A Writer at War (50 page)

The ghetto. One can imagine how tall the buildings had once been when looking at the huge brick waves into which these buildings
have been turned. Amid the brick sea, two [Polish Roman Catholic] churches are standing.
²
A woman’s head [carved from] stone is lying among red pieces of brick. Streets have been hacked through this wild masonry forest. The Judenrat building, gloomy, grey. [In] its inner yards – [are] rails, red from cinder, on which the bodies of rebels had been burned from the Warsaw ghetto. A heap of ashes in the corner of the yard – Jewish ashes.
³
Jars, scraps of dresses, a woman’s shoe, a torn Talmud book.

Resistance at the Warsaw ghetto began on 19 April and ended on 24 May. The chairman of the community, Chernyakov, committed suicide on 23 July 1942. Members of the Jewish Council of the Ghetto – Gustav Tselikovsky, Sherishevsky, Alfred Stegman, Maximilian Lichtenbaum – were shot early in May.

During the uprising at the Warsaw ghetto, Shmul Zigelbaum (Comrade Arthur), who was then living in London, committed suicide in order to draw the world’s attention to the tragedy of the Jewish nation.
⁴

From Warsaw, Grossman continued on in the wake of the victorious Red Army, to the city of
ód
where the Nazis had also used the ghetto as a holding camp.
ód
was seized by Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army on 18 January, just four days after the start of the offensive. The rapidity of the Soviet advance had not given the German authorities time to destroy the city.

ód
. Five hundred factories and plants. Directors and owners have fled. At the moment they are managed by workers. The electric power station, trams, railway are working at full power. An old man, an engine driver, said: ‘I’ve driven trains for fifty years, I’ll be the first man to drive a train to Berlin.’

Gestapo [headquarters]: the building is intact, everything is in its place. Luxurious portraits of leaders of the German National-Socialist Workers’ Party are lying around on the pavement. Children in torn felt boots are dancing on the faces of Goering and Hitler.
Munitions factories: there were three of them. Two of them were destroyed by the English air force, the third we examined today in
ód
; – a gigantic facility for the manufacture of torpedoes. They had been building it since 1944, but it never started on full production. There are slit trenches in the yard, stretching parallel to the workshops. Tables in the factory canteen. Signs over some tables: ‘For Germans only.’ A Polish worker says: ‘In the time it took me to produce eight [torpedoes], a German would make forty-five.’ A twelve-hour working day. Two kitchens at the canteen for workers – German and Polish. Two sorts of food ration cards – German and Polish. Huge slogans in German in the workshops: ‘You are nothing, your nation is everything.’

Punishments: when a worker was late, or dropped his tool, or seemed lazy to his foreman, they slapped his face and put him in the punishment cells (in the basements of workshops).

ód
, or Litzmannstadt, renamed to commemorate a German general.
⁵
We, the four Jews, represented Russia amid the family of a Russian general, Shepetovsky (deceased). The general’s daughter Irena doesn’t understand any Russian, she only speaks German and Polish. Gekhtman sings Volga songs to her, burring very expressively.

In the
ód
ghetto. The song of the ghetto [was]: ‘One shouldn’t feel sad and cry. Everything will be better tomorrow. The sun will shine for us, too.’