From the archives...

Chapter 24 titled 'Treblinka' from the book: A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army by Vasily Grossman. Today, the trial of another German Nazi monster (probably the last such trial) gets underway in Munich...

Inside the women's barracks was a hairdressers. Naked women's hair was cut with clippers. Wigs were removed from the heads of old women. A terrible psychological phenomenon: according to the hairdressers, for the women, this death haircut was the most convincing proof of being taken to the banya. Girls felt their hair with their hands and sometimes asked: 'Could you cut it again here? It is not even.' Women usually relaxed after their hair was cut, and almost all emerged from the barracks with a piece of soap and a folded towel. Some young women cried, mourning their beautiful long plaits. What were the haircuts for? In order to deceive them? No. Germany needed this hair. The hair was a raw material. I've asked many people, what did Germans do with these heaps of hair cut from the heads of the living dead? All the witnesses told me that the huge heaps of black, blonde hair, curls and plaits were disinfected, pressed into sacks and sent to Germany. All the witnesses confirmed that the hair was sent in the sacks to Germany. How was it used? No one could answer this question. Only Kon stated in his written evidence that the hair was used by the navy for stuffing mattresses or making hawsers for submarines.

I read about Treblinka yesterday – a poem

How many were dragged?
Did all of them hold hands?
Was there innate goodness?
How long is to the other side?
Why do the children last so long?
How many of them saw the truth?
Why do herds behave the way they do?
How many heard a whip lash overhead?
How many people does it take to satisfy?
How many sank tired into the frozen earth?
How many found it a beautiful place to die?
How many indulged in complete surrender?
Would the guards have been someplace else?
How long before they stopped following orders?

If you know, let me know.


Side note: I find German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open criticism of the Vatican based Christian leader Joseph Alois Ratzinger commendable.

Lynching postcards – and how we might put them to work for us

Recently, the Atlanta Center for Civil and Human Rights purchased “Without Sanctuary,” a famous collection of lynching images (many of them postcards).

Description of one of those postcards here: A particularly vivid lynching postcard depicts the charred and partially dismembered corpse of Jesse Washington, who was burned before a crowd of thousands in Waco, Tex., in 1916. The card, which appears to have been written by a white spectator to his parents, is signed “your son Joe.” He refers to the horrific murder — in which the victim’s ears, fingers and sexual organs were severed — as the “barbecue we had last night.” He identifies himself in the crowd by placing a mark in ink about his head.

It is a historical fact that almost 5,000 Americans were lynched in the United States from the 1870s to the 1970s; 80 percent of the victims were in the South, almost all of them black. Times editorial observer Brent Staples writes about an idea that was used effectively by Nazi hunters for years in a successful strategy to ferret out Hitler era Nazis who aided and abetted in heinous crimes against the Jews – proof of the crimes embedded within photographs.

Many of the people who attended lynchings as children in the 1930’s and 40’s must be still alive and walking the streets of the principal states of the lynching belt. It is also possible that their parents might still be alive. Nazi hunters have made an art of exposing war criminals through photographs taken in the death camp era. This strategy would have worked well against Southern lynch-mob killers who posed for the camera while murdering African-Americans in a campaign of terror that persisted into the mid-20th century.