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ings are to be put into shoes. The children s little stockings into
their sandals, boots and shoes. Be tidy!
And straight after this: As you proceed to the bathhouse,
take with you your valuables, documents, money, towel and soap.
I repeat . . .
Inside the women s barrack was a hairdresser s. The hair
of the naked women was cut with clippers; old women had
their wigs removed. This had a strange psychological effect: the
hairdressers testify that this haircut of death did more than
anything to convince the women that they really were going to the
bathhouse. Young women would sometimes stroke their heads
and say, It s uneven here. Please make it smoother. Most of the
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women calmed down after their haircut; nearly all of them left the
barrack carrying their piece of soap and a folded towel. Some
young women wept over the loss of their beautiful plaits.
Why did the Germans shave women s hair? To deceive them
better? No, Germany needed this hair. It was a raw material. I
have asked many people what the Germans did with the hair
that they removed from the heads of the living departed. Every
witness said that the vast heaps of hair black, red-gold and fair,
straight, curly and wavy were first disinfected, then packed into
sacks and sent off to Germany. All the witnesses confirmed that
the sacks bore German addresses. How was the hair used? No-
one could answer. There is just one written deposition, from
a certain Kohn, to the effect that the hair was used by the navy
to fill mattresses and for such things as making hawsers for
submarines. Other witnesses claim that the hair was used to pad
saddles for the cavalry.
This testimony, in my view, requires further confirmation. In
due course, this will be given to humanity by Grossadmiral Raeder,
who in 1942 was in charge of the German Navy.
The men undressed outside, in the yard. One hundred and fifty
to three hundred strong men from the first contingent of the
day would be chosen to bury the corpses; they themselves were
usually killed the following day. The men had to undress quickly
but in an orderly manner, leaving their shoes, socks, underwear,
jackets and trousers in neat piles. These were then sorted out by
a second work squad, known as the reds because of the red
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armbands they wore to distinguish them from the squad on
transport duty . Items considered worth sending to Germany
were taken to the store; first, though, any metal or cloth labels
had to be carefully removed from them. All other items were
burned or buried in pits.
Everyone was feeling more and more anxious. There was a
terrible stench, intermingled with the smell of lime chloride.
There were fat and persistent flies an extraordinary number of
them. What were they doing here, among pine-trees, on dry well-
trodden ground? Everyone was breathing heavily now, shaking
and trembling, staring at every little trifle that might give them
some understanding, at anything that might lift the curtain of
mystery and let them glimpse the fate that awaited them. And
what were those gigantic excavators doing, rumbling away in
the southern part of the camp?
Next, though, came another procedure. The naked people had
to queue at a ticket window to hand over their documents and
valuables. And again they heard that terrible, hypnotizing voice:
Achtung! Achtung! The penalty for concealing valuables is death.
Achtung! Achtung!
The Scharführer sat in a small wooden booth. Other S.S. men
and Wachmänner stood nearby. On the ground were a number of
wooden boxes into which they threw valuables. One was for
paper money; one was for coins; a third was for watches, rings,
earrings, and brooches with precious stones and bracelets. Docu-
ments were just thrown on the ground, since no-one had any
141
use for the documents of the living dead who, within an hour,
would be lying crushed in a pit. Gold and valuables, however,
were carefully sorted; dozens of jewellers were engaged in ascer-
taining the quality of the metal, the value of the stones, the clarity
of the diamonds.
Astonishingly, the brute beasts were able to make use of every-
thing. Leather, paper, cloth everything of use to man was of
use to these beasts. It was only the most precious valuable in
the world human life that they trampled beneath their boots.
Powerful minds, honourable souls, glorious childish eyes, sweet
faces of old women, proudly beautiful girlish heads that nature
had toiled age after age to fashion all this, in a vast silent flood,
was condemned to the abyss of non-being. A few seconds was
enough to destroy what nature and the world had slowly shaped
in life s vast and tortuous creative process.
This booth with its small ticket window was a turning
point. It marked the end of the process of torture by deception, the
end of the lie that held people in a trance of ignorance, in a fever
that hurled them between hope and despair, between visions of
life and visions of death. This torture by deception aided the S.S.
men in their work; it was an essential feature of the conveyor-
belt executioner s block. Now, however, the final act had begun;
the process of plundering the living dead was nearly completed,
and the Germans changed their style of behaviour. They tore
off rings and broke women s fingers; earlobes were ripped off
along with earrings.
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At this point a new principle had to be implemented if
the conveyor-belt executioner s block was to continue to function
smoothly. The word Achtung! was replaced by the hissing
sounds of Schneller! Schneller! Schneller! Faster! Faster! Faster!
Faster into non-existence!
We know from the cruel reality of recent years that a naked
man immediately loses his powers of resistance. He ceases to
struggle. Having lost his clothes, he loses his instinct of self-
preservation and starts to accept whatever happens to him as
his inevitable fate. Someone with an unquenchable thirst for life
becomes passive and apathetic. Nevertheless, to make doubly
sure that there were no mishaps, the S.S. found a way to stun
their victims during this last stage of the conveyor belt s work, to
reduce them to a state of complete psychic paralysis.
How did they achieve this?
Through a sudden recourse to pointless, alogical brutality.
The naked people people who had lost everything but who
obstinately persisted in remaining human, a thousand times
more so than the creatures around them wearing the uniforms of
the German army were still breathing, still looking, still think-
ing; their hearts were still beating. All of a sudden their towels
and pieces of soap were knocked out of their hands. They were
lined up in rows of five.
Hände hoch! Marsch! Schneller! Schneller!
They were then marched down a straight alley, 120 metres long
and two metres wide, bordered by flowers and fir trees. This led
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to the place of execution. There was barbed wire on either side of
the alley, which was lined by S.S. men and Wachmänner standing
shoulder to shoulder, the former in grey uniforms, the latter in
black. The path was sprinkled with white sand, and those who
were walking in front with their hands in the air could see on this
loose sand the fresh imprint of bare feet: the small footprints of
women, the tiny footprints of children, the heavy footprints of
the old. This faint trace in the sand was all that remained of the
thousands of people who had not long ago passed this way, who
had walked down this path just as the present contingent of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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