Small Riga Ghetto

80
it with my life!" Now we had to walk around freezing miserably for a long
time until we had once again scavenged protective clothing for ourselves.
One day as we came home from our work, we found a group of photographers
and reporters from Germany at the entrance to the ghetto. They had
shown up expressly to get material for illustrated journals. They sought out the
ugliest and most ragged people from our ranks and forced them to make grotesque
faces besides. Later we saw in a journal the picture of our comrades,
captioned: "Typical faces of the Riga ghetto"!
Commandant Krause became more brutal from day to day. He implemented
with extreme strictness his decree that bartering was punishable by death. This
measure claimed its first victims in the German ghetto. But that did not prevent
anyone there from continuing to filchen, * as they put it. And in fact if a person
wanted to go on living at all, there was no alternative to scrounging or bartering
his last remaining possessions.
Smuggling something into the ghetto always involved the greatest danger,
because if even the smallest thing was discovered in a body search, the Kommandant
immediately issued a death sentence. He then carried out this sentence
personally by shooting the person at the wall of the Jewish cemetery (see
the chapter "Kworim Weinen").
Because the Labor Authority was not yet operating at full capacity, Dralle
went from apartment to apartment to get people for work crews. Those who
had hidden and were found by him were beaten soundly.
The most difficult work crew at that time was the "cable crew". They had to
lay cables in the frozen earth. The foremen of that work crew beat us more
than the others.
IX.
Because the sanitation conditions were extremely bad, it was decided in mid-
January to enlarge our ghetto up to Mazā Kalna Street. Our work group at the
field headquarters was quartered in a house of its own at 55 Ludzas Street. It
took a fairly long time for us to put it more or less into order. As we cleared it
out we found all kinds of valuables left behind by the "evacuated" people.
I too fixed up a small inner room in the house for my son and me. Next door
to us lived the sign painter Lewi with his two talented sons and the typewriter
dealer and mechanic Abramsohn, who also had his son with him. Later we
were joined by Professor Gurwitsch. Nearby a certain Mr. Klein (from Auce),
* [Ed.: The word in the German Ghetto for bartering was "tauschen", and for stealing "organisieren";
"filchen" or "filzen" meant stealing too.]