A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Elie Wiesel, Thomas Buergenthal Read Free Book Online

I was afraid
     to play in the street and no longer thought that our courtyard was safe.
    As time went on, the Germans would, with ever greater frequency, conduct so-called
razzias,
or raids, in the ghetto. As a rule, these raids would begin with a contingent of heavily armed soldiers driving up to a house.
     They would storm inside, pull people out, and drag them into their trucks. Anyone who resisted was kicked and beaten. Some
     people were shot on the spot. Once, when I heard a lot of noise in our courtyard, I ran to the window and saw Germans pouring
     into the building across from us. Minutes later, I heard terrible screams coming from one of the apartments there. It served
     as a
chaydar
(religious school) as well as the living quarters of the rabbi, who taught a few children there in violation of the prohibition
     against teaching. The rabbi’s wife and grown daughters were made to undress and stand naked in the courtyard while the rabbi,
     his hat knocked off his head, was dragged out of the house by his beard and taken away.
    At other times, the Gestapo or the
Schutzpolizei
would drive into the ghetto, randomly grab men with beards, and order them to cut off each others’ beards and sidelocks.
     Those who resisted were severely beaten. The soldiers seemed to be enjoying themselves. They would laugh a lot and make fun
     of their victims, who were shaking with fear and pleaded to be allowed to keep their beards. Jews also had to doff their hats
     when encountering a German soldier on the street. If a Jew did not do so, the Germans would knock his hat off and beat him.
     But if he did, they would frequently also beat him, yelling, “Why are you greeting me, you dirty Jew? I am not your friend!”
     My father solved this problem by never wearing a hat, not even on the coldest days of those terrible Polish winters. “Why
     give them the pleasure?” he would say when people called him a
Meshoogene
(crazy man) for not wearing a hat.
    Every so often, we heard that this or that community leader or some other person had been picked up by the Gestapo, never
     to be seen again. My father and mother would discuss these events in whispered tones. Then I would hear one of them say that
     the victims must have been denounced to the Gestapo by our own people and that one had to be very careful what one said and
     to whom. “Yes, the walls have ears,” one of them would invariably say, and while I did not quite understand what that expression
     meant, I soon learned not to tell anyone what I heard in our apartment or in those of our neighbors, where my father and mother
     and their friends would gather in the evenings to talk and share some vodka that someone had been able to find.
    Not long after the ghetto was established, the Jewish community council put my father in charge of the office that allocated
     living quarters to the many people who had been moved into the ghetto. He did not really want that job since it put an end
     to the food he brought home from the police kitchen, but he felt that he could not refuse. The previous head of that office
     had been dismissed because of mismanagement and allegations of widespread corruption in the assignment of apartments. Not
     long after he took this job, my father threw two men out of our apartment. My father was very angry, and I later heard him
     tell my mother that the men had tried to bribe him with a lot of money to assign them a bigger apartment. That prompted my
     mother to ask why he did not get us a bigger apartment now that he had that power. My father just looked at her, shaking his
     head in disbelief; we continued to live in the same little place assigned to us when we first arrived in Kielce.
    After bringing some order to the ghetto housing office, my father was put in charge of the
Werkstatt,
or workshop, which resembled a small factory. Here tailors, shoemakers, furriers, hatters, and other artisans had to work
     for the Gestapo and
Schutzpolizei,
performing