The Warsaw Ghetto as seen by Stanisław Zalewski who worked in a garage in the ghetto. Stanisław Zalewski was born in 1925 in Sucha Wola. Before the war in lived in the Warsaw district of Praga. He went to school here. In 1940 he had to leave school and go to work as his family needed the money. He worked in the garages belonging to the Kozikowski company in Waliców street.

The financial situation of my family in February 1940 was very difficult so I had to leave school and go to work at the Kozikowski company garages in ul. Waliców. That was then in the area that was to become the ghetto. The garage, which had been taken over by the Germans, repaired military vehicles. I got an Ausweis, documents that allowed me to enter the ghetto and what was most important, extra ration cards.

People in the ghetto were so thin, they looked like skeletons. I saw how they fell in the streets and then they could not get up again. I saw the thin hands held out and their deep, fallen eyes begging for help. The ghetto had its own Jewish police and Jewish administration. They had to carry out the drastic orders of the occupier. I also saw Jews who were well fed. There were some important people who worked with German permission in our garage. They asked us various times to bring bread and ham from the Aryan side. The German troops or SS units who came to our garage organised sadistic games and the victims were those that passed by the nearby ghetto gate. They thought it funny to burn a long beard of a Jew with a cigarette lighter and then telling him to quickly run away. One day there was a problem with the device for pumping tyres. A soldier grabbed a man and told him to pump up the tyre by hand, hitting him with a rubber truncheon. When the victim was unable to continue and collapsed, they found another victim and the fate of the first was of no interest to him. My brother Józef smuggled Argentinian passports into the ghetto. He never talked about it and we will never know as he is dead now. I only took food into the ghetto.