I’ve been reading a book that keeps punching me in the gut, forcing me to put it down and think about something, anything, but what I’ve just learned. It’s called “Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps,” and the author is Yitzjak Arad, at one time, unless he still is, deputy chairman of the International Council of Yad Vashem, Holocaust Remembrance Authority. The camps of the title were the ones where any and all pretense of being a place for political prisoners, conscripted workers or the relocated was dismissed. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were created with the sole purpose of killing people, as many as possible, as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible. I’ve always been fascinated, in a train-wreck-watching kind of way, with the Holocaust, the most terrible example I think there has ever been of how terrible one group of human beings have ever been toward another. I knew it was going to be a tough read going in, but what I hadn’t reckoned on, what has arrested me time and again in the author’s almost laconic account of horror after horror, is that pretense was at the very heart of this heartless program. Any number of passages have been troubling, but the ones that have forced me to put the book aside and think of something, anything, but what I had just absorbed deal with the “improvements” enacted at the camps after they had been up and running and slaughtering people by the thousands, but not fast enough for the Nazis. This passage in particular, about Treblinka after new gas chambers with increased capacity were installed, tore at my soul: “The doors contained a small glass window, through which the SS men and Ukrainians checked to see what was happening and ascertained whether the victims were already dead. The entrance to the corridor was covered by a dark Jewish ceremonial curtain taken from an unidentified synagogue. On it was inscribed in Hebrew: ‘This is the Gateway to God. Righteous men will pass through.’ A gable over the entrance door bore a large Star of David. To reach the door, one climbed five wide steps with potted plants on either side.” The cruel cynicism of the curtain was bad enough, but I think it was the damned plants that pulled the breath out of me.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Aug 2013 20:52:51 +0000
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