KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
was hurt. People rushed home, and later that night we were told that every piece of gold, silver, and copper in the ghetto had to be turned in to him or we would all be executed by sunset the next day. In the morning, we surrendered all the goods and valuables we still possessed to the new commissar. I remember that my mother gave up her remaining jewelry and gold Russian coins. When the commissar noticed a good-looking girl, he would call to the foreman, point the girl out, and say, “At such and such a time, this girl is to be brought to my house.” All the women lived in fear of attracting his attention. My younger sister was too young to go to work, and my mother did not have to participate in the forced labor because she ran the photography studio, but my mother was worried about Chava, who was a beautiful seventeen year old. To make Chava ugly and invisible, my mother dressed her in a long baggy dress, tied a babushka’s scarf over her head, and painted dark circles under her eyes. She told her never to look up, to always look at the ground so that she would not be noticed and raped by the German commissar. This protected her, and thank God, nothing happened to her while we lived in the ghetto. In the ghetto, we were assigned a small apartment of three rooms — a living room, bedroom, and kitchen — which we shared with a young couple and their baby. The couple had come to our town as refugees when the Germans had occupied the western part of Poland. Their names were David and Manya Zuker. Manya Zuker was beautiful. The commissar saw her at the pho- tography studio and ordered her to sleep with him. Someone from the Judenrat (a council of Jews organized by the Germans) told him her name. I was sent out of the room, but I remember my mother helping Manya make it look as if she had her period. But Manya had to go to the commissar a number of times, and I remember that she was always scared to death. David was constantly planning ways to resist the commissar by force. He and Israel Dobina, who were in their early twenties, were planning a revolt together. They reasoned that, although the first few people who tried to escape might be shot, others might succeed
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