The silence described by the Polish railway official interviewed in Shoah is telling. That silence was the extermination of the Jews. The sound of the human suddenly ceasing to exist, the stillness that cloaked the landscape in which it had echoed only a moment before. The occasional rush of wind in the trees, a faint hammering in the distance, the sounds of emptiness. How was it possible that so many people, more than a thousand, could fall so silent? Where were they? That stillness is the stillness of the void, descending when what was no longer is, and it is this that makes what took place
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