The Last Stage of Deportation Is Death

Gustawa Jarecka

1942

Sensitive Content

This text recounts acts of antisemitic violence. The text provides insight into Jewish history; however, The Posen Library does not condone or promote violence or oppression of any kind.

[ . . . ] We have nooses fastened around our necks; when the pressure abates for a moment, we utter a cry. Its importance should not be underestimated. Many a time in history did such cries resound; for a long time they resounded in vain, and only much later they produced an echo.

Documents and a cry of pain, objectivity and passion do not fit…

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Creator Bio

Gustawa Jarecka

1908–1943

The Polish Jewish novelist Gustawa Jarecka was a member of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes group of ghetto inmates who documented life in Warsaw for the underground archive. Jarecka was born in Kalisz in 1908 and earned a degree in Polish studies from the University of Warsaw. Before the war she wrote left-wing novels in Polish, which depicted social struggles and working-class life but avoided specifically Jewish themes. Jarecka arrived in the ghetto with her two children and worked as a typist for the Judenrat, using her German and Polish language skills. Her access to Judenrat materials probably explained her recruitment to the Oyneg Shabes archive, where she wrote a particularly eloquent and moving account of the Great Deportation in the summer of 1942. Jarecka was deported with her two children to Treblinka in January 1943.

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