Small Riga Ghetto

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us the "high-society table". If they were cursing us, they called us "the intelligent
ones". The engineer Senitzki from Vilno sat opposite me. Besides my
comrades Gustav Joffe, Jakob Zinnmann and Birkhahn, who later died of starvation,
there were also other genuinely intelligent young men in my table
group. Whenever the food was distributed, one had the best opportunity to observe
every individual's character and degree of refinement. All of us were
starving, and basically nobody could wait to sit down to eat. Of course no precisely
equal distribution was possible. Outwardly self-controlled but inwardly
baring our teeth in anticipation, we watched the bread until it was distributed.
In order to be as fair as possible, we invented the following procedure. One of
us had to stand with his back to the table and was then asked before each piece
of bread was handed out: "Who gets this one?" Thus the distribution was entirely
even-handed. After the bread had been distributed, a veritable exchange
market was opened. One man would trade his bread for soup, another for
margarine and so on. Or someone would buy a knife, a spoon, a needle or the
like. The bread was measured out in centimeters as a means of exchange, so
each of us always carried a small ruler. More than once, when a person urgently
needed a small piece of shaving soap or something else, he would have
to go without a whole meal in order to get it.
The bread was handed out every evening for all of the following day. That
meant it had to be parceled out. I worked out a system for myself, which consisted
of eating all the bread at once. Of course that meant I had to go hungry
all the following day. Once I tried to eat the bread in two parts, but during the
night I couldn't sleep until I had eaten up the bread I had saved. My comrade
Joffe, who didn't approve of my system, resolved every evening to save a
piece for later, but in the end he couldn't wait so long either and ate everything
up. The only resolute man was Sienitzki: he always divided his bread
ration into portions. He was also the only one in the Magdeburg concentration
camp that I was really friends with, and when we separated after the liberation
this parting was very emotional for me.
After meals, Joffe would often tell us about his world travels, and the entire
political situation would also be discussed. In the final phase we had to rush
through our dinner, because the Americans would "pay us a visit" regularly.
The lights had to be put out beforehand. During my time there, the city of
Magdeburg was heavily bombarded twice. From afar, we saw it burning for
several days. Both the Americans and the English were very precise in their
work. They dropped their bombs only a few meters from our concentration
camp but left us entirely unscathed. We were actually convinced that our fac-