European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

All needed the time, organization and contacts... and insolence and impudence.

All advantages and disadvantages that a human being can have.

To get a birth certificate from a priest, you had to give a bribe.

Later on, to make `Kennkarte`, usually the price for it was about one thousand Zloties or more.

Then photos, then to find a photographer. It had to be organized perfectly.

Differences were big.

Here there were hungry and naked people, dead bodies were not in the streets, and there they were.

And then this horrible contrast.

Can you believe that in the ghetto you could get bananas and in Warsaw you did not have any chance to get them?

There was a restaurant, a Jewish one, in the ghetto, in 1942, where you could get everything.

Even on the Aryan side you could not find it…

And when you get to the street, only dead bodies, naked…

And that police… I, if I was going into the ghetto, I was scared only of the Jewish police. Nobody else.

Because I had never seen that a German shot a Jew in the ghetto.

But I saw Jewish police killing Jews in the ghetto. And I saw it.

I did not understand them at that time.

When I got to Majdanek, I understood what it was about.

This group of people, those who were managing the ghetto, wanted to survive at all costs.

It was not the Germans who were preparing the long lines of Jews who were sent to Umschlagplatz.

Jews were doing that, those Jewish policemen.