Michael Opas - [n.d.]
Life in Warsaw Ghetto
How did your family respond to that? Now that you're closed into this ghetto, how did you respond--what were your thoughts?
Well, we, we felt that--we, we are hoping for that blitzkrieg. You know what a blitzkrieg is?
Mm-hm.
It was--it had only--we thought will pass, will pass us--in about three, four months it will go away. We didn't realize it's, it's, it's going to have--it's going to last for so many years. We didn't realize it, it, it was waiting for us, that it's going to be Krematorias or concentration camps, we didn't realize this in the ghetto.
Mm-hm.
It was naturally cramped because people were--had to, had to share one apartment for two families. Or it was uh, it was really--it was a close off in a very, very small area.
Mm-hm.
And they kept shipping in people from all the, all the surrounding cities, from many cities. Every, everything came to Warsaw. It was really sickness--there were a lot of diseases, like typhus and diphtheria...
Mm-hm.
...and all kind of things. People came with only their shirt on their backs and they were really suffering and uh, starving.
Mm-hm.
The, the worst part in the Warsaw Ghetto was starvation. People were dying in the streets, literally on--dying on the streets. When I went to work in the morning, I can--I could count fifty, sixty bodies laying on the--covered with, with, with newspapers.
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