They were taken thus to Lidzbark, more than 30 km from Żuromin. There they
spent the night and were treated with the same great ‘hospitality.’
Very early the next morning, 6 October, they were herded out into
a square like slaves of old. Landowners arrived and began selecting them.
Some picked tall men with long arms, others preferred shorter men. When
the numbers proved insufficient for the landowners who had come, they were
assured that more batches of the same kind would be brought. Sadly, the
treatment of Jewish workers at the placówki was deplorable. Sufficient food
was out of the question, but the one thing there was plenty of was savage beating.
The sanitary conditions were quite grotesque: the Jews were not allowed
to shave, so as to turn them into caricatures. After 7 weeks of work, when
the tormented Jews were released from their harsh captivity, they looked so
strange that parents did not recognise their own children.
On the night of 5 to 6 October, i.e. the night of Simchat Torah, the town
synagogue, which had a 100-year-long history, was burnt down.¹⁸⁸⁹ The grief
of the shtetl was great, but the enemies revelled in the Jewish sorrow.
On 7 October the same obławy took place as two days previously and continued
for almost a week. [6] Several more batches were sent out, a large number
of people, old, sick, men in their seventies, having been dragged out of
their homes. In one case, the father was not in, so instead a sick boy, aged 14,
with a high fever, was dragged out of bed and taken away with the group. All
this was done in addition to the forced labour that had to be performed in the
town itself. The last batches were treated no better than the first.
On 8 October a Torah scroll was found in a shtibl. It was taken contemptuously
to the municipality building, where an order was issued to unravel
the scroll on the rubble of the burnt synagogue, defile it, then cut it to shreds
and burn it. The murderers ordered the Jews to clear it away together with the
market waste. The mass obławy continued day and night without a stop, getting
worse all the time. People sat up all night fully dressed in fear of a raid.
There were days when the sadists felt like making fun of the Jewish misfortunes,
so they organised Jewish beard hunts. When they caught an elderly Jew
with a beard, they put a rope around his neck and dragged him to the barber’s,
driving him on from behind with a stick. The humiliation was unbearable.
1889 The synagogue stood on Plac Wolności.
