teaching the holocaust 2004 summer workshop - Southern Institute ...

HANDOUT: THE PROTEST!
21
In the Warsaw ghetto, behind a wall that is cutting them off from the world, several hundred
thousand condemned people await death. No hope of survival exists for them, and no help is
coming from anywhere. The executioners run through the streets shooting anyone who dares
leave the house. They shoot anyone who is near the window. The streets are full of unburied
corpses.
The prescribed number of victims is 8,000-10,000 daily. Jewish police must deliver the
victims to the hands of the German executioners. If they do not, they themselves perish.
Children cannot walk on their own strength and are loaded into wagons. The process of
loading is so brutal that very few survive it. Mothers, looking on, become insane. The
number of people insane from grief and horror equals the number of people shot to death.
Railroad cars wait on the ramp. The executioners pack the condemned into the wagons, 150
of them in one wagon. On the floor of the wagon lies a thick layer of lime and chloride
poured over with water. The door of the wagon gets sealed. Sometimes the wagon moves
immediately after loading, sometimes it stays on the side rails a day or two - it doesn’t matter
to anyone anymore. Of the people crammed so tightly that the dead cannot fall and keep
standing arm in arm with the living, of the people slowly dying in the fumes of the lime and
chloride, being deprived of air, water, food - no one will remain alive anyway. Whenever,
wherever the death - wagons will arrive, they will only contain corpses.
In the face of this suffering, speedy death would be liberation. The executioners foresaw this:
all pharmacies in the ghetto were closed to prevent the delivery of poison. There are no
weapons. What is left is jumping from a window onto the pavement, and thus many
condemned escape their executions in this manner. Just as in the Warsaw ghetto, since six
months ago in larger and smaller Polish towns and cities the same is happening. The total
number of Jews killed is over one million, and the number is growing daily. All perish: the
rich and poor, the old, the women, the men, the youth, the babies. The Catholics dying, with
the name of Jesus and Mary, like the Jews: all were guilty of being born as Jews, who were
sentenced to annihilation by Hitler.
The world looks upon this murder, more horrible than anything that history has ever seen,