the
young girl, slender and dark, who, passing near me, pointed at herself,
saying, "twenty-three." I walked around the mound and faced a
frightful common grave. Tightly packed corpses were heaped so close
together that only the heads showed. Most were wounded in the head and
the blood flowed over their shoulders. Some still moved. Others raised
their hands and turned their heads to show that they were still alive.
The ditch was two-thirds full. I estimate that it held a thousand
bodies.
Here in Berlin and more and more across Germany, we have so called "Stolpersteine".
These
are solid metail stones, which are embedded in the street, where a
former German jew or family lived, who was killed during the holocaust. I
think - but did not yet "google" for it - that there is even an
overview of all "Stolpersteine" across Germany and the details of the
respective families or people who were murdered.
When
you casually stroll through Berlin, you again and again encounter these
"Stolpersteine". It shows, that these were not some distant people who
were killed off. But rather neighbors.
Some
were for sure reported by "fellow Germans" for being a jew. Others were
taken away and all neighbors were simply too afraid to do something.
Like
the eye-witness report I read some time ago about a lady who watched
how armed men took away their jewish neighbors. A family of 4. Mother,
father and two kids. One of them being a toddler.
The
family was not surprisingly agitated and the toddler crying and one of
the armed men, while shouting commands for them to get in the car or
van, took the toddler away from the crying mother and slammed it into
the wall of the car/van until it stopped crying. Then he gave the corpse
back to the mother and all were loaded into the van and vanished (in
one of the concentration camps for sure).
The same men would go home the same evening and kiss their kids goodnight.
It
is hard to process. But it has happend way too often in history. It has
happened during the last century and it is happening today. We need to
remember history, teach it well and make sure that something like this
never happens again.
You
can see one collaborator is smiling. These guys volunteered and were
happy to carry out the murders. There was no forcing to be done. They
were not held at gun point or were drafted. The German officers too are
also not innocent.
This
is how my grandfather’s side of the family was killed. On May 29, 1942,
the Jews in their village in Belarus were marched out of the Ghetto to
the local cemetery and executed.
Witness Interview Yulya
P.: "The Jews had to go down into the pit. They had to stand in a line,
before being fired on all at once with a machine gun and falling into
the pit. The Jews were clubbed on the head, adults had their hands tied
behind their backs and the children cried. They had to lie down on the
previous “layer” of Jewish bodies which had been arranged. If they were
next to the pit, policemen pushed them in with their feet. The policemen
were scum. They betrayed and shot their own friends." (Eyewitness N°27,
interviewed in Dokshitsy, on March 27th 2008)
Soviet archives "All
3,000 or 3,500 Jews had been kept in the Dokshitsy ghetto. They were
taken out of the ghetto in groups of 100-150. They were, for the most
part, women with children, old people and young people. They were taken
to a pit near the Jewish cemetery of Dokshitsy, where they were forced
to undress and shot. This mass extermination lasted three weeks and all
Jews from the ghetto were shot." [Act drawn up by the Soviet
extraordinary commission; RG-
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