Read Online A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz by Goran Rosenberg - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Goran Rosenberg
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The children, the sick, and the old are to be delivered up in order to be killed. This you must all understand. It cannot be misunderstood.
Nor can it be understood. The world in which something like this can be understood is a world no one in your world can imagine. Between your world and the world where parents are exhorted to sacrifice their children, children their parents, and the healthy the sick, there is a chasm that reason cannot bridge.
Only misunderstanding and lack of imagination—this is how I see it—can keep your world together after September 1942.
The inability to imagine a place like Chełmno. At one end of a manorlike building, “the castle,” the entrance to the changing room and showers, at the other end the way out to the trucks that are docked to the outside wall, their airtight compartments snugly fit to the door openings. The biggest is a Magirus truck, made by Deutz AG in Cologne, which in 1942 has been declared a National Socialist model company, and which can load 150 living human beings. The two smaller vehicles, an Opel Blitz and a Diamond Reo, can load from eighty to one hundred each. Once the compartment has been fully packed, the smallest children sometimes packed on top of the adults, and the airtight doorsbolted, the driver turns on the ignition and attaches an exhaust pipe from the diesel engine to the cargo area/gas chamber, and within five to ten minutes the cargo has been asphyxiated. Then the truck is driven to a camp in the Rzuchowski Forest, four kilometers away, where the dead bodies are unloaded, stripped of jewelry and gold teeth, and burned to ashes. After ten minutes of airing, the truck is driven back to “the castle” to get ready for the next load. Between September 3 and 12, 1942, a total of 15,859 people, young, sick, and old, are dispatched from the ghetto in Łódź and delivered to the gas vans in Chełmno.
I note down the exact figures and dates, in fact I scour the archives and sources for the exact figures and dates, because I want to reconstruct your world as you see it before it’s liquidated, and I need something to build it with, and I don’t know what else I can understand. But I soon notice that the exact numbers and dates merely reconstruct the widening gulf between what’s happening around you and what can be understood. The ghetto’s enclosed inside a wall of lies and euphemisms that no reason can penetrate.
Between January 16 and 29, 1942, 10,003 people are dispatched from the ghetto for onward transport and relocation. They’re permitted to take 12.5 kilos of luggage each and are promised that they’ll be able to exchange their ghetto currency for up to ten German Reichsmarks at the assembly point. Between February 22 and April 4, 1942, 34,073 people are dispatched from the ghetto. Between May 4 and 15, 1942, 10,914 are dispatched. Altogether, from January 16 to September 12, 1942, 70,859 people are dispatched from the ghetto in Łódź to be suffocated to death in the airtight compartments of the trucks that shuttle to and from the docking wall of a manor known as “thecastle” in a small village sixty kilometers northwest of Łódź called Chełmno in Polish and Kulmhof in the language of the new masters.
I could have filled the rest of this book with figures and dates from lists detailing the dispatch and delivery of people who will never be heard from again, but apart from the fact that nothing can be understood from those lists, I also don’t trust them. The figures are too precise, of course, and the abbreviations too arbitrary.
Ausgeliefert
is sometimes written
ausg
., sometimes
a.g
., sometimes just
ag
. Precise figures and arbitrary abbreviations are the crowbars of Nazi euphemism. They break up the established links between word and experience, between what happens and what is possible to understand. Why is 12.5 kilos of luggage the permitted amount? Why not ten, or fifteen? Why does the labor deployment, in
Nor can it be understood. The world in which something like this can be understood is a world no one in your world can imagine. Between your world and the world where parents are exhorted to sacrifice their children, children their parents, and the healthy the sick, there is a chasm that reason cannot bridge.
Only misunderstanding and lack of imagination—this is how I see it—can keep your world together after September 1942.
The inability to imagine a place like Chełmno. At one end of a manorlike building, “the castle,” the entrance to the changing room and showers, at the other end the way out to the trucks that are docked to the outside wall, their airtight compartments snugly fit to the door openings. The biggest is a Magirus truck, made by Deutz AG in Cologne, which in 1942 has been declared a National Socialist model company, and which can load 150 living human beings. The two smaller vehicles, an Opel Blitz and a Diamond Reo, can load from eighty to one hundred each. Once the compartment has been fully packed, the smallest children sometimes packed on top of the adults, and the airtight doorsbolted, the driver turns on the ignition and attaches an exhaust pipe from the diesel engine to the cargo area/gas chamber, and within five to ten minutes the cargo has been asphyxiated. Then the truck is driven to a camp in the Rzuchowski Forest, four kilometers away, where the dead bodies are unloaded, stripped of jewelry and gold teeth, and burned to ashes. After ten minutes of airing, the truck is driven back to “the castle” to get ready for the next load. Between September 3 and 12, 1942, a total of 15,859 people, young, sick, and old, are dispatched from the ghetto in Łódź and delivered to the gas vans in Chełmno.
I note down the exact figures and dates, in fact I scour the archives and sources for the exact figures and dates, because I want to reconstruct your world as you see it before it’s liquidated, and I need something to build it with, and I don’t know what else I can understand. But I soon notice that the exact numbers and dates merely reconstruct the widening gulf between what’s happening around you and what can be understood. The ghetto’s enclosed inside a wall of lies and euphemisms that no reason can penetrate.
Between January 16 and 29, 1942, 10,003 people are dispatched from the ghetto for onward transport and relocation. They’re permitted to take 12.5 kilos of luggage each and are promised that they’ll be able to exchange their ghetto currency for up to ten German Reichsmarks at the assembly point. Between February 22 and April 4, 1942, 34,073 people are dispatched from the ghetto. Between May 4 and 15, 1942, 10,914 are dispatched. Altogether, from January 16 to September 12, 1942, 70,859 people are dispatched from the ghetto in Łódź to be suffocated to death in the airtight compartments of the trucks that shuttle to and from the docking wall of a manor known as “thecastle” in a small village sixty kilometers northwest of Łódź called Chełmno in Polish and Kulmhof in the language of the new masters.
I could have filled the rest of this book with figures and dates from lists detailing the dispatch and delivery of people who will never be heard from again, but apart from the fact that nothing can be understood from those lists, I also don’t trust them. The figures are too precise, of course, and the abbreviations too arbitrary.
Ausgeliefert
is sometimes written
ausg
., sometimes
a.g
., sometimes just
ag
. Precise figures and arbitrary abbreviations are the crowbars of Nazi euphemism. They break up the established links between word and experience, between what happens and what is possible to understand. Why is 12.5 kilos of luggage the permitted amount? Why not ten, or fifteen? Why does the labor deployment, in
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