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Kristoffer 2022-08-20 11:52:23
Fragment of "Holocaust"
"Converted people can keep their faith secretly in their hearts, and those who are expelled can come back, but the dead will never reappear."
"There is no document that mentions'killing the Jews', only'final solution' Project'. This name means that from now on there will be something that... -
Johanna 2022-10-17 07:42:27
The suffering of the world
Part of the interview record:
1. Please remember my words, Treblinka is a primitive, yet extremely efficient production line of dead people.
Claude Lanzmann
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Claude Lanzmann: You don't remember those days?
Franz Grassler: Not much. I recall more clearly my pre-war mountaineering trips than the entire war period and those days in Warsaw. All, in all, those were bad times. It's a fact we tend to forget, thank God, the bad times more easily than the good. The bad times are repressed.
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Claude Lanzmann: But a ghetto like Warsaw's, in a great capital, in the heart of the city...
Franz Grassler: That was unusual.
Claude Lanzmann: You say you wanted to maintain the ghetto?
Franz Grassler: Our mission wasn't to annihilate the ghetto, but to keep it alive, to maintain it.
Claude Lanzmann: What does "alive" mean in such conditions?
Franz Grassler: That was the problem. That was the whole problem.
Claude Lanzmann: But people were dying in the streets. There were bodies everywhere?
Franz Grassler: Exactly. That was the paradox.
Claude Lanzmann: You see it as a paradox?
Franz Grassler: I'm sure of it.
Claude Lanzmann: Why? Can you explain?
Franz Grassler: No.
Claude Lanzmann: Why not?
Franz Grassler: Explain what? But the fact is... That wasn't maintaining! Jews were being exterminated daily in the ghetto wrote... To maintain it properly we'd have needed more substantial rations and less crowding.
Claude Lanzmann: Why weren't the rations more humane? Why weren't they? That was a German decision wasn't it?
Franz Grassler: There was no real decision to starve the ghetto. The big decision to exterminate came much later.
Claude Lanzmann: That's right, later. In 1942.
Franz Grassler: Precisely.
Claude Lanzmann: A year later.
Franz Grassler: Just so. Our mission, as I recall it, was to manage the ghetto, and naturally with those inadequate rations and the over-crowding, a high, even excessive death rate was inevitable.
Claude Lanzmann: Yes. What does "maintain" the ghetto mean in such conditions, the food, sanitation, etcetera? What could the Jews do against such measures?
Franz Grassler: They couldn't do anything.
Claude Lanzmann: Why did Czerniakow commit suicide?
Franz Grassler: Because he realised there was no future for the ghetto. He probably saw before I did that the Jews would be killed.
