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Until 1941, '42, things were not all that bad. It was when
the...when the ghetto was established, all the Jews were herded
into one part of the city. Uh, food became very scarce. Housing
became very scarce. We lived in...in one room that my father and
mother and I shared. And food was very difficult to come by. A lot
of...uh lot of hunger, but still not as serious. There were still
a lot of people who lived quite well, who had uh had ways of
getting food into the...into the ghetto. Especially in the
beginning. Things gradually became harder and harder. And the walls
were...protection was built up much heavier than initially.
Initially, it was still possible for people to go in and out, I
remember. But after a while that became uh more difficult. Then, of
course, in 1942 the ghetto...most of the people in the ghetto--I
would think about some close to twenty thousand people--uh were
shipped uh to Treblinka. And that included uh my grandparents as
well. That was sort of the first really serious uh killing
experience that...that I had. During...I...I should note, though,
that in the ghetto itself there were--if not daily, certainly
sporadic--killings going on by Germans of people...German uh guards
of Jews, uh, on the street. At the same time, there appeared to be
some sort of normalcy that...that reigned.
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