The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer

Author:Saul Friedländer [Friedländer, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: European History, History.war
ISBN: 9780060190439
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-01-15T10:00:00+00:00

The total confusion about what was happening to the deportees, from whom nothing was heard directly once they had boarded the transports, reappears in Paris at the end of 1942. Although on August 18 Biélinky had emphasized that “one never had news from the deportees,”172 on December 2 he reported: “It is said that the Jews deported from France, Belgium, etc. have been found—about 35,000 of them—in a town in Russia, where they have been well received by the population.”173 December 17 Biélinky recorded his last diary entry. He was arrested on the night of February 10, 1943, by the French police and deported from Drancy to Sobibor on March 23.174

On December 9, 1942, Lambert was ordered by the Commissariat Général to dismiss all foreign Jews still working for the UGIF (approximately one-quarter of the staff) and told that—at that price—the French employees would be spared from deportation. Did he believe it? Even when he heard the Allied governments’ declaration about the extermination of the Jews of Europe later the same month, he wrote that he still believed in his “star.”175

Thus in almost all the diaries written by Jews in Western Europe, in Germany, and even in Theresienstadt, the entries during the second half of 1942 indicate both sporadic intimations about Nazi intention to exterminate all of them and, often simultaneously, contrary information and personal plans for the postwar period. Lambert, like Redlich, dreamed of the future: He hoped to own “a house on a hill” in his old age, although he immediately added that he knew this to be impossible.176

As for Klemperer, after noting on October 23, 1942, how the German military situation was worsening, he added: “But all conversations among Jews again and again lead to the same reflection: ‘If they have the time, they will kill us first.’ One said to Frau Ziegler yesterday: He felt like a calf at the slaughterhouse, looking on, as the other calves are slaughtered, and waiting for his turn. The man is right.”177 And yet, a day later, as though what he had just written was meaningless, Klemperer mused about his future projects “after Hitler’s fall:” “With what shall I start? I very certainly do not have so much more time [Klemperer had a heart condition]. The 18ème [a book project on eighteenth-century literature] has slipped into the background for me. Tackle a supplement of my Modern Prose? Continue with the Curriculum?”178 and the like.

Even close to the killing sites, Jews at times did not know what happened to the deportees, nor did they believe the information that reached them. Jews in Warsaw and in London knew the details about Chelmno, while the inhabitants of Lodz dismissed them. Thus a little-known Lodz ghetto diarist, Menachem Oppenheim, a native of the city and apparently an Orthodox Jew, recorded his reaction after the great deportations of September 1942. Oppenheim, like everybody else, was wondering about the use of small children, the elderly, and hospital patients in labor camps in places unknown, and yet

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.