Living today in a city like Paris, we tend to think of Jew, polizei, and grave filler as separate beings, or at least as clearly distinct from one another. But above all, they were simply neighbors. Sometimes it would turn out that the filler knew the polizei who guarded the Jews leading up to shooting, as well as the Jewish family with all its children who waited, naked, beside the ditch. They were all, or rather they had all been, neighbors. And not just for the past few weeks or even years, but quite often for generations. Only the Germans, foreigners arriving by truck or car from the big
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