538
PARTISAN REVIEW
health of many tens of thousands of sons and fathers, men of all ages
from children to old men.
Cholrn, heaps of skulls.
While the forward march of the German battalions was tram–
pling the Russian soil, while
gren~des
where bursting inside the de–
fense works of the Russian front, while the eyes of unpracticed forr.st
fighters were searching the underbrush for snipers, while shots were
ringing out and lives were being lost on every side, Cholrn was to
become the camp holding 120,000 Russian soldiers-Ukrainians,
White Russians, Greater Russians, Bessarabians, Rumanians, Gali–
cian Jews, Don Cossacks, Mongols, and Poles from Russian-occupied
territory.
We enter the camp, classified as company leaders. We have no
arms. At the barbed wire and at the guard houses stand comrades of
one unit or another; we are to attend to prisoners who are considered
to be the scum of the earth.
It is rainy September, the clouds hang low and here and there
a plume of smoke rises above the camp from a forbidden fire, which
freezing prisoners have made from stolen wood. Right by the German
mess-kitchen stands the punishment block. Exactly twenty-five strokes
a minute and almost continuously as long as daylight lasts. Shrieks
of pain come from prisoners who often do not know for what crime
they are laid on these three wooden planks and beaten with a heavy
stick by a German n.c.o. or a Russian assistant selected especially for
this purpose. The "crimes" are forbidden traffic between the indivi–
dual prison blocks; barter of cigarette papers for tobacco, shoes for a
coat, a piece of bread for tent space. The outcry of the tormented
mingles with the howls and laughter of those who stand above them.
A regular technique of beating develops; if the blows don't fall hard
enough the one who administers the beating is replaced or the beating
is repeated. Each of our soldiers carries a stick, provided by the pris–
oners themselves. Weapons are not used because the prisoners are
docile. Their one hope is humane treatment.
Many of us do not use the sticks, but almost all are proud to have
them. Nauseating.
As we come into the camp they are still busy building the
earthen huts. These earthen huts, it was said, had the advantage of
being warmer than barracks in winter and of not using up so much
wood. The prisoners themselves had to bring up the wood. When they
came to the camp they were as yet not badly undernourished. But
prisoners who had been captured some six or eight weeks after the
