Given name: Chaim Family name: Hasenfuss

Grew up in Warsaw. Before the occupation he graduated from the R. Kowalski German junior-high school. Worked as an accountant and a bookkeeper. During WWII worked as an agent and sometimes managed to earn some money. Was not cut out for physical labour and during slave labour at the Sejm he talked to a Pole (the director of the forced labour unit who graduated from the same university) and showed him four university diplomas and as a result was assigned to lighter labour. In November 1939 the Germans conducted a search in the Sociology Department of the University. Reader Ossowski ordered Swiszewski to inform Chaim Hasenfuss of this fact. The Germans took Chaim Hasenfuss' work from professor Bystron's desk and took it. The work was titled 'The Language Question of Polish Jews' and was to be published in 'Przeglad Socjologiczny.' Words of a Czech writer Karel Harlicek: 'To live is much harder than to die' were a motto helping him to live. He spent the three worst days of bombardment of Warsaw (25-27 September 1939) in a tailor's cellar at Nowogrodzka Street No. 25. Since 1916 lived at Nowogrodzka Street No. 33. When the Warsaw ghetto was created he was forced to exchange the flat for the flat at Sienna Street No. 41 that belonged to a Polish police commissioner. He left the commissioner a bookcase with 400 books. He was writing some of the notes from his diary among the cracks of the German artillery firing from the suburbs straight into his house since 1 September 1939.