Free A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz by Goran Rosenberg Page A

and formulated? Let alone a world in which such a decree can be organized and implemented.
    Many cannot live on. After each wave of dispatches comes a wave of suicides. People throw themselves from the windows, or hang themselves from beams and doorposts, or cut their arteries, or use poison, or take an overdose of some sleeping drug they’ve been fortunate enough to have access to, or get themselves shot by the German guards at the ghetto fence. That last one doesn’t require much effort. The German guards readily shoot even thosewho don’t want to be shot. All suicides are noted in the diary or daily chronicle maintained by the Jewish ghetto administration, without German knowledge, in premises on the third floor at 4 Kościelny Square. Thousands of typewritten diary pages, sometimes in Polish, sometimes in German, filled with observations and details of daily life in the ghetto, of deaths and births (!), of reductions in rations, of consignments of turnips and potatoes, of the lack of matches and fuel, of production quotas and actual production, of the weather, and of an old man, clearly ill, standing with an emaciated boy on a street corner, trying to sell something that looks like an onion. An escalating number of entries about starvation, transports, and suicides. Faced with the transports of September 1942, parents attempt to kill their children and themselves. Not all succeed.
    Sixteen thousand people are offered up on those days in September, handed over for onward transport, according to lists compiled by thirty-eight people working twelve-hour shifts in the offices of the Jewish ghetto administration on the second floor of the building in Kościelny Square, plowing through the nineteen files that contain the ghetto register of inhabitants, copying thousands of family names and exact ages onto individual cards and sorting them by district and address before carrying them up to the Evacuation Committee on the third floor, which picks out the cards of those to be dispatched and sends them on to the Jewish ghetto police for execution.
    Yes, this is what Josef Zelkowicz typewrites in Polish in the ghetto diary on September 14, 1942. Outside the diary, handwriting in Yiddish, he notes that everyone seems to have lost their senses. He also notes that the selection cards soon prove redundant because within a day or two the Germans lose patience and send their own people into the ghetto, ignoring the cards andpicking the inhabitants out at random, shooting those who try to hide or refuse to obey or have the wrong expression on their faces. In the actions of September 1942, 600 people are shot by the Gestapo. Two of them in the backyard of 7 Żytnia Street, where the residents are ordered to file out for German inspection. Among them a mother and her four-year-old daughter. It’s Zelkowicz narrating. The mother and daughter are holding hands tightly and smiling, the mother to show she’s a viable survivor and the daughter because she’s happy to be out in the sun. The German orders the mother to hand over her daughter. The mother hands nothing over and keeps on smiling. Mother and daughter are taken out of the line and given three minutes to think about it. Three minutes, not a second more. For some reason, the German is smiling, too. The ranks of neighbors are shaking with dread, but as discreetly as possible so as not to draw attention to themselves. When the three minutes are up, the mother and daughter are ordered “against the wall” and the German shoots them both, one pistol shot to each neck.
    Zelkowicz tries to find words for what happens in the ghetto on those September days in 1942 but despairs of being believed. He senses that there will be those who, a few decades on, will claim it’s all lies and deception. So at regular intervals, as if to pinch himself, he puts down in writing that this is really happening, that this is “one hundred percent factual,” that it’s happening before his eyes here and