The Ghetto Within by Santiago H. Amigorena

Author:Santiago H. Amigorena
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

In fact, the reality in Europe in July 1942 was worse than what had been described in the Daily Telegraph article. The mobile gas chambers (the first generation, disguised as small trucks from a company called Kaisers-Kaffee, and the second generation, 2.5- and 3-ton trucks that held between thirty and fifty people, and the 5-ton trucks that could fit as many as eighty victims—standing and tightly packed—fitted with special hermetic chambers into which exhaust fumes were directly funneled) had already been replaced by the fixed gas chambers that, since March and April, had been operating in the extermination camps of Bełżec, Chełmno, and Auschwitz. And, on July 19, 1942, the day of Vicente’s elder daughter’s eighth birthday, Himmler signed the order to set in motion Aktion Reinhard, with the stated goal that, from December 31, 1942, no persons of Jewish origin would remain within the General Government.

In Warsaw, the Germans began by offering bread and jam to those in the ghetto who agreed to be evacuated to labor camps, and many thousands responded to the call. Then, over the summer of 1942, they began calling for the “resettlement to the East”—which, in practice, meant the deportation of all Jews from the ghetto to the extermination camp Treblinka II. This ancillary operation, code-named the Großaktion (Great Action), began on July 22. In the space of eight weeks, some seven thousand people were deported daily. People were snatched from the ghetto day and night, from the streets and from their houses. Jews were taken to the Warsaw Umschlagplatz and, from there, by train to Treblinka, fifty miles away, which, they were told, was a transit station from which, having been disinfected, they would be transferred to labor camps farther east. The road that led to the “showers”—which more than 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto would take over the summer of 1942, and more than 450,000 Jews from Radom, Lublin, and Białystok would take in the months that followed—was dubbed by Nazis the Himmelstrasse: the “road to heaven.”

July, August 1942. Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, the changeable weeks of winter in the southern hemisphere flashed past and Vicente still had no news of his mother. Night after night, he stayed up until dawn playing poker and never woke before two or three o’clock in the afternoon. He would emerge from the bedroom, go into the bathroom to splash water on his face, have a quick cup of coffee, give his children a half-hearted kiss as they came home from school, then head to the store to see whether the new salesman he had hired, a Greek man of about fifty named Yorgos, had sold anything. In order not to think about his mother, Vicente also forced himself not to think about Rosita, or the children, or himself. The slightest compassion for another human being seemed like an insult to . . . to what, exactly? To his mother’s circumstances? To her suffering? To her memory?

“Say nothing. Yes, say nothing. Forget what it means to speak.

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