CHOLM: HEAPS OF SKULLS
537
converted into barracks, and try, in the town crammed with churches
of the most diverse beliefs, to find a little change from the dreary
barrackyard drill and duties. What is there to see in a town so much
more eastern than western? The smaller houses built partly of wood,
where people are living in the cellars, where at night a single light
burns and where a child sits alone at a table or crouches at the foot
of a bed where her mother, seriously
ill,
lies prostrated. Here is being
played out the fate of a people which Hitler defeated and battered
in a campaign of scarcely more than twenty days, and which now
in its poorest quarters is gnawing the cloth of hunger and preparing
for death-death that is familiar not only in concentration camps
and bombed cities. The churches are packed. Once again a few
priests may preach, once more on holy days the Polish Catholic puts
on his festival attire for Sunday church, and bears witness in con–
spicuous numbers to the old doctrines of the west and his Christian
faith. But in the Jewish quarters there rises a movement at midday
as though all the nations of the earth were in labor. Even the sight–
seeing soldiers ought to realize that in this eastern world want and
necessity exist side by side with the riches of bazaars, busy industries
and alluring vistas.
The first prisoners of war are coming in. By strange, little-known
paths they arrive in the prisoner-of-war camps, which have been put
up outside the town. The encircling fence is of barbed wire. The
accommodations are gray earthen huts, rising one or two meters
above the ground, in which tens of thousands of men arc in the
future to live out their wretched lives. Here and there is a large tent.
In any other place or time one would have thought this a circus,
where gay and artful acts would be performed. But here several
thousand men are living tightly packed together, sweating out their
bodies' warmth and spreading the vermin collected in their clothes.
At the corners of the giant barbed wire fences of the rectangu–
lar camp stand high wooden towers, where a stolid German soldier
operates a searchlight, at night letting its beam play over the camp;
or where another has his hand on the trigger of a machine gun,
ready to loose a merciless red streak if a shadow moves within the
defenses, hastening toward the barbed wire in an insane longing for
freedom. I have sometimes wondered which is the worse fate, to be
a prisoner or to guard prisoners. Slime and filth, rain and sun, soften
the ground of the camp. The winter, inhumanly cold, breaks into
this place of outcasts, and, together with the bad food, undermines the
