It is virtually impossible today to imagine the pain endured by men and women being beaten as they were marched to their death simply for being Jewish while their neighbors’ children ran up and down beside them, more likely than not just to watch the show. It is difficult to visualize this coexistence, the juxtaposition of the mass murder of one part of the village and the curiosity it excited in the children of the same village, a curiosity that would be banal were it not focused on a crime of genocide.
