Mila 18 - Leon Uris [95]
Fuel ration has brought on pneumonia this winter, Emanuel Goldman tells me. He says another cut in food ration was ordered by Schreiker yesterday.
Not to be outdone by the Reinhard Corps, Rudolph Schreiker has hundreds of thugs from Solec and even mobs of children and students to roam the Jewish area and smash store windows, beat up Orthodox Jews on the street, and loot. It is understood that no Pole will be punished for a crime against a Jew. Special rewards are offered to Poles who turn over Jews with “Aryan” Kennkarten.
Rabbi Solomon’s synagogue was burned to the ground, as he was caught by Stutze teaching cheder in his basement. (I could have sworn young Bronski was receiving instructions. Maybe not. He did not show up among those turned in at Pawiak Prison.) Rabbi Solomon’s congregation was fined twenty thousand zlotys to free the boys and to pay for petrol which the Germans used to burn the synagogue. Zemba’s American Relief put up half the fine in American dollars.
All teen-age orphans in our orphanage in Powazki and a dozen other orphanages were forced to donate blood to the German army. Does Hitler know his Aryans will be transfused with impure blood?
Simon Eden says the trade in poison is getting large. Everyone is carrying a capsule for suicide. No one gets more than a few hours’ sleep these nights. Whistles, rifle butts, pounding boots. We sleep with one eye open. A hundred different rape cases reported. “Juden ’raus [Jews, come out]!” is heard every night, all night.
If we are to hand out prizes for ingenuity, Stutze’s Reinhard Corps must win. They force the old Orthodox to scrub sidewalks under bayonets. They have made them dance naked. They make them exercise with heavy cobblestones. They make them beat each other with galoshes. They make them crap their pants. Still, through it all, I am proud of these Jews. They refuse to shave off their beards or earlocks. They walk with their heads erect in great dignity despite the fact that their very appearance will bring them abuses. They are stubborn and honorable and of Rabbi Solomon’s breed, and we Zionists could learn a thing or two from them.
Schreiker, jealous of Stutze and not to be outdone, turned loose mad Gerta, an ethnic with a psychopathic hatred of Jews. She has been allowed to wander through the northern quarters with a lead pipe.
A.B.
Chapter Sixteen
Journal Entry
THE GERMAN HAND IS being revealed more each day. The Krakow Gazette keeps hammering on a theme of “segregation of the Jews on reservations.” That is fancy talk for ghettos.
More talk about sending Jews from Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany into Poland.
Yesterday it became true. A ghetto was decreed in Lodz. Chaim Rumkowski was appointed chairman of a Council of Elders. Ana Grinspan is there now to see if we can organize a “self-help house” like Mila 19. There are around two hundred thousand Jews in Lodz.
At yesterday’s meeting with Emanuel Goldman, David Zemba, and Simon Eden, Goldman thinks we are heading into a week of crisis in Warsaw. He says that all the abuses up to date have been merely to soften us up. A new Nazi, Oberführer Alfred Funk, has arrived, and that means trouble because Funk is the direct liaison between Berlin and Globocnik in Lubin and is no doubt carrying a pocketful of candy on new German policy.
ALEXANDER BRANDEL
SS Brigadier Alfred Funk was the young blond blue-eyed Aryan about whom Adolf Hitler bragged. He was an intelligent and industrious man who cut a smart figure and would have been successful in any capacity he sought in life. He was shrewd and astute and dependable, unlike the bumbling bully Rudolph Schreiker, the timid conforming opportunist Franz Koenig, the half-mad Sieghold Stutze, and the cynical, lazy Horst von Epp.
Like Von Epp, he calculated that the rise of Nazism was unstoppable. Unlike