Jews, come feast your eyes!
Can you believe our luck?
We've got a Jewish mailman!
The letter carrier [mailman] was welcomed into every Jewish home with shouts of joy,
looks of astonishment, and then with affectionate glances.
The letter carrier's self-esteem began to grow.
The Jewish letter carrier got off to a good start.
The job of letter carrier, in fact, stoked feelings of envy in many Jews, who treated
him as one of the elect - one of the fortunate few on whom lady luck had smiled.
No one really knows why people felt this way.
Does the letter carrier's job in itself have something romantic about it?
Does he bring the scent of far-off lands, of oceans and deserts, and of ships and trains
along with him?
The letter carrier has to hurry on with his route: he still got a lot of letters to deliver
on a number of different floors the letter carrier would work his way up and down stairs,
only to be met in every apartment by enraged customers pouring a steady stream of demands
on his head making it hard for him to control his temper and stay polite.
The public of course had a great deal riding on prompt mail delivery; not just merchants
and small tradesmen depended on it but the broader public as well.
The little scraps of paper they received in the mail, often written in mishmash of half
Yiddish, half German, often represented their last chance for salvation, providing them
with bread or other support from relatives still living in the countryside at large.
People kept a special eye out for letters from Russia.
A letter from Russia; The sweetest dream of those who have been ruined, and their ultimate
hope of consolation.
Children infected with their parents' sense of anxious expectation would not let the letter
carrier take a single step down the street, besieging and pestering him with the shrill
shriek of their youthful voices...
And if fortune smiled and he actually brought a letter for their parents, the same child
raced head over heels up the stairs, screaming at the top of their lungs and crashing into
the room out of breath: Papa, Mama, a letter from Russia!
From Srulik, from Tsirl, from Yocheved.
I saw it myself - a letter with a Russian stamp!
The Jewish woman is dizzy as she waits: in her mind, the letter soon becomes a huge round
of cheese, a fat salami, or a thick chunk of butter.
Before long, her eyes can see nothing else, her ears nothing else
When a Warsaw Jew received a package with items such as these, he would be able to take
some of it - a portion of tea, coffee, whiskey, or tobacco, for instance - and sell it for
good money on the open market.
Selling part of the delicacies could bring in enough to pay for food for several weeks,
and he could go on and consume the rest.
There were times when a card announcing a package to come would determine the fate of
an entire family, deciding whether they would live or die.
The higher the cost of living climbed and the tighter the noose was drawn around the
neck of the ghetto Jews, the stronger their clamor for mail became.
The constant wait for packages drove people out of their minds.
The street numbers of the buildings were terribly confusing.
Doing his job conscientiously became a next-to-impossible task for the Jewish letter carrier,
especially in winter, when walking up slippery, often broken stairs could become a deadly affair.
The knock on the door in the middle of the night - what a torture it was!
Jews trembled at the prospect of house searches and assaults
when no one answered immediately, the knock became stronger
- the mail, after all, must not be delayed.
In winter, the letter carrier might see ten to twelve people in the home of one of the
larger families - lying in bed with pale faces and feverish eyes, swallowing their spittle.
Things were scattered around the house in a terrifying disorder, a reminder of the truth
of the old saying "like outside, like inside".
What was obvious was that all were crazed by a single, obsessive idea: Where can I get
a little piece of bread?
And then suddenly: Boom!
War with Russia!
At the post office, all hell breaks loose.
The letters that trickle in become fewer by the day.
Thousands of letters sent to Russia over the last few days are being returned with the
German notation, "Postal Service Suspended".
As the nightmare of Jewish Warsaw darkens, hope is gradually extinguished: no more letters
from Russia, no more packages, just walls - drab, red, and cold ghetto walls, like the
walls of so many cheerless prisons.
Who cares about the Jewish post office or the swollen feet of the Jewish letter carrier
now?