The Horse Adjutant mankind. Our only hope would be outside intervention, and it had to be soon. The war seemed hopeless. The world news was all bad. The British were defeated at Dunkirk and forced to evacuate the mainland of Europe, while France fell to the Germans in another quick defeat. Germany was gaining territory by leaps and bounds. They seemed unstoppable. The only place it began to unravel was when they attacked Russia, causing a two-front war. Russia at first almost succumbed, but slowly, with massive casualties, it turned the tide. Meanwhile, we were trapped far behind enemy lines. All of the initial restrictions although strict were relatively mild. Since they didn’t separate my family, we still found ways to fill our pot with something to eat. We were already poor, so we were used to living on very little and did not expect much. It was not until massive numbers of the Gestapo arrived in Poland that things turned toward the unspeakable. With those troops, the Germans established bases in every county, including mine. Once securely in place, all the Jewish businesses were taken forcefully, and our misery accelerated. Luckily, I was too young to report to work. The cutoff age was 13. This gave my fam- ily a lifeline, as I could use my time at home to plan how to find food and then go and get it at night. As much as the Nazi occupation was pressing us, another even more immediate and ominous killer also was brewing; Winter. So, even though the Germans were a nagging problem, it was Winter that demanded our immediate attention, and the Winter of 1940 was shaping up to be brutal. Temperatures were reaching dangerously cold levels for extended periods of time. It caused us to suffer from the cold, not just the hunger. And worse, as the Germans were also caught in the cold, they compounded our misery by an edict requiring the Jews to give up all their fur coats. Without warm fur, we were naked, in the dead of winter. That year the cold would go deep into our bones making us miserable and subject to sickness. Regardless of the weather, my father and all the Jewish men reported to the area out- side the magistrate’s office every morning for his daily orders. Here they were assigned jobs. I remember his job was to remove the snow to keep the roads clear. To do this, he used our horse. They made him work from early in the morning until sunset. In doing this work, he was able to still do what he did best, work with animals. And for my family, this meant a lifeline to his horse and travel by me at night. Having access to that horse became a key part of our near-term survival. The Gestapo established an open ghetto, the Jewish townspeople were cordoned off to a limited area. It was against the law to venture 1 kilometer beyond this border. Even
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