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

now, however inconceivable and preposterous it may sound to those who will one day read what he’s writing. And actually, however inconceivable and preposterous what’s happening may sound even to those who are living through it, here and now. When the only way to go on living is to fail to grasp what’s happening. These are days when the people of the ghetto do not cry like humans, writes Zelkowicz.They bark like dogs, howl like wolves, cry like hyenas, roar like lions. They don’t cry like humans because the pain isn’t a human pain that can be responded to with human tears. These are days when the ghetto is a cacophony of wild noises in which only one tone is missing: the human tone. Humans aren’t capable of bearing such suffering. Beasts perhaps, but not humans.
    So people don’t cry.
    Josef Zelkowicz strains his vocabulary and hunts for metaphors: people are shot “like mad dogs”; a woman who has just lost her three sons “laughs as wildly as a hyena”; a woman whose husband has just been shot before her eyes “hiccups like a crazed ostrich,” and every hiccup “is a poisoned dart to the heart.” In every apartment “a pocket of pus” is bursting, in every room there’s “a roaring, rumbling, hiccuping, hysterical volcanic eruption,” through every window and broken door “lava pours into the courtyards and streets. One dwelling infects the next, one house the next, one street the next. The whole ghetto quakes, churns, riots, runs amok.”
    With the “sacrifice” of the old, the sick, and the young children in September 1942, Josef Zelkowicz’s world ruptures. He can’t understand how the ghetto can live on after such a thing, still less how those responsible for selecting the victims could do so, and he’s genuinely surprised, no, upset, in fact, to see that “the appalling shock” instead seems to transform itself into a kind of detachment. The brutal purge is hardly over before the struggle for survival resumes, as if nothing had happened. “People who have just lost their loved ones now talk of nothing but rations, potatoes, soup, and so on! It is beyond comprehension!”
    The next entry in the ghetto diary: “During the first twenty days of September the weather was lovely and sunny, with only a few brief showers.”
    I don’t know how you all go on living and perhaps I don’t want to know, but I do know that you’re still alive. That 85,000 people live on after September 1942, and that 73,000 survive until August 1944. That the Łódź ghetto is still in existence in August 1944, whereas the Warsaw ghetto is not.
    In the Warsaw ghetto, life does not go on. In May 1943, the Warsaw ghetto is liquidated. In the space of two months, from July 24, 1942, to September 24, 1942, 270,000 people of all ages and conditions, no haggling over the old, the sick, and the young, are transported onward. Warsaw’s Chełmno is called Treblinka. In Treblinka, the diesel engines are bigger and connected to stationary gas chambers in a purposely built block where many more people can be killed in a shorter time. No driving around in trucks through the woods; the bodies are burned in situ. It’s more efficient that way. In the Warsaw ghetto, the chairman of the Jewish Council is Adam Czerniaków, not Chaim Rumkowski. When he’s ordered by an SS-Hauptsturmführer, one Hermann Worthoff (who has just liquidated the ghetto in Lublin, whose Chełmno or Treblinka is called Bełzec), to deliver 10,000 people and a transport of children by July 24, 1942, he takes his own life. “I cannot send defenseless children to their deaths,” he writes in his farewell letter.
    Chaim Rumkowski doesn’t take his own life. He lives on, convinced that by sacrificing the sick, the old, and the little ones, he can save the strong, the well, and those fit for work. He makes a calculation in which the survival of some becomes the overriding aim and the sacrifice of others the inevitable means of achieving it. He makes a