Time went by, and the German authorities declared that all Jews in Poland would be confined to designated areas known as “ghettos”. Leah and her family lived in the Warsaw ghetto, the world’s largest, which was walled off from the rest of the city. Non-Jewish Poles resided in the “Aryan Side”, and any Pole discovered helping or sheltering a Jew was executed.
Food was scarce, and the family used to go to bed mostly hungry, despite the fact that Leah’s parents used to give her brother and herself more food than what they had themselves. Her parents had grown skinny, and her father was sick and in a chair most of the time.
The meagre rations permitted by the Nazis for the ghetto Jewish population were not enough to nourish them to remain alive.
Uncle Urjasz used to bring small amounts of flour, groats, vegetables, bread, and sometimes margarine, meat, milk, and sugar. Later, Leah learnt that he risked his life to smuggle food from outside the ghetto.
The winter of 1940 was long and relentless. People burned pieces of their furniture as there was hardly any wood, fuel oil or coal to keep them warm. Cold, starvation and overcrowding precipitated the onset of deadly disease, with the elderly and the very young being the primary victims.
For Leah, the site of shrivelled children 5 to 6 years of age lying listless along the sides of the streets was no longer a very uncommon sight, as she used to go out with her mother to her uncles’ homes. The older siblings of such children would beg the passers-by for food. Often, the child was frozen, stiff, and lifeless, having suffered extreme cold and starvation.
Leah felt distressed by the apparent insensitivity of all the adults with white bands around their arms who would pass by, telling their children to look the other way. But she was proud of her mother, who would often kneel beside the very sick of the lot and put a pinch of sugar in their mouths.
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Surprisingly, the child would open its eyes and look at her in a way that drove her to pick it up and hug it for a minute or so. Leah could not forget the expression on her mother’s face, and she always wondered whether she was an angel.
Leah never wanted her mother to be an angel, as angels and fairies had wings that enabled them to fly away.
With Symeon sick most of the time, Ewa felt it was time to play a more active role in looking after her kin, as they were exhausting their savings. She wanted a steady income to support the family and offer more than a pinch of sugar to the orphans dying on the streets.
She and her female relatives started knitting sweaters and warm socks. They assembled spare clothes, children’s toys, suitcases, and décor items to pass to Urjasz, who would sneak them to the Aryan side and trade them in the quiet for food and medicine.
They soon ran out of goods to trade, and her family could not meet the demand.
Ewa managed to recruit more women, and after four months, she was running three small factories in some of the bigger homes in the vicinity. She had to keep her business secret out of fear of extortion by the ghetto police and because the Germans wanted the Jews to work for them for free, not earn a living for themselves or their kin.
The enterprise also allowed the menfolk of the female workers to band together and conduct the smuggling more skilfully, boosting their earnings and profits and helping their families.
Although some ghetto inhabitants became relatively wealthy thanks to the underground economy, it was responsible for keeping the population alive.
Ewa made a list of young orphans and the aged people in her locality, as they bore the brunt of malnutrition and disease. The ghetto children played a crucial role in passing food through the wall. She structured a mechanism to furnish sustenance to this disadvantaged group by engaging her neighbourhood kids to distribute the food to those on her list.