Free Born Survivors by Wendy Holden

ages of ten and sixty-five had to work. Each day there were announcements on loudspeakers in the ghetto’s largest open space – Fire Station Yard – on Lutomierska Street, informing newcomers where to report before the factory whistles blew. The Nazis set a ‘Jew allowance’ of approximately thirty pfennig a day per person for subsistence rations dispensed from communal kitchens, so each resident had to work to pay back their ‘loan’. Rachel and her family were immediately employed making raw materials for the German war machine. These included textiles, shoes, rucksacks, saddles, belts and uniforms. In return, the Nazis provided just enough food for the population to survive (but not always) and a few basic services.
    Once a worker had completed half their shift, they were entitled to a bowl of soup or ‘swill’ and a small piece of bread. Weekly, they queued for further rations such as beets, potato, cabbage, barley or onion, depending on what was available. If the authorities were feeling generous they might hand out a little sausage of dubious origin, a stick of margarine, flour, artificial honey or tiny (stinking) fish, which had to last a month. Milk was delivered through the gates occasionally, but in the summer it soon turned sour, while any fresh produce quickly spoiled.
    It was up to individuals how they managed their provisions for the week; they might choose to barter shoes, clothes, cigarettes, books or other precious belongings for a little extra something like radish leaves to enhance a soup or root vegetables normally fed to cattle. Rachel’s father Shaiah, a chain smoker, frequently traded his food for cigarettes and began to shrink inside his clothes.
    What Rachel and her family remember most about the ghetto is ‘working all the time and being hungry all the time’. Their eyes began to sink into their sockets and their hipbones to rub againsttheir clothes. Belts were tightened and then had new holes punched in them, and the few clothes the family possessed soon became threadbare and stiff with grease. Their bellies ached and their legs were leaden. As in Warsaw, it was only the black market that helped keep people alive as the distribution points and potato depots increasingly fell prey to corruption and theft – known to all as ‘skimming’. Hundreds suffered from pus-filled abscesses or swollen feet, legs and bodies – all caused by malnutrition. ‘Some people could hardly walk because they filled their empty bellies with water and drank too much,’ Sala recalled. ‘There was a time when my feet wouldn’t carry me so Mother gave me some dark oil and brown sugar as a kind of vitamin. I don’t know why, but it worked.’
    An estimated twenty per cent of the ghetto’s population died of exhaustion, starvation or disease. In the frigid winters people froze to death in their beds. Some killed themselves by jumping from windows, by poisoning or hanging, in order to avoid the inevitable. A few parents killed their children and then themselves. Others ‘went into the wire’, which involved running at the barricades confident they’d be hastened to their end by a Nazi bullet. Later, in the camps, the most desperate prisoners were often to use this method of suicide, running at the electrified fencing in order to bring about a swift end.
    Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a childless sixty-three-year-old Polish businessman, had been appointed the Juden Älteste – or ‘Elder of the Jews’ – by the Nazis. Just like Czerniaków in Warsaw, Rumkowski was put in charge of the day-to-day running of the ghetto from his headquarters in Bałuty Square. It was also his lot to decide the destiny of every man, woman and child. A former textile manufacturer and the director of an orphanage, Rumkowski was to become a controversial figure, regarded as a hero or a quisling, once he chose to co-operate with the Nazis.
    White-haired and blue-eyed, he believed that in using the negotiation skills he’d honed