on Szeroka Street,¹⁶⁷³ yet it was forbidden to pray there. It served only as an
assembly point for workers going to forced labour and as a guardroom for
the Jewish Police.
The life of the Jews assumed a distinctively different character from
September 1940, that is, with the establishment of the ghetto. Before, [16] the
Jews had maintained contact with the Polish population and even during
the war they had been allowed to go to every part of the city, of course from
late November 1939 wearing a yellow patch on their back and on the lapel and
having to bow to every passing military man; but when the ghetto was introduced,
life became positively arduous.
All Jews were obliged to reside on three streets and they were not allowed
to leave the ghetto. It was impossible to contact any civil or military authorities
unless a Jewish Council member was specifically summoned.
In the ghetto, the Jews lived their own lives and everything revolved
around the Judenrat, which provided them with necessities as it ran its
own bakery, had some distribution shops with meat, vegetables, fuel yards,
etc., etc.
There was no social life, nor were there any cultural institutions [17]
in the ghetto. As a dozen or so families lived in one house, they had the
opportunity to meet during evening hours and relate the events of the day to
one another.
The life of the Jews, both before and after the establishment of the ghetto,
was relatively often disturbed by the [Germans’] excesses. From time to time,
they entertained themselves by rushing at night into the defenceless Jews’
flats and plundering and looting everything that was valuable.
As has been mentioned, one night in November 1939, a few hundred men
were dragged out of their beds, almost barefoot and naked, to the courtyard of
a hotel, where they had to stand by the wall and the [Germans] ‘entertained’
themselves until morning, when they released the men.
On 1 May 1940, a group of [Germans] captured 10 Jews in the city and
maltreated them in a very cruel way: they cut out parts of their flesh with
razor blades and put them in wooden boxes which they then [18] threw down
from the second floor. A few of those Jews were brutally roughed up and taken
1673 The small synagogue was built after 1810. From December 1939, the Judenrat offices were located there. The present address of the building which survived is Kwiatka Street 7.
