The Mass Murders and Our Escape into the Forest
O ne of the most terrifying tactics used by the Germans was the night roundups, when the Ukrainian police would come bang- ing on the doors and windows of the houses in the ghetto. They would wake everyone up in the middle of the night, chase them into the square, and line them up in rows. People came out in their nightclothes or whatever else they were wearing. Sometimes they had to remain there waiting for hours, anxious about what was go- ing to happen to them. Suddenly, the commissar would arrive on his horse and deliver a speech, usually about cleanliness. He would bellow that the ghetto was dirty and that he was going to conduct inspections. This was a calculated strategy. The Germans feared that the Jews might rebel when the Final Solution came. They thought that the Jews, once they realized they were being taken to be killed, would cause trouble. Every couple of weeks, in order to accustom people to roundups, the Germans would pull them out of their houses in the middle of the night. Everybody in the ghetto believed that this was just one of the sufferings we had to endure. But the Germans knew that one of those nights, when they had made the decision and arrangements for the final liquidation of the ghetto, the Jews would already be used to coming out to the square. And that was exactly what happened. During our time in the ghetto, my father wanted to spare us the humiliation of being taken out at night into the square. There was a small basement in our building and my father managed to find some old wood. He created a false floor that hid the basement hatch. As a result, when you walked into the room, you were not
101
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online