The deportation train departed from Warsaw for the last time.
 

Inside cattle cars, thousands of people were crammed – imprisoned and locked behind gates and bolts, without food or drink, no seats and no windows. A little air penetrated through a narrow ventilation opening between the car wall and its ceiling. The opening was high up, where no one could reach, to breathe fresh air, to look out at the vast expanses of their homeland, Poland, and try to guess where they were headed.
In one of the cars stood Muniek and his two brothers, clinging to their mother, Chava, and their grandfather, Mordechai.
Father-Aryeh was not with them.
They surmised his fate, and could only hope and believe that theirs would be better. To their right and left, in front and behind them, stood dozens of men, women, and children in the mobile pen – swaying with the rhythm of the car wheels, tossed from side to side on sharp turns, breathing stale air, smelling vomit and excrement that had accumulated on the clothes of those around them.

The train traveled on iron tracks stretched between mountains and valleys, crossed fields and plains, forests and desolate expanses, passed over bridges above rivers, swallowed by tunnels, on its way to its designated final station. Its passengers stood throughout the journey that lasted day and night, or perhaps just a day, or perhaps just a night... who could count and observe. Time lost its meaning. Seventy-five years after that journey, time remains elusive and without narrative value.
 

Moshe Jakubowicz, who was transported on the train with his mother and brothers, cannot reconstruct how long they stayed inside the closed car. He only remembers that the train kept going and going. Perhaps it stopped once to wait, perhaps not.

"How can one remember?"

he asks, sitting before the biographer documenting his life story.

For many years Moshe suppressed the youthful memories of Muniek, the boy from Warsaw, and dared not bring them up to anyone. He learned a lesson from what happened when he did tell – listeners who heard his stories were skeptical and found it hard to believe that these were real occurrences.

Since then, he no longer bothered to convince them.

 

When the whole world was exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust and all the small and large details came to light, archives were established, testimonies were given in writing and orally – he was no longer there. His daily affairs occupied him, and he did not bother to delve into his private history. When he decided to enter the archive of his memories, he found no photos or documents there. Only blurred fragments of memory remained in the archive, devoid of emotional value, which he preferred to arrange precisely on the historical timeline:

"In forty-two we were still in the ghetto, and then, in forty-three everything ended."

They took him, then moved him, and in forty-four they moved him again until forty-five. Despite the thousands of people around him, he remembered only a few names. All the others entered the process of dissolution from human existence. He somehow managed to cling to life and survived.

​

In his late ninth decade of life, Moshe talks about what happened to Muniek.

A recording device sits on the table in front of him, capturing a dialogue that grows longer and longer, without silences, without tears, without anger or a shake of the head.

There are questions and answers. An in-depth inquiry of one-on-one – the biographer who wants to delve into the details, and Moshe Jakubowicz, at 88 years old, finding it difficult to go into every single detail, and out of difficulty and with an expression of discomfort, answers the questioner – with questions.

 
- "Do you think there was room to sit on the train? Of course not. There was no room to sit or even move. I'm telling you again: they took us in a cattle car, not for human beings."
- And what did you do for the entire journey?
- "Nothing. What could we do? Stand. Stand pressed against each other, that's all".
- How long did it last?
- "I can't tell you. It must have been a day and then a night, and maybe another day. Who could have known? We were on that train for a long time.".
- And excuse me for asking... what about bodily needs? Excretions?
- "You do it in your pants.".
- Standing?
- "Didn't you understand what I told you before? There were so many people inside the car. There was no room to sit. At most, you could lean. Standing and standing.".
- And everyone endured?
- "Certainly not. People died standing."
- I'm trying to imagine the situation: standing together for many hours... living people and dead people...
- "What is there to imagine? It's very simple – whoever died, their corpse continued to stand among living people. That's all.".​