Children…

Death in the streets
Death was everywhere in the ghetto. Adina Blady
Szwajger, a nurse in the Warsaw ghetto hospital, gave
an account of everyday life in the summer of 1941.
“After three weeks I went back to the hospital. (...)
Back to the typhoid ward where children weren’t dying.
Except there weren’t enough beds for them and they
lay two and sometimes even three to a bed, with little
numbered plasters stuck to their foreheads. They ran
a fever and kept calling out for something to drink.
No, they didn’t die of typhus. We discharged them but
we were terribly tired because every day we took in a
dozen new children and the same number had to be discharged
or transferred from ’suspected’ to ’certain’ and
the records of the typhoid ward were, after all, under
German supervision.We discharged them so they could
die of hunger at home or come back, swollen, for the
mercy of a quiet death. Such was each day.”
A dying child on a pavement in the Warsaw ghetto, 19 September
1941. The photographer wrote: “On the sidewalk in a side street
I saw this tiny child who could no longer pull himself upright.
The passers-by didn’t stop. There were too many children like
this one.”
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