Judgment Day.
The Sun stabs like needles.
The heat is unbearable.
There is no air to breathe.
A crowd of 1,500 people is gathered on the fire brigade square. It is not simply
curiosity which brings the people here today.
Curiosity would not have been enough to tear people out of the lines at the
potato stores and food distribution points.
The crowd pushes closer and closer to the stage and to the left where there is
shade, we wait.
A great tribe condemned to death.
What will Kofsky say? At quarter to five the German appears. He cannot
control his tears. He weeps like a child.
A painful blow has tracked the ghetto.
We are being asked to deliver the best we possess. Children and the elderly.
I never imagined that I would be forced to deliver the sacrifice to the altar
with my own hands. In my old age I must stretch out my arms and beg. Brothers and
sisters hand them over to me.
Fathers and mothers give me your children.
Yesterday afternoon they gave me the order to send out from the ghetto more
than 20,000 Jews. If not, they will do it.
I must perform this difficult and bloody operation. I have to take children
because if not, others might be taken as well. God forbid. I must tell you a secret.
They requested 24,000 victims. I succeeded in reducing the number to
20,000 but only on condition that these will be children up to age 10. Children
over ten are safe!
From Small Hamlet's barely a thousand arrived here.
So what is better? That 80 or 90 thousand Jews remain? Or death?
God forbid the whole population be extinguished. I implored on my knees but
it did not work.
This is the most difficult order that I have ever had to carry out. Give into my
hands the victims. Hand them over to me so that we will avoid having further victims
and the population of a hundred thousand Jews be preserved.
So they promised me if we deliver our victims by ourselves
There will be peace.
The ghetto is now writhing in convulsions.
I sit at home casting furtive glances at my wife who has aged dozens of years in the
last two days.
I look at my beautiful son. See his dark hollow face and the mortal fear lurking
in his eyes. All the terror around me makes me fear for myself. Makes me fear
for my wife. Makes me fear for my trembling child.
All of us are candidates.
A child is contraband. His breath shouldn't even be heard. The mother
places her unsure feed on the steps of the staircase. She wants to go down into
the cellar, to bury herself in the farthest wettest corner and lay there
till the house has been worked over. The neighbors warn. God forbid, the first
place they look is the cellar. What if the child becomes frightened when it hears
the shot and starts crying? Then the whole house, all of us, are in for it.
Suddenly gunshots outside. No time to think.
Rifle butts against the door into a long line of people. I'm first, my mother
behind me, Father's last. Father's 56 but he looks fine.
He rubbed his cheeks, they have a normal color, but mother is thin. Very thin. Her
face is drawn and her hair is all white.
Moving slowly towards the selection commission I hold my head straight.
They tell me to go to the right.
I wait. Other people are coming but they are not my parents.
The freshness of the girl fell under the eyes of a Nazi Party man, but no. The
mother would not give up her child's hand while she lived. The smile on his
twisted face trembled. "Tie them to the wall."
She held the girl's hand more convulsively.
They put up resistance yesterday on Diminovski Street and now the Gestapo
has stepped in.
The doctors searched my mother for some ailment. They couldn't find any but they
designated her to be taken.
She kissed each one of us goodbye and left quickly. I couldn't muster the
strength to look through the window.
I was like a stone. My poor mother. I swear to all that is holy
that if I could only know my mother would not be sent to her death but she would survive.
But I doubt very much that anything will save her. A blood-thirsty Nazi beast.
The Jewish police have been bought. Their children were exempted from the order.
They've been given three pounds of bread a day for their bloody bit of work. Bread
to gorge themselves on and an extra portion of sausage and sugar.
They are not to be envied at all.
At the last minute I hide Moka in the clothes basket. The poor thing begins to cry.
I should have stayed with her.
I should have hidden with her in the cellar.
My dear child naked barefoot left crying miserably in a clothes basket.
I betrayed you.
Your father deserted you. I did not protect you because I feared for my own
life. I cannot write.
I won't find peace. How can a father desert a child and run away? In whose
name did Moka lose her life?
Why did she perish?
One week. Eight days that seemed an eternity.
A primitive force is passed through the ghetto and swept away some 15,000 people.
Now, life appears to have resumed its former cause. There are still some mothers
weeping for children shipped down from the ghetto but now the population is
obsessed with getting bread rations and has gone from immediate personal tragedy
right back into daily life.