groundless. Later on, however, it was learned that the youngsters had been telling the truth. These children remained at Theresienstadt for about three months. In comparison with Jews in other camps, the Bialystoker children lived under reasonably good conditions. After a while, the people suddenly noticed that there were no further movements in the barracks where the children had been quartered. It was later learned that they and the personnel supervising them had been sent to Auschwitz, where they perished in the gas chambers. A horrible incident occurred. As one of the Jewish workers, who loaded gassed corpses into the cremato- rium, was placing the body of a little girl onto the load- ing shovel, she begged him not to cremate her because she was still alive. The Jew, not hearing her plea, pushed her into the oven alive. The entire camp was awash with horrified conversations for the next few days. This hapless Jew shortly thereafter lost his mind and was shot and cremated by the Gestapo. it should be pointed out that many children, who had _ been gassed together with adults, still showed weak signs of life at the time they were to be cremated. Back at the ghetto, the remaining Jews were con- vinced that the Nazis would not leave until the last Jew had been rounded up. Moreover, the scarcity of food in the hideouts was becoming more severe. Hungry people who yearned for a piece of bread left the shelters at night, stealing into what had been a Jewish bakery to bake some bread. This action cost them their lives, for when the Nazis smelled the aroma of baking, they quickly uncovered the bunkers where the breadmakers were hiding. The increasingly unsanitary conditions caused an infestation of lice and disease. Not more than 500 Jews remained in the bunkers at the end of the second week of liquidation. Many of them stole into the mini ghetto because conditions there were preferable. The Liquidation of the Mini Ghetto At the beginning of the third week, a rumor spread that the mini ghetto would very soon be destroyed as well. Clearly its Jewish inhabitants no longer had any useful function to perform, since all the machines, raw materials and dead bodies had been processed. The order came at the end of the week that more than 1,200 Jews in the mini ghetto would be transferred to Lublin- Poniatow. When they arrived in Poniatow, they were assigned work tn the local factories. On November 3, 1943, all of the Jews at the Poniatow labor camp, numbering 22,000 (including 9,000 Bialystoker Jews) were taken to an open place and shot under orders of the camp com- mandant. While these wholesale murders were being committed, the camp orchestra played Strauss’ waltzes. Virtually all of the leading personalities of Jewish Bia- The Bialystoker Memorial Book lystok both before and during the war were killed in the Poniatow massacre. During the fourth week, the Nazis were still look- ing for Jewish holdouts. The Jewish mood was one of resignation and apathy. There was no longer any hope of survival. The Bitter End On September 16, 1943, exactly a month after the final liquidation began in the Bialystok ghetto, it ended. The large search squads were replaced by a small group of older, less physically fit, Nazis. A few Jews succeeded in escaping because of the less stringent security in the ghetto. (Editor’s note: Further on in his diaries, Rajzner men- tions the few Bialystoker Jews who remained alive in and around the ghetto, who managed to continue hid- ing from the Nazis. He also describes Jews who were arrested, tortured and killed in the prisons as well as those deported to the death camps and exterminated. Only a handful of Bialytoker Jews who experienced the horrors of the Bialystok ghetto’s liquidation succeeded in avoiding extermination. They are alive today in numerous lands, frequently sharing their memories of those tragic times, exhorting us never to forgive or forget the wholesale slaughter of the Jews during World War II in Bialystok, whose magnificent heritage shall continue to be honored as long as they live.) A group of refugees in a German concentration camp. Cee 1 ee) 97