![]() Without hesitation he jumped from the moving train in the dark nightbruised and bloody from his hasty jump and half-conscious. Then, when the train began to move, Halber got to work on the door with his tools. It was so crowded in the wagon that it was difficult to move. ![]() On his way there, Halber took with him a pair of pliers, a small saw, a drill, and other tools that might be useful for whatever might happen. On November 30, at the final liquidation of the last Jews of Siedlce, Halaber was loaded together with all the others in a transport headed for Treblinka. We will pass over that dead silence and allow the survivors to explain how they managed to escape from the angel of death. Their broken hearts were overflowing with such sorrow, sadness, and mournful feelings that we remained suspended in stillness, and it was difficult to speak a word. We did not sit on the earth, everyone wore shoes, on our heads we had no ashes, but our voices were all like the voices of observant Jews from a hundred years agoĪs they observed Tisha b'Av, sitting on the ground, bemoaning the destruction of their people and their land. Evening shadows grew over the half-ruined city, swallowing up and filling with fear the emptied streets, so that everything gave the impression of homeless, frightening specters. The sun, which followed our wanderings through the ruins and the graves, was as tired as we were, and it set in a tired, embarrassed way behind the distant tree tops and the nearby ruins. ![]() Each one avoided looking another in the eye, as if people would be embarrassed by them, that they should be called people, like those creatures, the murderers of our people and our community and embarrassed that that we did not take that same journey as the rest of our community. Weary after a day of wandering through the ruins and graves of our destroyed home, worn out by the horrors that we absorbed, upset at what we saw and heard, we went together, the greatest part of the remnant that remains of the Jewish community of Siedlce: a number of wanderers returned from traipsing through the vastness of the Siberian taigas and the steppes of Kazakhstan, dressed in foreign, party Russian and partly donated clothing some having emerged from underground bunkers and caves in the woods and some who had suffered through all seven levels of Gehenna pretending to be Aryans on the other side.Most of them were young men with gray heads, old beyond their years, with creased foreheads and with bulging eyes that glanced around nervously, darting in all directions and focusing on nothing. ![]() Siedlce, Poland (Pages 140-182) « Previous Page ![]()
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