The Clean Shirt: A Flicker of Hope in Despair

Abstract

As a young Jewish boy during the Holocaust, Jerry Rawicki was a courier for the Polish Underground in the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis murdered his father Abram, mother Sophie, and sister Stephanie. Passing as a Gentile, his surviving sister Fela worked in a coffee shop in Warsaw. Under the cover of groups leaving for hard labor outside the Ghetto, Jerry was able to surreptitiously steal away and attend to his assignments on the Polish side. Within the Ghetto, people were dying from dysentery, typhus, and starvation. Deportations were rampant and ominous rumors that death camps were the destinations, no matter how unbelievable, in time became a horrific reality. In January 1943, the Germans staged an action on a scale that foretold a total destruction of Jews in the Ghetto. The inhabitants’ refusal to obey orders to vacate their apartments stunned the Germans. Armed resistance, mostly skirmishes, forced the Germans to back off, but the euphoria of prevailing over the Germans did not last long. On the night of April 18, 1943, during Passover, the Germans came back with fury. The armed resistance, this time more organized, held off the onslaught for over a week. But the fighters could not match the German firepower that turned the Warsaw Ghetto into a burning inferno. This story describes Jerry’s actions on that night, at the age of fifteen, and afterwards, when he found hope in the midst of despair.