Historical Photograph
Brush manufacturing
Ghetto workshop
May 1942, 4000 Jews without identity cards were rounded up and sent to Belzec death camp.
The workshop is equipped with a board or table with a screw attached to it; the screw is used to hook the wire for binding the bristles. The job is dirty, dull and tedious, done [...] under dreadful sanitary conditions [...]. The wire bit into my fingers, all sticky and dirty from the revolting bristles I was fixing ineptly and in disgust to a plank.
Halina Nelken
The devout Jews were meeting for everyday prayers at the three synagogues that existed in the Ghetto. The services on the occasion of the major Jewish holidays were held in larger halls, e.g., at the orphanage. People in almost every apartment in the Ghetto would say Kaddish (a prayer for the dead). A hundred or so boys, the followers of the tzaddik from Gora Kalwaria (Gerer Chasidim), studied the Talmud on an ongoing basis.
Confident that the offering of blood was not futile, they would daringly stare death in the face, walk presumptuously in their long bekishes [...], put up passive resistance by ignoring the German orders [...].
Rabbi Menasze Lewertow
