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his officers to work double shifts to protect every food delivery
(there were now two policemen to every convoy of provisions and at least three
at every depot), they could not prevent the mob from getting in, and out again
through the gates, so that in the course of just a few hours it had been
stripped entirely bare.
    Hunger was the problem.
    Whatever measures the Chairman took to
tackle the lawlessness in the ghetto, he would never bring it under control
until he got to grips with the hunger.
    To give an impression of strength and
decisiveness, the Chairman abolished all extra rations and increased the
collective bread ration. Everyone employed in the ghetto, regardless of
profession or position in the ghetto hierarchy, would be entitled to a ration of
four hundred grams of bread a week.
    Abolishing special rations initially
seemed a wise move. It would later turn out to have been the Chairman’s biggest
mistake, one that very nearly led to open revolt against his rule.
    Ever since the ghetto was sealed off
from the outside world, distribution of what food there was had been in
accordance with a clear hierarchy of privilege.
    First, the so-called B rations .
    B stood for Beirat , the central ghetto administration. B rations were allocated
to people in positions of particular trust – divided into categories from I to
III, depending on their position in the ghetto hierarchy: from members of the
Chairman’s own Secretariat down to business leaders and technical instructors,
lawyers, doctors and others.
    There were also so-called C
rations.
    C stood for Ciężko Pracujacy and was given to manual labourers with particularly
heavy jobs. They did not amount to a great deal more than the normal worker’s
ration: the heavy workers were given fifty grams more bread a day than the
ordinary factory workers, and possibly an extra ladleful of soup. But it was a
symbolically important extra allowance because it was proof that hard work
paid.
    When word got out that the C ration was
to be stopped to finance an increase in everyone’s bread allowance, the joiners
in Drukarska and Urzędnicza Streets decided to go on strike. They demanded not
only no cut in the C rations but also an insignificant wage rise.
    It was naturally impossible for the
Chairman to agree to this. If the joiners of Drukarska were allowed to keep
their extra rations, then a host of other workers would soon be insisting that
their jobs, too, required a supplementary food ration. He ordered Rozenblat to
have his forces ready. Rozenblat sent seventy men, led by a police inspector
named Frenkel, to the Drukarska Street joinery shop. A few of the workers left
the building when they saw it was surrounded by the police, but most barricaded
themselves in on the first floor and refused to evacuate the premises despite
repeated appeals, first from Frenkel and then from Freund, the factory manager.
When the seventy-strong band of police finally stormed the upper storey, it was
met with a hail of wooden furniture at various stages of manufacture. Stick-back
chairs struck the policemen on the head; these were followed by shelves, sofa
legs, table tops. Shielding their faces with their arms, the police made their
way up the stairs and attempted to overpower the workers one by one and drag
them out. Not a single worker gave in without a fight. In fact, reported the
agitated factory manager Freund on the telephone to Rumkowski afterwards,
several of the arrested workers subsequently needed hospital treatment. They
were in such a starved state that they collapsed with exhaustion even before
Inspector Frenkel’s men got the handcuffs on them.
    Freund had no sooner hung up than
Wiśniewski, manager of the tailoring workshop that made uniforms at 12 Jakuba,
rang to report that they had also stopped work there, in sympathy with the
joiners in Drukarska and Urzędnicza. Wiśniewski was desperate. His workshop was
just about to complete delivery of an order of some ten thousand