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January 7 - January 8, 2023
Within the present-day borders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine alone, historians estimate the number of Jews exterminated to have been 2.2 million,2 more than 80 percent of them by bullets, with the remainder having been deported and murdered in camps or gas trucks.
The Shoah in the East, by contrast, was not discreet. The victims were publicly assembled, albeit often at first on the pretext of being sent to a labor camp or to Palestine. The mass murder then took place in full view of the victims’ neighbors, the curious, and soldiers or civilians who happened to be there.
When an act performed by a “requisitioned worker” is described as though “automated,” habitual, without a foreign giver of orders, it seems devoid of any responsibility. Of course, the diggers dig and the fillers fill. But the rare accounts that do describe the presence of the German architect give back a certain autonomy to the conscripts; the surveyor shows, explains, outlines the dimensions of the grave—but, without the skill of local labor, it would never be ready on time. The diggers are not mere labor. They are not simply living excavators. At the base of the hierarchy in the Shoah by
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The requisition of villagers is the hidden face of the Einsatzgruppen, the special German mobile units. The Germans could be so mobile thanks to an immobile local population that was always there to do their dirty work.
It should be noted that in this village a single German, in one long afternoon, killed more than seven hundred Jews! “The German shot them in the head. Sometimes in the forehead, sometimes in the neck. He didn’t aim too carefully…. He shot from very close, about a meter away from the Jews; just far enough to avoid the blood splatter…. He had cases full of bullets in the truck…. When the shooting was over, the truck drove to the edge of the ditch to collect the clothes.”
As Catherine Deneuve says in Indochine, “Youth is believing that things don’t have to come apart.”
We cannot see what we cannot stand to see together.
Human beings are quite adept at telling themselves that if something is legal, they can’t be guilty.
