In her biography of the painter Charlotte Salomon, who was transported from Drancy to Auschwitz in September 1943, Mary Felstiner quotes from the testimony of Holocaust survivors the following points:

For some, Pitchipoi was was the nonsense name of a Polish ghetto, a Yiddish name used by Polish Jews; for some, the word "resonated like an eternal curse"; for others, "Pitchipoi was a place of compulsory forced labor".

It was Nazi policy to keep Jewish prisoners in a state of ignorance about their final destination, so Pitchipoi was invented to fill this vacuum in their knowledge.

Notes

References

• Felstiner, Mary Lowenthal (1994). To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era. HarperCollins. ISBN 0060171057.