Mila 18 - Leon Uris [141]
The most horrible of all sights in the ghetto are the “snatchers.” Starved children prowl near the bakeries and, driven by hunger, grab bread from people as they leave. They eat it on the run. Often children have been beaten half to death while cramming the bread into their bellies.
The Good Fellowship Club appointed a special committee to analyze the always elusive mystery of what the Germans are really up to. Information from the massacres in the east. There are definitely four main groups of “Action Kommandos,” SS men trained for massacre.
Group A. Commanded by SS Major General Franz Stahlecker in the Baltic-Leningrad area.
Group B. Commanded by SS General Artur Nebe, White Russia.
Group C. Otto Rasch (rank?) in Kiev on the southern front. The Babi-Yar massacre of thirty-three thousand in three days seems to be his brain child.
Group D. SS Major General Otto Ohlendorf (is he the noted engineer of pre-war times? Hard to believe) in central Russia.
The method is basic. Roundup, victims dig their own graves, are stripped, shot in the back. This apparently amuses the local populations, who are giving full co-operation. The SS have augmented their ranks with Ukrainians and Lithuanians. Reports of massacres so far at Rovno, Dvinsk, Kovno, and Riga. They say seventy thousand have been shot at Wilno.
We are trying to determine what the shifts in general German policy are and how these massacres will apply to us in Warsaw and the General Government Area. Have the Germans established the number of people they will need to run their slave-labor factories? Obviously the action groups were formed in advance of the invasion of Russia.
Ervin Rosenblum develops the theory of the German “apologetics.” They go to extraordinary lengths to prove their “innocence” and establish their “justifications.” This, of course, means they know they are doing something evil and feel they must cover their tracks.
The German language has been bastardized by the Nazis with their “joy through labor” ... “Aryan-master race” ... “land to live” ... “German destiny” ... “the true ones” ... “folk people” ... “führer” ... “inhuman treatment of ethnics,” etc., etc.
The whole text on behavior toward Jews also has been compounded in this new “language.” The basic “theory” is that the Jews have always been the enemies of the German people and are therefore trying to destroy them, so the Germans must destroy the Jews purely out of “self-defense.” They point up to the economic competition with classic portraits of the cunning Jew who has “always hated the German” and robs the German of his right to make a living.
Here are examples of their new double-meaning language:
Reservation—ghetto.
Legitimate war booty—wealth stolen or confiscated from Jews.
Contaminated—to be confiscated.
Sanitation measures—an excuse for mass executions.
Unpleasantness—the carrying out of mass murder.
Shot while trying to escape—a common phrase for someone killed in prison.
Resettlement—deportation with confiscation of all property.
Voluntary labor—slave labor.
Sub-humans—Jews, Slavs, gypsies, political and criminal prisoners, clergy, homosexuals (other than German), and others unfit to breathe Aryan air.
Mongrelization—the excuse to “get rid of sub-humans” who will contaminate the pure German blood lines.
Bolshevik-profiteer-warmonger—almost always used before or behind the word “Jew” to pound in the identification.
Now then, theorizes Silberberg, the playwright, the Germans go to fantastic trouble to make themselves truly believe what they are saying. The verbal acrobatics are played out. Basis: In order to live in the ghetto, one must break the law. Therefore, everyone who is alive is a criminal in the German lexicon and can legally be