those Jews who would constitute the 12,000 deportees. After much debate and soul searching, it was decided that those who did no work outside the ghetto, and who were poor, would be the first to go. The next group would consist of those who lived in the most squalid buildings bursting at the seams from over- crowding. The remainder would be chosen by name, in alphabetical order. It was understood that the council members themselves were exempt from deportation, as were those who worked outside the ghetto by day. Various Jews who had access, or so they claimed, to jobs for the unemployed, many of which offered no wages or were sinecures, began to sell these positions to the impoverished for large sums of money. Some of those able to raise these large sums managed to have their status changed from unemployed to employed — the difference between life and death. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the poor and jobless failed to obtain the funds and were deported. It is sadly ironic that most of the wives and children of those who per- ished in the ‘‘Saturday Massacre,” left without support, joined the 12,000 martyrs of the first expulsion from the Bialystok ghetto. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, 1941, a large number of Jews received summonses from the Judenrat, commanding them to appear with their possessions at 8 A.M. the next day at a point of embarkation, from which they would be sent to Pruzane, a village not far from Bialystok. No one believed the Nazis would allow this group to reach their destination alive. Families were plunged into terror, panic and deep mourning as they contemplated what lay ahead. Suddenly everyone realized this was the beginning of the end. BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH At the end of October 1942, a most unusual event occurred. A Jewish woman in the Bialystok ghetto, Jenta Lejzerson, and her children received permission from the Gestapo to go to Israel, then known as Pales- tine. This came about as a result of a prisoner exchange negotiated between the German and British govern- ments. Although Mrs. Lejzerson and her family were the only ones from Bialystok legally allowed to settle in Israel, there were Jews from other Polish cities who had the good fortune to be included in this prisoner exchange. Jenta Lejzerson’s husband already had been living in Israel before the war. The Gestapo issued an order to the Judenrat in Bialystok that Mrs. Lejzerson and her children were to dress up in their finest clothes. They traveled by railroad to Vienna, where they were taken to a special terminal. There they met other Jews allowed to go to Israel. Several days later, the group departed Vienna for Turkey, accompanied the entire way by a Nazi officer and two nurses. The liberated Jews went from Istanbul to Syria and, in mid- November 1942, arrived in Israel. Throughout the war, the Jews in the Bialystok ghetto never knew for sure whether Mrs. Lejzerson and her children had ever reached Israel. Bialystoker Jewish settlers in Israel, who had rela- tives and friends in the ghetto, fell upon Mrs. Lejzerson, desperate to discover what was happening to their loved ones under the Nazis. The report she gave them was horrifying. The following are excerpts from an article written by the Palestine correspondent of the Jewish Daily Forward, Menachem Trajster, which was reprinted in the February 1943 issue of the Bialystoker ' Stimme: The Bialystoker Memorial Book ‘““Jenta Lejzerson revealed that Bialystok, the cen- ter of Jewish industry, political diversity and cultural prolificacy, existed no more. In its place stood an inhu- manly congested ghetto, occupying one small section of the entire town, into which 60,000 Jews were cramped. People once free were now enslaved, and the threat of deportation and liquidation was always there. ‘She told of the Great Synagogue incinerated with 2,000 Jews inside. The Nazis had the audacity to tell people, fleeing in panic from their Nazi-torched homes, that the Soviets had set fire to their dwellings and they should all run into the synagogue, where God would save them. Obediently, these panicked souls sought refuge in their temple, which was transformed into a mass funeral pyre.