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Then the typhus epidemics broke out [the peak of the typhus epidemics in the Warsaw ghetto was between July and September 1941]. In the ghetto we had a Judenrat [23] decree and a so called ‘13’ [24] kept a close eye that anyone who came down with typhus was taken to a hospital, it was banned to be sick at home. They were afraid the epidemics would spread. Those taken to the hospital usually never came back. And Uncle Lajbisz Gefen’s brother, Szmelke, who lived in the same back premises got sick with typhus first. Lajbisz lived on the second floor, and his brother on the first. He didn’t have children, had a significant hump, lived with his wife. And as Uncle Lajbisz was a good man, his brother and brother’s wife were considered to be bad people. They never helped anyone, they were withdrawn, sullen, he was a co-owner of the bakery. He was always sickly, pale, because of that hump probably too, and they knew that if they took him to the hospital that would be the end of him, but they had to call a doctor when he got sick. They brought a doctor in, and I remember they tried to bribe him with golden dollars, or so called ‘piglets’, that’s what we used to call Russian rubles, but the doctor refused and reported and they took [Uncle Gefen’s borther] to the hospital where he died.
Period
Interview
Izaak Wacek Kornblum