A Light in the Darkness: Part IV

The Führer decided to attack the Soviet Union, though Germany was still at war with Great Britain and clearly not winning. The decision was an unforced error, a colossal blunder that would bring Nazi Germany to ruin.

“I will raze this damned city to the ground,” he swore, “and I will make an artificial lake to provide energy for an electric power station. The name of Moscow will vanish forever.”

Fighter pilot Hans Hartigs boasted: “We liked to go for women pushing prams, often with children at their sides. It was a kind of sport really.”

Columns of prisoners, marching five abreast, stretched to the horizon, as far as the eye could see.

To be sure, as Germany rearmed and Hitler grew bolder, he did not mince words in meetings with foreign diplomats. In November 1938, just days after Kristallnacht, he told a South African official that the Jews “would disappear from Europe one day.”

Evidently, what troubled Himmler was not the morality of the mass-murder order; a fervent racist, he, too, wanted the Jews wiped out.

Volunteers also became auxiliaries, working alongside the Waffen-SS and Einsatzgruppen.

Himmler agreed, adding that Jewish children not only had “bad blood” but would seek vengeance for their parents’ deaths if allowed to live. Therefore, according to his perverse logic, “even the child in the cradle must be trampled down like a poisonous toad.”

Bielenberg replied, “No—no...I am not horrified, I think I pity you, for you have more on your conscience than can be absolved by your death.”

We use a bland term—a euphemism—rather than a harsh or direct one. Nazis routinely used euphemisms—“office talk”—to veil their crimes.

special installations = death factories
finished off = murdered
pacification = massacre of Jews in a specific area

Before mass deportations could begin, SS planners decided they needed to further terrorize, confuse, and disorient their victims. The purpose was to paralyze resistance and divide the Jews, forcing each group to look after its own interests at the expense of others.

So, for hours he went from office to office, asking about the rumored deportation. He got the runaround: Talk of deportation was “prattle and nonsense.”

All Jews, irrespective of sex or age, with certain exceptions, will be deported to the East...[for] resettlement.

Though admired in the ghetto’s early days, Jewish policemen had long since earned residents’ scorn for their callousness and corruption.

To save themselves and their families, they tried to ingratiate themselves with the Nazis and even identified with them, speaking of “those Jews” as if they were a race apart.

One wants to yell, but there is nobody to yell to; to implore, to argue—there is nobody to argue with; one is alone, completely alone in this multitude of people.

Pleased with himself, the major, an eyewitness wrote, “would climb up to the top of the [hospital] and observe the people slated for deportation calmly and nonchalantly. He stayed utterly impassive to tragic scenes worthy of great writers, film directors, and painters.”

It’s impossible to imagine the horrors of that closed, airless boxcar. It was one big cesspool.

Whenever a German troop train bound for Russia got caught behind a trainload of maltreated Jews, the “pestilential smell” made Waffen-SS men gag and vomit.

Comparing Jews to a ghastly infection, Hitler admitted, “I gave the order to burn out the abscesses of our inner well-poisoning and the foreign poisoning down to the raw flesh.”

Fact: Anti-Semitism was rife in prewar Poland. Fact: Poles often shunned assimilated Jews, treating them as outcasts.

Indeed, there were instances where entire villages took part in organized “Jew-hunts,” scouring the countryside for victims to kill or hand over to the Nazis for a reward.

Thus, it made sense for the Nazis to select Poland for their death camps, believing that Jew-hatred there was so intense that Poles would condone mass murder.

Poland, too, had a fine railway system, and large tracts of forested countryside with small populations, ideal for masking atrocities.

Elsewhere, Germans wiped out entire villages in reprisal for a family’s sheltering Jews.

Incredibly, several rescuers were both staunch Catholics and anti-Semites. The most important of these, Zofia Kossak, is a testament to human decency in the face of evil.

“You can go free, if you drown him, or I will kill you, too. Drown him or die. I will count...1,2...” The Pole broke down, grabbed the child, and threw him into the Vistula. The soldier patted him on the shoulder, said, “Stout fellow,” and walked away.

We protest from the bottom of our hearts filled with pity, indignation, and horror. This protest is demanded of us by God, who does not allow us to kill. It is the demand of our Christian conscience.

Code-named “Żegota,” it was the only organization in occupied Europe entirely devoted to helping persecuted Jews. Jointly run by Catholics and Jews, Żegota was divided into sections, each dealing with a specific need: escape and evasion, housing, finance, medical care, propaganda, and child welfare.

Jan Karski, a hero of the resistance, thought women better suited to secret work than men. “They were quicker to perceive danger...more cautious and discreet, had more common sense and were less inclined to risky bluffing.”

Many, if not most, child-survivors of the Warsaw ghetto owed their lives to another woman. From the look of her, Irena Sendler, at four feet ten inches, was not an imposing figure.

“We won’t let our children be handed over to convents for spiritual destruction,” they’d declare. “Let them share the fate that God has ordained for us.”

Sendler and her group used two buildings that straddled the border between the ghetto and the Aryan side as escape routes for older children.

A woman walked out with a little girl hidden between her legs, under her voluminous skirt.

Oskar Schindler, the more famous German industrialist, saved twelve hundred Polish Jews, nearly all of them adults. Hollywood made Schindler’s List, an Academy Award-winning film about his exploits. Sendler’s work was no less heroic.

This meant teaching them a lot more than they’d learned thus far: Catholic dogma, prayers, hymns, rituals. This was also necessary to keep them from standing out from the other children, who did not know they were Jewish.

Miriam asked a nun she admired to prepare her for conversion, but Sister Bernarda deftly changed the subject.

Other nuns quickly bandaged the heads and faces of children with Jewish features, feigning injury.

“Their tragic bodies were left hanging for several days,” wrote Ruth Altbeker Cyprys, who saw them as she passed by. “People tried desperately not to look, yet they were compelled to see them, to think about them.”