Free A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz by Goran Rosenberg

a
Sonderaktion
(special action) for the “dejudification of the Warthegau” (
die Entjudung des Warthegaus
), require 1/8 liter of spirits per man per day? Why not a half liter, or a quarter? Amtsleiter Hans Biebow, the Nazi commandant of the Łódź ghetto, writes to the
Herrn Reichsbeauftragten für das Trinkbranntweingewerbe beim Reichsnährstand, Kleiststrasse, Berlin W32
, to request extra spirit rations and extra cigarette rations for the extra staff required to dejudify Warthegau—that is, the part of Poland now belonging to the German Reich, with its center a city now called Litzmannstadt, whose Jews are now being gassed to death in a small village called Chełmno, situated on the banks of the River Ner. The staff deployed for such a
Sonderaktion
, Biebow emphasizes, must unconditionally,
unbedingt
, be allocated an extra ration of spirits.
    All this is somehow reassuring from a purely linguistic point of view: the fact that a man with the power to hire people for a
Sonderaktion
whose object is to dejudify Warthegau lacks thepower to give them an extra ration of spirits. The fact that he repeatedly has to approach the high command of spirit allocations in Berlin and bow and scrape and attach certificates from the health authorities in Litzmannstadt testifying to the workers’ need of spirits while on duty. Reassuring, because the long-winded sentences hint at some kind of meaning and the long-winded bureaucracy at some kind of order, but all of it, of course, entirely incomprehensible, since the words have been detached from their significance and the bureaucracy from its logic. Anyone with permission to transport 70,000 or 80,000 or, were it technically possible, 100,000 individuals to the gas vans in Chełmno ought not to have to concern himself with permission to dispense 1/8 liter of spirits a day to the extra staff that must be recruited to carry out the disgusting (yes, that’s what it says,
ekelerregend
) work.
    Not in the world as it has been understood until now.

    A man named Josef Zelkowicz is listening to Chaim Rumkowski in front of the fire station at 13 Lutomierska on that hot afternoon of September 4, 1942, and as usual takes notes on what he sees and hears. Zelkowicz’s notes will survive the liquidation of the ghetto and the liquidation of Zelkowicz himself (in Auschwitz in 1944). Mortifying sobbing erupts, he notes, after the exhortation to mothers and fathers to deliver up their children. Piteous wailings erupt, he writes, after the declaration that the limbs must be cut off to save the body. Ice in every heart, he writes. Despair in every eye. Hands clenched convulsively. Faces rigidly contorted.
    They all know. Little by little, the decrees have become brutal and the euphemisms have been stripped bare. Already in the second wave of transports, in February 1942, the promised exchange of money into German Reichsmarks is abandoned, and the travelers are brusquely told that the 12.5 kilos of minutely itemized luggage they’ve been urged to take with them to the assembly point are to be left behind when they board the train. The ghetto lies sleepless over the luggage left behind. And over the luggage that’s sent back.
    Everyone knows, but no one understands.
    “The fact is,” Josef Zelkowicz notes in September 1942, “that no one has even a vestige of doubt that the deportees from the ghetto are not being taken to any other location. They are being led to perdition, at least the elderly.… They are being thrown on the garbage heap, as they say in the ghetto.… If so, how can we be expected to accept the new decree? How can we be expected to live on after this?”
    I don’t think anyone has the right to ask that question in retrospect, but Zelkowicz asks it there and then. How can you go on living once you’ve been commanded to “sacrifice” your old, your sick, and your small children as a price for doing so? How can you go on living in a world where such a decree can be conceived