The Jews of Warsaw

A reminder for deniers

Story of a Secret State (1944) is a work by Lt. Jan Karksi that tells of his time in the Polish Underground, working as a high-level liaison between the military and political cells inside and outside the country. It’s a captivating story of how Karski was mobilized after the Nazi invasion of Poland and almost immediately taken prisoner by the Soviets, how he escaped the Soviets through a prisoner exchange that put him under the control of the Germans before escaping them, too, by jumping out of the window of a train that was headed for a labour camp, how he was gradually recruited into the Underground and how he carried out his dangerous missions, up to the time of his final report to the President of the United States of America about Poland and the Underground.

Part of Karski’s account discusses his visits to the Warsaw Ghetto to observe the state of the Jewish community there and to see the Jewish death camp. “The images of what I saw in the death camp,” he writes, “are, I am afraid, my permanent possessions. I would like nothing better than to purge my mind of these memories. For one thing, the recollection of those events invariably brings on a recurrence of the nausea [that he had experienced at the time]. But more than that, I would like simply to be free of them, to obliterate the very thought that such things ever occurred.”

Karski is not the only one who would wish to be free of memories of Jewish death camps, and it is not only those who saw them or survived them that have that wish. There are those today who are tired of hearing about Jewish camps, Jewish death. Among them are some who deny the Holocaust happened or who claim that Jews have exaggerated its scope and significance for their own benefit.

For a certain section of the population, hostility towards Jews and towards the recent history of the West, to the extent to which it has been constructed on the civil religion of anti-Hitlerism, coupled sometimes with a general sense of ironic detachment, other times with disturbing nihilistic hatred, takes the form of gleeful jokes about the camps. “If I wanted your opinion, Jew, I’d gas it out of you.”

I read Karski’s book not long ago, and I was moved by the horror of his account. But it did not occur to me to share any details from it until I started seeing hatred towards the Jews and jokes about their mass murder increasingly circulating on large social media accounts (as opposed to smaller, more marginal ones).

I will only share some of what Karski writes about what he saw. He saw Jews forced into freight cars — 120 to 130 Jews per car, each with a capacity of 100 in the tightest imaginable scenario. Here is how he describes it:

“The military rule stipulates that a freight car may carry eight horses or forty soldiers. Without any baggage at all, a maximum of a hundred passengers standing close together and pressing against each other could be crowded into a car. The Germans had simply issued orders to the effect that 120 to 130 Jews had to enter each car.”

Having spent a good amount of time online (too much time, probably), I can imagine a young Jew hater, somebody with a cold heart and a head that is not empty but filled with garbage, responding that in Japan they also squeeze passengers onto trains like sardines, and yet the Japanese don’t run America…so why do the Jews? Well, let us suppose that the parallel is reasonable enough, although it is not (needless to say). Does it hold up?

Karski continues his account by describing the scene:

“Alternatively swinging and firing with their rifles, the policemen were forcing still more people into the two cars which were already over-full. The shots continued to ring out in the rear and the driven mob surged forward, exerting an irresistible pressure against those nearest the train. These unfortunates, crazed by what they had been through, scourged by the policemen, and shoved forward by the milling mob, then began to climb on the heads and shoulders of those in the trains.”

When the cars had been packed beyond what would have been humanly possible but for the inhumanity of the Nazi guards, when they were “crammed to bursting with tightly packed human flesh, completely, hermetically filled,” that is when the real horror of the account begins. And I must warn you that the following details are disturbing.

Karski explains that the freight cars had been lined with a powder (quicklime) that served two purposes. First, “the moist flesh coming in contact with the lime is rapidly dehydrated and burned. The occupants of the cars would be literally burned to death before long, the flesh eaten from their bones. Thus, the Jews would ‘die in agony,’ fulfilling the promise Himmler had issued ‘in accord with the will of the Fuehrer,’ in Warsaw, in 1942. Secondly, the lime would prevent decomposing bodies from spreading disease. It was efficient and inexpensive — a perfectly chosen agent for their purposes.”

Jews were not only herded into the cars. They were burned to death in them through contact with the quicklime powder, which ameliorated the overcapacity by dissolving their bodies. “It took three hours to full up the entire train by repetitions of this procedure,” Karski writes; “forty-six (I counted them) cars were packed.”

And where did the cars go? “As I listened to the dwindling outcries from the train, I thought of the destination toward which it was speeding. My informants had minutely described the entire journey. The train would travel about eighty miles and finally come to a halt in an empty, barren field. Then nothing at all would happen. The train would stand stock-still, patiently waiting while death penetrated into ever corner of its interior. This would take from two to four days.”

Karski further describes the logistics of this routine mass murder as follows. “When quicklime, asphyxiation, and injuries had silenced every outcry, a group of men would appear. They would be young, strong Jews, assigned to the task of cleaning out these cars until their own turn to be in them should arrive. Under a strong guard they would unseal the cars and expel the heaps of decomposing bodies. The mounds of flesh that they piled up would then be burned and the remnants buried in a single huge hole. The cleaning, burning and burial would consume one or two full days. The entire process of disposal would take, then, from three to six days. During this period the camp would have recruited new victims. The train would return and the whole cycle would be repeated from the beginning.”

You can understand why Karski, who saw these things, wanted to “obliterate the very thought that such things ever occurred.” But they did occur, and many Jews have dedicated their postwar existence to ensuring, or at least saying, “never again.”

Two groups take issue with that fact. First, opponents of the State of Israel accuse it of committing similar atrocities against the people of Gaza and the West Bank. I readily admit that it can feel morally repugnant and debasing to compare atrocities. Is not every violently imposed death equally a death, every killed person equally a person, and every killer equally a murderer, to be judged before God and man? But that Jews would be herded into train cars by the hundreds and thousands as part of planned mass murder, designed to produce not only death but an agonizing death, not only the murder of people but the complete destruction of a people…with all the mercy and love one can summon for other victims of this and other wars, can we not let such horror speak, or cry out, for itself, without depriving it of what is uniquely depraved through universalizations and equivalencies? (On this point, some of my readers may find it worthwhile to consider the book called To Mend The World by Emil Fackenheim). After all, Israel is not Nazi Germany. Netanyahu is not Hitler. Hamas fighters are not the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, and killing innocent civilians in a war against Hamas is distinct from rounding up the Jews for being Jews, something that can be said with no disrespect intended for the innocent civilians killed in wars with Israel.

Second, those opponents of the Jews who are not necessarily supporters of a Palestinian state or anti-Zionists sometimes level the accusation (some fiercely so, some in the manner of friendly criticism) that the Jews have exploited the horrors of the death camps in ways that are now not conducive to but detrimental to the safe and sound continuance of a strong Western world. How? By themselves engaging in universalizations and equivalencies, such that every strongman is Hitler and every attempt to regulate immigration policy intelligently is Nazism or at least one of the dominoes that leads to genocide. If in the previous case Jews were accused of being Nazis and Hitlers, in this case they accuse others of the same. In itself that criticism is not altogether unfair. Trump, too, is not Hitler, however much a Jewish liberal might protest the fact. And — you would hope that this goes without saying — restricting illegal immigration does not mean supporting a policy of racial or ethnic annihilation or pursuing the most agonizing means of carrying it out. Not wanting a Mexican cartel to be roaming American streets is not the same as dissolving Jews in acid. Oh, how some of us long for a world in which these truths are self-evident!

Somehow — to conclude this dark reminder — it must be possible to remember what was done to the Jews (that, how, and why they were killed), despite the wish, voiced by Karski, to obliterate the thought of it once and for all, but to do so in a way that does honour and justice to the victims of other atrocities, or at least that does not detract from them, and, perhaps the most difficult thing, that recognizes the fair claims of those who are untouched by the history of the Jews, by the attempt to kill them as a people, but whose attention is focused instead on their own histories, their own lives, and the way in which the use and misuse of the Jewish story affects them. My wish is that this can be done with understanding and respect, in good faith and without malice.

Karski recognized the futility of his wish because his eyes could not un-see what they had seen. Never to forget was for him a kind of curse. He could only bear witness in his report. From my peaceful home in a time and place of peace I have not seen the horrors of war first-hand. But I see them trivialized, mocked, ridiculed, diminished, cheapened, and abused; perhaps I myself have done that by not caring or not caring enough about the several wars of our age, except for where I think they concern me. Our age, our place, our people, our history, our tragedy, our life, our death…it is hard to preserve one’s sense of what’s “ours,” is it not? and to keep it in the right balance and proportions with what is not ours but belongs to another, to everyone, to humanity — if it remains.

I am Jewish enough to care about the mass murder of the Jews, Jewish enough to be bothered by those for whom it has become a cruel joke (though I won’t lie, there are people I know, friends of sorts, for whom it is, as far as it can be, an “innocent” joke, even or especially a Jewish joke). If you are not Jewish enough for that, if it makes no difference to you, I can understand (barely); and if you resent the Jews for trying to make you care, I can understand that, too.

And yet and yet and yet…