Objects

Illustration of the scenes of hungry Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto being bribed with bread to voluntarily board train wagons heading to Treblinka. These events were recounted by Marek Edelman in a conversation with Hanna Krall, published by the author in her book "Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem" (Wrocław 1977). The food shortage was so widespread in the ghetto that its residents refused to believe the warnings that handing out bread was just a way to persuade them to board the extermination transports. "Listen, my child. Do you know what bread meant in the ghetto back then? Because if you don't know, you will never understand why thousands of people could voluntarily come and go to Treblinka with their bread. After all, no one has understood this until now. Here they were handing out, in this place. Long, browned sieve loaves. And you know what? And people walked, orderly, in fours, to get that bread and then to the wagon. There were so many volunteers that they had to stand in line, two transports a day already had to be sent to Treblinka – and they still could not accommodate all those who signed up. [...] 'Are you people crazy?' – they said when we tried to convince them that they weren't being taken to work. "Would we be sent to our deaths with bread? So much bread would go to waste?!". MBK