews still here? Get off!
