Marek Edelman - Going through the canals (108/145) скачать в хорошем качестве

Marek Edelman - Going through the canals (108/145)

To listen to more of Marek Edelman’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Marek Edelman - Recollecting my parents (1...   Marek Edelman (1919-2009) was the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He had remained in Poland following the Nazi defeat and was active in domestic and international politics while at the same time becoming one of Poland’s leading cardiologists. [Listeners: Anka Grupinska, Joanna Klara Agnieszka Zuchowska, Joanna Szczesna; date recorded: 2003] TRANSCRIPT: When that happened, we saw what was going on so we took those 12 people and led them away because we had to move out of Franciszkańska 20, 30 to 23 and we took all of those people and led them to Franciszkańska 23. Then we decided we'd been broken up, we had no men, we had nothing, all of our weapons and the small reserves of ammunition we had left were back in that cellar which we couldn't get into. So I made a group of 10 people, I mean, not I - something wonderful happened there. We all came to Franciszkańska 23 and the cellar there was absolutely filthy. These two girls came in with us - peaches and cream. So I said, 'Where can we lie down?' 'We'll take care of things', and they hitched up their skirts showing their red knickers and began to scrub. 'Why?' 'Because we're whores and we can do more than just work, than just give a man a good time, we'll be here with you.' Good, they stayed with us. Lusiek Błones was there, he'd been wounded in the lip, here, and he couldn't eat, so who fed him as gently as anything? Those two whores. I don't know where they got it from but they managed to get him some luke-warm porridge. It was unobtainable but they had their whoring contacts. That was there. So when we got there, I said, '10 people are going down over onto the Aryan side, there's no address, they just have to go somewhere, I gave them a telephone number but nothing else and they just had to save themselves.' 'There's 10 of you, 30 of us are staying behind, go.' Kazik and Zygmunt were already on the Aryan side, we had no contact with them. That was that. They went, jumped into the canal, into the water up to their waists because in that shelter if you could call it that, there was a hole leading to the canals, to the big ones because this linked up with the storm drains in Żolibórz. You don't know what storm drains are. They're huge canals which were the main drains so they were high and wide, whereas those that joined it were quite different, they weren't those 70 cm street canals, they were high enough for a person to be able to stand upright in them. That's where they went. They went down into the canal, and that was it. We stayed where we were. Suddenly, after about an hour or an hour and a half, there was shouting. You never shout in the canals. Janek Bilak emerged from the hole leading to the canal and said, 'I met Kazik who came to get us and couldn't find us because he went to Miła 18 but there was no one there', then some woman had told him a few years ago that she'd heard the password. Someone had been calling out 'John!' and I'd been answering 'Warsaw!' and then he saw me and spat at me. Then he went back. Because Kazik had brought - I'm not going to go into the whole story of Kazik, you're getting bored and it's late - Kazik had found two sewer workers, he took a gun and half a litre of vodka and brought them down to the canals so that they'd show him the way to the ghetto. He brought them down there, they stayed there while he carried on. He drew a line in chalk so that he would know how to get back. He came out in the ghetto, couldn't find anyone there and went back home. Then Janek turned up and told us he was there, told us what to do, to follow the white line and so we got out, not everyone, everyone stayed behind, Celina and I went to find that idiot Arsztein, we didn't know him, but perhaps he would have heard the password. We knocked all over Nalewki, he wasn't there. He probably didn't come there that night to Miła 18. There was nothing we could do, it was getting light. Some lad went back there again and said he thought there was no one there. Forty people got out and we walked the whole night long.