Goyim in the Ghetto

Peretz Opoczynski

1941

There’s a folk saying: “The way it goes with the Christians, so it goes with the Jews.” Many concessions were made to the goyim, especially in matters concerning the ghetto. The guards at the ghetto gates started to look the other way and didn’t check entry passes so carefully. Just as it became easier for goyim to enter the ghetto, so too did it…

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Creator Bio

Peretz Opoczynski

1892–1943

Peretz Opoczynski was born in Lutomiersk, near Łódź, was given a yeshiva education far away from home, which precipitated a break with his Hasidic upbringing. A shoemaker by profession, he also worked as a Yiddish journalist, first in Łódź and then, as of 1935, in Warsaw, specializing in reportage of urban poverty. Confined during the war in the Warsaw ghetto, Opoczynski worked by day as a mailman and by night continued to write reportorial fiction about all aspects of ghetto life for the Oyneg Shabes archive. He was most likely rounded up in the deportation of January 1943.

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