Of all things, this murder jerked the comrades’ resolve, and their sense of purpose began to slip. Why read, learn, work? Live? Why bother anymore?
*
It got worse. Rumors began. The Jews would be “resettled” to a locked ghetto, in the neighborhood of Kamionka, on the other side of the train station. Twenty-five thousand Jews were to be housed in living quarters meant for ten thousand. Those like Renia, who had already lived in a ghetto, were all too aware of the nightmare that awaited them. Even those who hadn’t lived in ghettos were dismayed. “In the summer, it will be unbearable,” a B?dzin teenager wrote in her diary when she heard the news, “to sit in a gray locked cage, without being able to see fields and flowers.” Frumka and her fellow Freedom leader Hershel Springer walked around as if poisoned, pale and sick. What to do? To move to the ghetto or to flee? Fight or flight.
Heated discussion ensued. Ultimately it was decided that struggle would be futile, even leading to unwanted consequences. The time for fighting had not yet arrived.
Instead, Frumka and Hershel spent entire days at the Judenrat trying to arrange housing for the Freedom kibbutz as well as for the Atid group, now comprising nineteen teenagers from the shuttered orphanage who lived with them. The Judenrat office was packed. Yelling, screaming. The rich, Renia wrote, had an easier time because they could offer bribes. “Without money, you’re like a soldier without a gun.”
The Jews were shoved into the ghetto. Though Kamionka is now a hilly and leafy suburb, during the war, it resembled a crowded refugee camp: poor, neglected, unhygienic. Small stoves were everywhere, exuding noxious smoke. People sat on the ground, eating what they could. Furniture and packages piled up in front of every house. Next to the piles, babies. Those who couldn’t afford apartments built huts in the square, like chicken coops, for protection from the rain. Stables, attics, and outhouses all became homes. Ten people lived in a converted cowshed, and they were lucky. Many slept with no roof at all. There was no room for furniture inside any abode except for necessary tables and beds. Each day Renia saw Jews hauling mattresses outside so that more people could move inside, calling up her horrid memories of living in ghettos with her family. Jews moved around like shadows, Renia wrote, like raggedy living corpses. At the same time, she felt that many Poles were pleased, robbing Jewish homes of possessions and commenting callously, “It’s a pity that Hitler didn’t come earlier.” Some Jews burnt their belongings or chopped their furniture into firewood just to prevent Poles from eventually taking them.
The Freedom members left for the ghetto, packing their bare necessities into a car. Frumka and Hershel had managed to secure an entire two-storey house, half for them, half for the Atid orphans. Though this was much better than most living quarters （“a palace,” Renia called it, happy it was clean）， it was small. There was no room to walk between the beds. Their closets and tables stood out in the yard, to be used as kindling.
The ghetto was closed, guarded by the militia. Police walked the Jews to and from work as tailors, cobblers, and metal workers in German workshops. Then workers stopped going to work, saying they needed child care. （Renia proudly noticed the Jews’ sense of rebellion.） The Judenrat created communal day cares where kids were fed while their parents labored. Later, they built shacks in front of the workshops, so that the babies could sleep there at night. Each workshop had its own shack; desperate people moved into them before they were even completed. As Renia recalled, Kamionka was a “disgraceful site.”
Any infraction brought death. The night was so silent, it was dangerous to go outside after eight o’clock. Complete blackout was mandatory. A militiaman stood on each corner, enforcing the curfew, his flashlight flickering in the stale air. Suddenly a gunshot. In the morning, a funeral. A man had been trying to walk to another building.
Every week, Renia watched as groups were sent to Auschwitz to be killed: the elderly, parents who’d hid their children, toddlers torn from mothers’ breasts, young people accused of being politically active, people who didn’t show up for a couple days’ of work. They were brought to the station, beaten, and thrown into cattle cars. A man who took something by accident was flogged, strangled, trampled, and, if necessary, shot. But it was never necessary—he had already died.