The Last Stage of Deportation Is Death

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.