In 1940, my mother’s name had been submitted to Prezes (President) Chaim Rumkowski for an Etat (government) position in the ghetto. A man named Jochimek, who was employed as a special courier or secretary for Rumkowski and had access to the office, saw to it that my mother’s application appeared at the top of the request pile. When my mother received the notice to report for an interview, she somehow managed to arrange for my brother Shimon to replace her. She explained that her future was much more uncertain, whereas Shimon was young, able, intelligent, and had more of a chance to succeed. She said that if Shimon got the job instead of her, our whole family would benefit from it and perhaps we would all have a chance to survive the war. There were several levels of Etat jobs. We did not expect either my brother or my mother to get a very high level position, but we were hoping for the best under the circumstances.
Shimon returned from the interview with Rumkowski very jubilant. He told us that Rumkowski, who was famous for his swinging moods, was apparently in an unusually good state of mind when they had met. He asked Shimon mainly about the composition of our family. As soon as Shimon told him, Rumkowski yelled out: “A mother, a brother, a sister and a grandmother, too? Oh, I’ll make sure that you get a good position!”
It took several months before Shimon was notified regarding a privileged job as a guard in a butcher cooperative. In the meantime a change had occurred in Shimon’s life. One evening, he told our mother that he and his fiancée, Shprintse, had decided to escape eastward to the Soviet occupied part of Poland. They had one problem, however: her parents, who were Khasidic Jews, wouldn’t hear about their daughter running off into the world with her fiancé before marriage. “So, mama, I would like to get your approval to marry the girl I love as soon as possible,” he said.
My mother expressed discontent. “First of all,” she said, “the year of mourning after father isn’t over yet… Secondly, you are not even nineteen years old, so you are too young to become a husband, let alone — a father. These are horrendous times and Jewish children are being condemned to death before they even have a chance to be born. Thirdly,” she asked, “how in the world could a young couple begin a decent marriage on ‘unstable footing’ — homeless, away from their families and without any of the material conditions necessary for a marriage to last?”
Shimon responded that he had known Shprintse for a long time, that he loved her dearly, that he must marry her soon, and that he could not live without her. My mother’s oldest and favorite son knew how to manipulate our mother.
So eventually, he had his way — but my mother managed to persuade him to postpone the wedding until the following spring. On March 27, 1941, the marriage between my brother and Shprintse took place in the bride’s home.
All of the attendees wore their best clothes – made before the war – for the occasion. Everyone looked very elegant and cheerful — that is, everyone but my mother. She sighed and cried a lot, mainly because my father had not lived long enough to share in the joy of seeing their son being married. Also, according to the religious custom followed by Shprintse’s father, my widowed mother could not escort her son under the khupe (wedding canopy) — because “as she was being a widow at the time she was not regarded as a married woman.” Eyl Mole Rakhamim (a prayer for the dead) was recited in the memory of my father and my mother cried again. Aunt Leytshe and Uncle Yosef accompanied Shimon under the canopy.
A wedding reception followed the ceremony. At the two long tables, with the bride and groom at the head of each table, sat the young couple’s parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles — a total of 45-50 individuals. We ate, sang, and prayed, and I recited a poem that I had written for the occasion.
The newly married couple got a room in the back of an old wooden, dilapidated building in the poorest and oldest section of Baluty. Before the war, this section (Fayferurke) was known as an area where the underworld and paupers resided. Both my mother and the mother of the bride, as well as several relatives of the young couple, tried their utmost to provide them with bedding, cooking utensils and other household items.
Shimon finally obtained the promised job (in a butcher’s cooperative); Shprintse, along with her twin sister Rozka, got jobs as seamstresses in a shirt factory. Very shortly afterward, the rest of Shprintse’s large family, the Zytenfelds, who did not have jobs and were therefore termed as “undesirables” (by the Nazis and by Rumkowski) — were deported to a concentration camp, and Rozka moved in with the young couple to live in their one bedroom apartment. I once overheard Shimon complaining to our mother that he and his newly married wife had lost the intimacy of marriage at a very early stage in their marriage. By that time, getting out of the ghetto had become virtually impossible.
On his privileged job, Shimon’s duty was to guard the lines for meat so that they moved in an orderly fashion and no one pushed in front of others. It was considered to be a third level etat job in the ghetto. Besides the special food allocations as a Government employee, he also received additional allocations of meat from the director of the cooperative. He also wore an armband with the blue Mogen Dovid (Star of David).
Shimon did not, however, hold this job for too long. A horrible experience almost cost him his life. It happened like this:
When Shimon was appointed to his new job, it was explained to him that his duties would be to make sure that the meat line moved in orderly fashion and that no one was allowed to push in front of others. It wasn’t explained to him that the police, firefighters and others wearing armbands — the privileged ghetto inhabitants — were exempt from these regulations. Shimon, a firm believer in justice, couldn’t see why the sick, skinny, undernourished and hard working ordinary people who could barely keep their equilibrium, should stand in line for hours; whereas the relatively well-to-do, well-fed, strong, privileged and not so hard-working ghetto elite should be allowed to get their meat rations without waiting in line for their turn. Shimon treated everyone equally, and didn’t allow anyone to push in front of others. The privileged, especially the police, didn’t appreciate his attitude, and repeatedly warned him that he would pay for his behavior.
One late afternoon, on a day that all the butcher cooperative employees received their special meat allocations, Shimon, who was heading home, was arrested by two policemen. He was charged with theft of meat. Inside the police station he was beaten up with blunt instruments and thrown into a jail cell, where they kept him until the director of the butcher store bailed him out. The director testified that he had personally given Shimon the meat and assured them that Shimon was a very honest young man.
Since the police station on Franciszkanska was practically across the street from us, after his release from jail, Shimon’s first stop was to our home. He told mama all that happened to him that afternoon. For the first time in my life, I saw Shimon crying like a baby. Mama was speechless and tended to his wounds. Soon thereafter, that meat cooperative was closed and my brother got another job as an attendant in a ghetto factory on Swiety Jakuba Street. Thus came the end to his special meat allocations, his armband and the special status.
Elek openly expressed resentment because mama had turned over her interview and thereby her potential good job to Shimon, who was sharing the allocations with his wife and his sister-in-law after his marriage — but not with us. Elek felt that if my mother or he had the better job, our whole family might have been in better circumstances and the job would have been more secure.
Shimon’s health rapidly declined — both physically and psychologically. It was heartbreaking to see this gorgeous looking young intellectual, chessmaster, excellent mathematician, talented caricature drawer, poetry lover and writer, and pre-war, Tsukunft-Shturem militiaman, reduced to an always hungry, and increasingly withdrawn person, continuously obsessed with searching for food. His eyes were now always wandering — looking to the ground, onto tables, or wherever — to find bread crumbs or anything else resembling food. He would pick up anything that came his way and shove it into his mouth. I could not understand what had happened to my older, handsome, talented and favorite brother, who had been my idol and my model. I couldn’t understand why he, who had more food than the rest of us (even if it wasn’t much more than we had), could become such a weak and helpless person. I felt both great pity and great resentment toward him.
Child In Captivity 