A woman does the washing in a basin outside at the ghetto laundry in the Kovno ghetto.

A woman does the washing in a basin outside at the ghetto laundry in the Kovno ghetto.

The laundry, which began operation on February 16, 1942, was one of 44 workshops in the ghetto. It employed 41 persons, mostly women. The laundry was very difficult to outfit initially since the ghetto had no sewer system or water mains, but ghetto engineers installed heating and water pipes to make it fully operational. The laundry cleaned clothing and linens of German civil administrators, military and police. In addition to providing labor for women who would have found it physically or personally difficult to join brigades outside of the ghetto, the laundry provided another benefit as well. The ghetto was not allocated a soap ration. Therefore, during the summer months, workers at the laundry frequently threw linen straight into the river for easy cleaning and channeled the saved soap to ghetto inhabitants.