Life in the Ghetto

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In 1941, the Knoblauch family was relocated to the Krakow Ghetto along with the other 15,000 Jews in the area. The sign above the entrance to the Krakow Ghetto read, “Welcome to the New Jewish City.” The Knoblauchs were moved into a three-bedroom apartment, but the five of them were only allowed to have one of the bedrooms. There were three other Jewish families that shared the space along with them. It wasn’t enough that they had to live in cramped quarters, but the Germans put all of the Jews in the ghetto on a starvation diet. That would mean that each person was only allowed to get 480 calories per day. Today Oskar states, “People eat more calories than that just for breakfast.” It was a hard life in the ghetto and the suffering would not stop.

After a short amount of time being in the ghetto, the Germans began to round-up Jews for deportations, known as the “aktions.” In order to avoid being round-up by the Germans, you had to have a job that was extremely important in the ghetto. Leopold had such a job, since as a furrier he was highly skilled and hard to replace. He got Oskar a job working on the garbage detail. Everyday Oskar would pick up the garbage cans to empty them into the outgoing wagon.

A young Catholic Polish man who drove the horse drawn wagon through the ghetto helped Oskar on several occasions. For instance, on a daily basis he would slip Oskar a loaf of bread to take home to his family. Then, one day when the Germans were entering the ghetto to round-up the Jews, the man told Oskar to take his wagon and disappear for a while. When Oskar arrived back in the area, he found that nearly everyone in his neighborhood had been taken for deportation. Had Oskar not driven the wagon to the dump that day, he would likely have been taken as well.