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By Root 1306 0

Browning shows that during the weeks and months that followed, most of Reserve Police Battalion 101’s members overcame initial revulsion, and became hardened killers. To be sure, they resorted to alcohol to render their duties tolerable, but they performed them with a growing accession of brutality. Lt. Hartwig Gnade, for instance, degenerated from a mere murderer into a sadist: at a mass killing at Łomazy on 16 August, while he waited for 1,700 Jews to finish digging their own mass grave, he selected twenty elderly, heavily bearded Jews and made them crawl naked before him. As they did so, he screamed at his squad, ‘“Where are my non-commissioned officers? Don’t you have any clubs yet?” The NCOs went to the edge of the forest, fetched themselves clubs, and vigorously beat the Jews with them.’ By the time Battalion 101 completed its contribution to the Holocaust in November 1943, its five hundred men had shot at least 38,000 Jews, and herded a further 45,000 aboard trains for Treblinka. Browning found no evidence that any sanction was imposed upon those who refused to kill; in one of the most highly educated societies in Europe, it was easy to find men willing to murder those whom their rulers defined as state enemies, without employing duress.

Many Jews sought the help of the Almighty as killers descended upon their communities. Nineteen-year-old Ephrahim Bleichman’s uncle was shot by Polish gendarmes after fresh meat was found in his house, and his cousin Brucha was killed by scavengers who wanted her fresh bread. Young Bleichman thought: ‘If this tragedy was God’s will, nothing could be done. Yet my family … depended on God, not man to rectify the situation. I could neither abide by their philosophy, nor dispute it. The propaganda machine combined with systematic harassment cowed many of us into apathy. [They] felt powerless.’ Ephrahim took to the forest when he heard that a German deportation was imminent, and survived in hiding for many months. ‘We shared the forest with owls, snakes, wild hogs and deer. On windy nights, the tree branches made strange noises. The shadows of bushes resembled intruders ready to pounce on us. The natural movements of animals made us always worry that enemies were afoot. It took us a long time to accustom ourselves to the nights.’ By the summer of 1942, all Soviet Jews in areas under Nazi control had been killed. Thereafter, even as Germany’s military predicament worsened, the pace of slaughter quickened. There were wholesale deportations from Greece and Bulgaria in 1943. The Warsaw ghetto rising in April that year provoked intensified persecution in Poland, Holland, Belgium, France, Croatia and Slovakia.

Many great testimonies by victims of the Holocaust have been preserved, but one of the most astonishing was revealed to the world only sixty years after its author’s death. Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, daughter of a rich banker who had translated himself from the Ukrainian ghettos and pogroms to a large mansion in St Petersburg. She grew up in lonely luxury, travelling regularly with her family to France. They fled the Revolution in 1917, enduring considerable hardships before reaching Paris two years later, where her father rebuilt his fortune. Irène had been writing since she was fourteen. In 1927, she published her first novella; by the outbreak of war she was an established French literary figure, author of nine novels, one of which had been filmed, and married with two daughters. In 1940, when the Germans occupied Paris, she retreated to a rented house in the village of Issy-l’Evêque, in Saône-et-Loire. There, in the following year, she embarked upon what she intended to become a trilogy about the war, on the epic scale of War and Peace. She had few illusions about her own likely fate, and wrote despairingly in 1942: ‘Just let it be over – one way or the other!’ Though she had converted to Catholicism, there was no escape from the Nazi blight upon her race: on 13 July she was arrested by French police and deported to Auschwitz, to be murdered at Birkenau on 17