One looks at the cover of this, with its hope filled faces of women and children escaping a train, and one expects a story or a couple of dozen, of people who are in this photograph, who were fortunate enough. Perhaps those stories are there, too. After all the book did begin with a detailed description of the cover photograph.
But the work is by someone who was born much later, came to know of this era later, and delved into it with the same disbelief that those without any comparable experience are likely to, even though it isn't a denial of the events. So the book plunges headlong, to a wary reader's dismay, into first hand accounts of a death camp, Bergen-Belsen.
And it's not for those with delicate sensibilities.
Most of the first part is about the dying, the disposal of them, and the living ones dying in the process, all quite intended by those that ran the camp, merely as a matter of executing the plan, the orders.
At about 10%, one of the descriptions of leaving the camp after Germans giving option to the inmates to stay or leave,
"We were a ragged group with tattered clothes, damaged even more when we pulled off the Jewish star that we had worn all those years.
"The Germans did not want the local population to know who we were. Many people were almost barefoot as we no longer had decent shoes. We walked unnoticed through the town of Bergen; the inhabitants in the houses on both sides of the road had their shutters closed. Some people in our column fell and were left by the wayside. Then, suddenly a small girl fell, and a German guard hurriedly picked her up and helped her to move on. I noticed the guard was crying. I had never before noticed any German guard having sympathy for the children in the camp even though many children were starving to death or dying of typhus. So why was this German guard crying? Did he suddenly take pity on this young girl? Or was he upset when he realized it was all over and Germany was going to lose the war?"
The part one finds significant amongst others being about the shutters of the town being closed, in view of the constant refrain heard from Germans generally about how nobody knew of what went on!
Another quote from a survivor, as the story - or rather, the series of accounts by various survivors - gets close to the cover photograph moment:-
"On the sixth day of our journey, April 12, a Thursday afternoon, we were about fifteen kilometers from Magdeburg, a city on the Elbe River about halfway between Berlin and Hannover. The train stopped on a curve near a bridge over the river, which wasn’t unusual, since a red light frequently stopped the train for a short period. This time, however, there wasn’t any movement. We later found out that the Nazis had devised a new plan—they wanted to position the train on the bridge and blow it up so that they could both kill us and stop the Allied advance. Somehow though, the engineer and his assistant had gotten wind of the plan. They, too, must have heard the rumbling explosions from the front line and realized that the end of the war was imminent. Not wanting to die, they just ran off while the train was stopped at the red light, leaving the train and its cargo behind."
But no, it wasn't that easy. Other nazis turned up, and
"April 12, 1945. We now reached the most crucial hour of our life during World War II under German Nazi rule. From each and every truck, a Jewish leader was asked to appear before a high-ranking SS officer, who issued a disastrous order that we immediately carried out. All men between the ages of sixteen and sixty were to line up in columns of five in front of the cattle trucks, with the angels of death fluttering around.
"A paralyzing darkness seized me. They were going to gun down the men with machine guns in front of the cattle cars, and then blow up the rest of us—babies, small children, women and the elderly—in the cattle cars. That was the decree that the Nazi beast devised when its hour of doom came—our SS captors decided to annihilate us all."
This was the day that FOR, suddenly and unexpectedly, died, and there was a short lived jubilation in Berlin hoping for the predicted turn that was ruined by the Russian advances into Vienna shortly.
"There were no secrets. Hitler laid out his plans all along as he developed the party platform. Simple answers to complex problems. But while the insidiousness of the invective struck fear in the hearts of the fractional minority of Germans who were Jews, no one could predict just how far this madness would go. No one could believe that in a short six years, two-thirds of European Jewry would be murdered by the Nazis and their willing accomplices.
"How could this happen? Like many infections, the terror incubated slowly and innocuously from the dregs of society; from the gutters of Munich rose up a movement that proclaimed glory and greatness, revenge and revolution. Setbacks would occur, but struggle is the father of all things, after all. From the pain and the suffering a new race of mankind would emerge. The weak would give way to the strong, and from the blood of the martyrs of the movement Germany would be purified and reconciled on its destined plane of glory. All hail, victory. Sieg Heil."
And, short but succinct answers to most questions about the predicament of Jews of Germany of the era:-
"The window for escape is also rapidly shrinking; Jews find it difficult to obtain passports for travel abroad. But the discrimination is incremental, so the question begged, should they leave? After all, this is their rightful home, Germany. Surely, the injustice will be righted when the world steps in or a new government comes to power. Who could possibly imagine the slave labor factories, the killing fields and forests, the industrialized mass murder, and the complicity of the ordinary man—even the neighbors—in the horrors to come?
"Increasingly, Jews were being also impoverished by the state. Jews were now required to register their property and non-Aryan businesses were taken over by other Germans, the pitiful compensation set by the state. Jewish doctors could not treat non-Jews, and Jewish lawyers lost their occupation. Who could afford to leave? Discounting the rampant antisemitism of the day, most nations had extremely rigid immigration policies, and at the international Evian Conference held at the French resort in 1938, almost every nation involved turned its back and refused to reconsider their immigration policies in the wake of an obviously humanitarian crisis. ... Where would they go?"
When confronted by questions of visitors or migrants in Germany, those assigned officially to respond resort to subterfuge or outright lies, perhaps not so instructed officially but as a routine anyway, and have a series of layers of lies ready, as habitual with liers - from "Jews left and migrated" to "we did not know", of course. Few have the accidental honesty of revealing to someone unfamiliar with church propaganda that Jews were being targeted via every pulpit, falsely if course, as responsible for crucifixion, and thus a racist hatred was nurtured in guise of piety that served to disguise later persecution of excellence by lumpen, of educated by those unwilling to work their minds, of knowledgeable by the ignorant.
The terminology, one doesn't realise, isn't impartial either:-
"The preeminent scholars of the Holocaust tell us that the Holocaust began on January 30, 1933, the day that Hitler came to power. They will also agree that the word ‘holocaust’, from the Greek referring to a burnt offering to the gods at the temple, is a now considered an inadequate name, and perhaps on some levels, inappropriate. ... Saul Friedländer sees it as an event that is impossible to put into normal language. Raul Hilberg, in his groundbreaking work at the beginning of the 1960s, called it the ‘Jewish Catastrophe’ or destruction; in Hebrew, ‘HaShoah’. Yehuda Bauer, who first classified it as the watershed event that it is, still struggles with the label ‘Holocaust’ and falls back on the ‘genocide of the Jewish people’, which he tells us is unprecedented in the history of mankind. The language escapes us."
And it was all done and planned with sheer hatred, rather than any necessities of wartime or any other sort, as they might insinuate in conversations whether personal or on internet -
"...the gates of the infamous Wannsee Villa, where on one day on January 1942, decisions were made that would ramp up the fate of European Jewry, and to use the language of the perpetrators, the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ would be decided once and for all.
"But make no mistake. The genocide of the Jews was already very well underway. But it was with the invasion of the Soviet Union that for the Nazi hierarchy, efforts among various government bureaucratic agencies would have to be coordinated. Here, at this beautiful mansion on a sailboat-dotted lake, with its manicured grounds and gardens, the intentionality of the Holocaust hits you square in the face and takes your breath away."
"....A troubling photograph is on display here—‘Einsatzkommando 12b of Einsatzgruppe D kills Jewish women and children in a pit, Dubossary, Moldova/Transnistria, 14 Sept. 1941.’’—Twenty or so soldiers with rifles are shooting down into a ditch; through the tall grasses we see the target figures, as officers stand on and watch, or walk past in the foreground. It was taken just seven weeks after the blitzkrieg steamrolled into Soviet territory in the largest land and air invasion of the history of the world. Now that the Soviet Union had been invaded, there were millions more Jews in the path of the genocidal war machine; the Holocaust here was carried out by Germans with bullets. Entire villages and districts were murdered, with over 1.5 million victims. The dirty work gets done; the earth atop the covered-over pits undulates for three days.[18] It is remarkably ‘efficient’—between June and December, 1941, 3000 men have killed between 600,000 and 700,000 persons[19]—but given the ‘trauma’ for the shooters engaged in face-to-face mass murder, the thinking is, ‘there has to be a better way’. And to dispel another myth, there is no known instance where those few Germans who refused to take part in the killings were shot or otherwise severely punished—because some did ask to be relieved, and they were.[*]
"The SS bought the mansion in 1941 for a series of planned rest and recreation centers for its officers. Reich Security chief and SS General Reinhard Heydrich took a fancy to it, and on January 20, 1942, fifteen German military and government heads met for a day to discuss the Jewish problem. As scholars have noted, the Wannsee Conference was not called to decide the fate of European Jews, but to clarify all points regarding their demise. To put it another way, the intent was there, but with events on the warfront ratcheting up, the fact was highlighted that there was no blueprint for the murder of millions—and that because there was no precedent like this in history, on some level the Germans had been ‘making it up as they went along’. Mass murder was already underway, and the process now needed refinement, decision making, and coordination.
"On that January day, Heydrich and his henchman Adolf Eichmann indicated to the gathered group that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the ‘Final Solution.’ Deploying carefully coded euphemisms—‘evacuation’, ‘resettlement’, ‘special treatment’, etc.—logistics were discussed as plans were made for major gassing centers in occupied Poland. Once mass deportations were completed, the ‘Final Solution’ would be under total SS jurisdiction. With that matter ‘settled’, secondary decisions revolved around revisiting the legal definitions of degrees of ‘Jewishness’ established at the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.
"The conference lasted perhaps 90 minutes. Just one copy of the carefully coded minutes turned up after the war and was subsequently used at the Nuremberg Tribunals. We may have been in the building longer than the criminals who plotted the destruction of European Jewry 75 years ago. And Heydrich almost got what he wanted."
So the excuses about having to obey orders due to fear of reprisals are only that - plausible stories readily swallowed by those that lack courage to condemn the living criminals for justice to the dead victims. And thus too is discussed, but not entirely honestly:-
"Here in Germany, we turn to the question of the role of the ordinary German person in Nazi Germany. In Matthias’s opinion, the majority of Germans at the time supported the master race theory. What disturbs him today is that in his opinion, few of his fellow countrymen seem conscious of this. It is a very complex topic.
"The historians talk about the mass crimes, and in Matthias’s words, they work on thin ice; the responses to the Holocaust run in a range. Some people want to know more—after all, many of them learned nothing about it from their teachers, many of whom were bystanders or even perpetrators.[*] Some quietly deny the extent—but as I am careful to lay out in this book, a person will find that the more he or she is willing to study it, the more he/she will learn how vast and almost unbelievable the topic is in scope. Others are tired of the topic—‘Yes, it happened. So what? Enough…’"
No, the "few of his fellow countrymen seem conscious of this" is simply a dishonest denial, in face of kniwledge that one isn't supposed to say it, but the attitude about a master race is far from over, and it merely assumes that perhaps the master race epithet might be extended to cover more of European ancestry descent, specifically West and North Europe, not just the central Europethat was mostly Germany, but that one can only convey this in unsaid behaviour when in presence of those not so included, although one may indicate it in other ways, such as condescending advice about how they should run their countries and so forth as per opinions of any member of master race. Or they might complain to someone supposedly not quite familiar, about how the Jews stop talking to a German who was not born when it all happened.
"....nearly 200,000 persons passed through the camp gates. Hiding in plain sight? ‘We did not know’, becomes the familiar refrain, after the war."
Of course, antisemitism wasn't limited to Germany, Poland had enough of it :-
"In the 15th and 16th centuries, Poland was the center of European Jewish life. In fact, at the end of the 18th century, 75% of the world’s Jews lived in the former Galicia, where we are, once part of Poland, Ukraine and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Still, in most places in Poland there is nothing left of this heritage; out of what was once millions, today only between 12,000 and 14,000 Jews call Poland home. And let’s not forget that after the war, Jewish survivors were not exactly welcomed back by their neighbors with open arms.
"There was no memorial here at Belzec for nearly 60 years. When Ariela visited in 1993, there was nothing here; it had reverted to forested hillside. The women in our group enter the memorial for a private ceremony. The seven men walk the perimeter, near the hillside. It’s said that during the actions, some of the locals would gather on the hillside behind us as transports pulled in to discharge the terrified and doomed victims.
"They would watch. And after the German attempt to destroy the site and hide the evidence of a half a million gassed and cremated, this site, like many others, would be rifled for gold, pockmarked with shovel pits by the local population. Surely those Jews had gold with them, when they were killed."
Later, when the author visits Majdanek,
"We exit the building. Two young Polish women with a stroller casually pass us, chatting—they are cutting through Majdanek to take a shortcut to the Catholic cemetery on the outside of the camp memorial complex. The irony is not lost on the group.
"Nervous about the recent uprisings at Treblinka, Sobibor, the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos and elsewhere, the SS chief Himmler ordered the murder of the Jewish slave laborers in and around the camp, including the camp at Poniatow.
"Code named ‘Aktion Erntefest’ (Operation Harvest Festival), the SS and police auxiliaries shot them in the ditches I am standing before; they played loud music through loudspeakers to drown out the noise, to disguise the gunshots for the folks back in the town. The shootings went on all day, the largest single-day and single-location massacre known to have occurred in the Holocaust.[28] Over 33,000 were murdered on that chilly Wednesday in November, 18,500 right here, right before me. .....
"Now we are under the dome, that stupid-looking flying saucer. We are in it, looking down on a mound the size of a small house. And as the realization dawns, now comes the shock that nearly knocks me over, the high tension electrical jolt that poor saps must feel when they realize they are suddenly in a very personal episode of the Twilight Zone—this dumb-looking saucer roof is covering something I instantly recognize—and I don’t need a sign for this. As a trained avocational archaeologist, I have excavated this material more than a few times, though not the human type, or anywhere near this magnitude.
"Calcified bone fragments, bone powder, and burned earth. Literally tons of it; I am looking at a mountain of burned bone. It’s a giant urn, an open-air mausoleum—I am face-to-face with cremated human remains. Bleached, white, and gray from superheat. How many thousands of human beings are in front of me? One of the most respected Holocaust scholars has suggested 50,000. A guess. There is a Catholic cemetery across the way, outside the gate. I suppose you could get an accurate count of the dead who lay there.
"And if there are any words to be spoken here in Majdanek, they would be outflanked and interrupted in some kind of twisted irony by the squeaking of the wheels of the baby stroller trespassing its way through the camp—yes, maybe a symbol of life in this monument to the dead, but more aptly a metaphor for the present, willful yet oblivious, dodging and darting the presence of the past."
And about the Warsaw ghetto uprising being crushed:-
"They say that the ghetto no longer exists. The wreckage of the houses is still standing; the piles of cinders still crackle, and at night shadowy figures, seeking food and shelter, still move about in there. But the ghetto no longer exists; 500,000 people have gone up in smoke. And those still alive bleed inwardly, their deep wounds will never heal. And maybe there will be no one left when freedom comes? Why are human beings so cruel and evil? They speak about the future, about truth, about Man as proof of God’s great wisdom, and it’s all lies, lies!
"I know there are also good people, but they are persecuted; society rejects them as weaklings. Why am I prevented from seeing the wonders of nature and the world, from breathing fresh air?"
Another child, may 1940, in Gennep, Holland, having been left there with his relatives for safety after Germany went through kristallnacht, while his mother relocated to UK managing to catch the last ship and barely managing to meet the child separated for a while, now seeing the invasion :-
"...My experience with German soldiers with few exceptions would be that, at best, they did not care, but usually they would be very brutal and uncivilized. For a child, these experiences were confusing; I was never sure what to expect from my encounters with German soldiers.
"Gennep was under German control almost immediately. Because the Netherlands was supposed to be a neutral country, it had only a small army, and after five days the army surrendered. Rotterdam had been bombed, with many civilian casualties, as a warning not to resist the invaders."
This last bit is so very like the policy used brutally, ruthlessly and invariably, by Chingis Khan with his Mongols invading on horseback from Mongolia all the way across Russia and more, that one is struck with his very apt the Allies' description or characterisation of Germans, especially when in war, is "Hun"!
The siblings went from Germany to Gennep, Holland, to Dinxperlo, and then were taken with family to Westerbrok transit camp where they were shifted to an orphanage, where it was better than the camp.
"Then came November 16th, 1943. The camp was very crowded, with about 25,000 people. It was Monday evening and the train stood ready to go east the next morning. About 2500 Jews were supposed to be deported that day. However, nearly everybody in the camp had some sort of exemption. So this time there were not enough people to fill the train. The head of the Jewish council, Kurt Schlesinger, went to Gemmeker and told him, ‘There are not enough people without exemptions.’ Then the Kommandant canceled all exemptions, including most Palestine lists. This meant that nearly all the children of the orphanage were put on the deportation lists, despite Mr. Birnbaum's efforts. Most of the children in the orphanage, many of whom were very young, went on this train to Auschwitz and to the gas chambers. Many people working in the orphanage, including Mr. Birnbaum, volunteered to go with the children, even though they were not on the deportation list; they wanted to take care of the children once they had arrived at these resettlement or work camps. The Kommandant would not allow Mr. Birnbaum to accompany the children. So he stayed behind, as did Edith and I, among the few other children who were left. But my sister and I were saved, I assume, because my uncle, at the last moment, had changed his mind, as noted earlier, and had decided not to put us on that Weinreb list, but instead to stress the fact that our mother was in England.
"This was a terrible night for all of us. Many of the children were very young, and all of us were unhappy. We did not know what their fate would be. In the morning, the train left with most of the children packed into cattle wagons. Those of us left behind felt very sad, as we had lost most of our friends. Despite the circumstances, we had been like one big family. Upon arrival in Auschwitz, all the children, with the people accompanying them, were sent to the gas chambers. There were no known survivors."
...............................................................................................
It takes a great toll on one reading through this, until about a little less than halfway where the moment depicted on the cover and in the title occurs - the arrival of U.S. army and their encounter with the horrors via seeing this train.
