The Wall by John Hersey

Author:John Hersey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

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EVENTS AUGUST 11, 1942. ENTRY AUGUST 12, 1942. FROM RACHEL APT. Yesterday Rachel, Rutka, Berson, and Mordecai Apt, our Hashomer contingent, received summons by urgent message to report to Zilberzweig’s “Workshop Three” in the evening. This they did, and found there about twenty-five other young people. When they arrived, Zilberzweig handed them a copy of the new edition of the Socialist broadside, Storm, which had been published just yesterday afternoon. Rachel’s face was at the center of a cluster of reading faces, and she had a good view of the words, but she says they seemed to jump and jerk before her eyes; she could scarcely credit the snatches as she saw them:

…Treblinka B, more recently constructed, lies beyond these woods on some sandy hills. Area roughly 5,000 hectares…newly-built sideline spur from Malkinia-Sokolów line terminates at the entrance to an enclosure (capacity, about three thousand people standing)…while south of the enclosure one finds the Lumpensortierungsplatz (clothes-sorting-place) with warehouse sheds…path runs through a green fence intertwined with barbed wire enclosing the general camp area, continues about 200 meters, swings around the incompleted, windowless walls of a new building, which is being constructed, incidentally, of bricks taken all the way from Warsaw, until it debouches before a building of unusual design…three blank-walled rooms, about two meters high, area 25 square meters, with a narrow corridor fronting all three…pipes with valves…outside, curious scoops reminding one of ship ventilators…power room at one end…hermetic seals around the doors and at the scoops and valves…floors with terra-cotta inlay which moisture renders very slippery….

…was especially struck by the irony of the classification signs in the first enclosure—Tailors, Hatmakers, Carpenters, Roadbuilders, and so on—tending to make the Jews believe they were to be sorted for labor farther east…kindly speech by a gentle-looking S.S. officer:…After the bath and disinfection, this property will be returned to you in accordance with your receipts…along the path naked, carrying a small piece of soap and his documents…about 15 minutes…are carried by the Jewish auxiliary, led by Kapos whose identification is a yellow patch at the knee, to the cemetery…and this duty, according to the escaped Kapo interviewed by our courier in a hut a few kilometers south of Malkinia, is trying in the extreme…covered over by bulldozers, the exhausts of whose Diesel motors provide the constant music of Treblinka….

When Rachel finished the broadside, she sat silent. She says her heart was beating very fast. She wanted to leave the room, to think, to be moving; the presence of her silent companions held her still.

Zilberzweig, after a while: —— Nu?

One of the young Hashomer zealots: —— Who is this Slonim?

Zilberzweig: —— He’s a Socialist, he has been to some of the National Committee meetings with Rapaport. Isn’t he a friend of yours, Chaverte Rachel?

Rachel: —— He’s a friend of Chaver Dolek here.

Berson: —— I know him.

Another of the Hashomer young people: —— What does he look like?

Berson: —— Oh, he’s rather frightened-looking, short, he walks like a piece of machinery, you expect him to clank.

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