The Kukielkas frantically packed their possessions onto a sled and were off into the middle of the night. It was freezing in Wodzis?aw, where they were dumped. This was part of the Germans’ plan, Renia deduced: shuttling Jews from town to town for no reason other than to shame and depress them. Renia shivered, pulled her coat tighter around her （lucky to still have one）， and observed, helpless, as hysterical mothers watched their babies’ flesh turn blue from the cold. The Jews of Wodzis?aw let the mothers and their half-dead babies into the sheep pens in their yards, which at least protected them somewhat from the howling winds.
Eventually all the Jews were herded into the freezing synagogue, icicles hanging from the walls, and fed soup from a communal kitchen. Once the most affluent and influential people in their community, they now accepted that the only important thing was to stay alive. “The result was that the Germans hardened the hearts of the Jews,” Renia wrote, sensing the toughening of her own core. “Now each person cared only for themselves, willing to steal food out of the mouth of their brethren.” As a survivor remarked about the callousing of the soul that took place over time in the Warsaw ghetto: “If you saw a dead body on the street, you took its shoes.”
*
As in all the ghettos, the decrees only became more barbaric.
“One day the Germans invented a new way to kill Jews,” Renia wrote. Was it possible to feel more terrorized? Somehow, despite it all, the shock had not yet faded. With each sadistic innovation, Renia felt a sick haunting, a deeper sense of the boundless malice, the myriad ways that her murderers might inflict violence. “At night, a bus full of Gestapo would arrive, drunk out of their minds.” They came with a list of thirty names, grabbed these men, women, and children from their houses, and beat and shot them. Renia heard yelling and firing, and, in the morning, saw bodies strewn in the alleys, black and blue from flogging. The families’ unbearable wails broke Renia’s heart. Each time, she imagined that one of her own might be next. It took days for the community to calm down after these incidents: Who had made up this list of names? Who did one have to be careful around? Whose bad side were you on? People were afraid to even speak.
This is how Jews in the ghetto came to feel fully occupied. Their territory, their skin, even their thoughts were threatened. Anything they did or said—the smallest movement or motion—could result in their execution and their entire families’。 Every element of their physical and spiritual existence was under surveillance. “No one could breathe, cough, or cry without having an audience,” described a young female ghetto dweller. Who could be trusted? Who was listening? To have a candid conversation with an old friend required prearranging a meeting spot, then walking together as if on a household chore. Polish Jews feared that even their dreams would somehow betray them.
Sometimes the Gestapo arrived in the ghetto at night and simply shot people to death. One night the whole Judenrat and all their families were executed. On another memorable evening, several buses of Gestapo forced Jews, half naked, barefoot in nightclothes, to go outside and run around the snow-filled market while the Gestapo chased them with rubber clubs, or told them to lie in the snow for thirty minutes, or forced them to flog their fellow Jews with whips, or to lie on the ground and have a military vehicle run over them. The Nazis poured water over freezing people and made them stand at attention. “You never knew if you’d wake up alive the next morning” was Renia’s new reality. Why did she?
Daytime nightmares began. Machine guns echoed in the forest. Nazis had Jews dig their own graves and made them sing and dance in the pits until they shot them. They forced other Jews to bury the victims—or, sometimes, bury them alive. Elderly Jews were also made to sing and dance, the Nazis plucking out their beard hairs one by one and slapping them until they spat out their teeth.
The ghetto was a closed-off society—no radios allowed—but Renia sleuthed for information. Hundreds of women were taken to unknown locations, never to be heard from again. A candid soldier revealed to her that these women were sent to the front to serve as prostitutes. They contracted sexually transmitted diseases and were burnt alive or shot to death. She listened raptly as he told her that one time, he saw hundreds of young women revolt. They attacked the Nazis, stealing their bayonets, wounding them, gouging out their eyes, and then killing themselves, screaming that they would never be made into prostitutes. The girls who remained alive were eventually subdued and raped.