Black Earth(88)

Sometimes Poles in the countryside would denounce Jews to the Polish police rather than directly to the Germans. This could seem less terrible than speaking directly to the foreign murderers. But once a Polish policeman had such knowledge, he became personally responsible for finding and delivering (or killing) the Jews in question. As of February 1943, the Polish police were under orders to kill “all Jews encountered, without warning.” Sometimes the Polish police would indeed shoot the Jews themselves, for reasons as banal as the inconvenience of riding by horse cart to the nearest German gendarme station. Sometimes they took the Jews to the Germans. Sometimes they were then ordered by their German superiors to shoot the Jews. For Polish policemen, the penalty for refusing to obey such an order was death. (For German policemen there was no such punishment.) Even so, in some cases Polish policemen set Jews free or even helped them to survive.

In these conditions, with violence privatized and the peasant population mobilized, very few Jews survived in the Polish countryside. Thousands of Jews who were on the run and in hiding were caught and murdered, almost all after a denunciation.

—

Wherever the state had been destroyed, whether by the Germans, by the Soviets, or both, almost all of the Jews were murdered. The Holocaust began as mass shooting campaigns in lands where the state was destroyed twice in quick succession, first the prewar nation-state by the Soviets, then the Soviet apparatus by the Germans. The techniques developed in the zone of double statelessness—the recruitment of locals, the use of multiple German institutions, the open-air shootings—were also applied further east, everywhere in the Soviet Union that German power extended. In western and central Poland, where the Germans had been present since September 1939 but began the mass murder of Jews more than two years later, other techniques were applied: secret gassing facilities, deportation from the ghettos, Jew hunts. For the Jews of the Baltic states, eastern Poland, and the Soviet Union, there were bullets and pits; for the Jews of central and western Poland, there were exhaust fumes and ovens.

Most of the remaining Jews of Europe were destined for a place called Auschwitz.





8


The Auschwitz Paradox


Auschwitz symbolizes the intention to murder all Jews under German control, and Jews from every corner of the German empire were murdered in its gas chambers. Some Jews survived Auschwitz because it remained, to the end, a set of camps as well as a death facility, where Jews were selected for labor as they entered. Thus a story of survival at Auschwitz can enter collective memory. Almost literally no Jew who stood at the edge of a death pit survived, and almost literally no Jew who entered Treblinka or Be??ec or Sobibór or Che?mno survived. The word “Auschwitz” has become a metonym for the Holocaust as a whole. Yet the vast majority of Jews had already been murdered, further east, by the time that Auschwitz became a major killing facility. Yet while Auschwitz has been remembered, most of the Holocaust has been largely forgotten.

Auschwitz has been a relatively manageable symbol for Germany after the Second World War, significantly reducing the actual scale of the evil done. The conflation of Auschwitz with the Holocaust made plausible the grotesque claim that Germans did not know about the mass murder of the European Jews while it was taking place. It is possible that some Germans did not know exactly what happened at Auschwitz. It is not possible that many Germans did not know about the mass murder of Jews. The mass murder of Jews was known and discussed in Germany, at least among families and friends, long before Auschwitz became a death facility. In the East, where tens of thousands of Germans shot millions of Jews over hundreds of death pits over the course of three years, most people knew what was happening. Hundreds of thousands of Germans witnessed the killings, and millions of Germans on the eastern front knew about them. During the war, wives and even children visited the killing sites; and soldiers, policemen, and others wrote home to their families, sometimes with photographs, about the details. German homes were enriched, millions of times over, by plunder from the murdered Jews, sent by post or brought back by soldiers and policemen on leave.

For similar reasons, Auschwitz was a convenient symbol in the postwar Soviet Union and today in post-communist Russia. If the Holocaust is reduced to Auschwitz, then it can easily be forgotten that the German mass killing of Jews began in places that the Soviet Union had just conquered. Everyone in the western Soviet Union knew about the mass murder of the Jews, for the same reason that the Germans did: In the East the method of mass murder required tens of thousands of participants and was witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people. The Germans left, but their death pits remained. If the Holocaust is identified only with Auschwitz, this experience, too, can be excluded from history and commemoration.