CHOLM: HEAPS OF SKULLS
539
beginning of the Russian campaign had exhausted all their reserves
of strength on the long road to prison. Now they set off, thousands
of them in charge of company leaders, to the railroad station, and
carried the heavy logs to camp on their weak shoulders. Many of
them collapsed. Go slow, slow! But unfeeling guards drove the columns
on and forced them, almost without a break, on up the ascending
road at a pace which would have been strenuous even for healthy
men. Oh! for our eyes, which never flowed with tears of shame,
when a brutal guard, leveling
his
fixed bayonet, stuck a tottering
wretched prisoner in the seat, and from there on blood made a
pattern on the road. Man is the worst enemy of man! There were a
few of us who could not bear the sight of such things, whose voices
were hoarse with shouting to the others not to be so cruel, to move
at a slower pace; and there were a few who turned away because they
could not endure the sight of what they had done. And in the camp
there again sounded the monotonous echo of blows. Thus the prisoners
were to be educated to accept the discipline of the camp.
There were 54,000 men in Camp B when it was laid out, and
still fresh loads of prisoners keep arriving. They stand in the reception
block with expectant eyes, thinking that for them the worst is over.
Many of them were indeed glad to have been captured. Their as–
sumption was that they could now look forward to agreeable labor
on a German farm. Remembering their fathers' stories of the last war,
they often asked: When do we get to the German farms? From
that alone one can judge how the moral structure of man has changed
in scarcely three decades, and how barbarous the conduct of war has
become. For
all
these men, who believed that they were here as pris–
oners of war, had been condemned to death. For a long time we
could not grasp that fact, though it was openly said to me (and others)
by the officer in charge. One afternoon, at the shooting range at
Kempno, I was sent for by the lieutenant. This Berliner was no
Nazi; he explained to me, referring to our previous training in grenade
throwing and machine-gun shooting, that it was believed in the higher
echelons that it would be necessary to shoot the prisoners because
hunger would drive them to revolt. We were to let them starve, to
let them die. The abysses of the soul are varied, and sometimes it
is not the soul alone but the apparatus, the mechanisms of human
life which are the instruments of the devil. The Ukrainians moaned:
When do we go home? When taken prisoner they were promised that
they would be allowed to go home; and now they lay, so like the
Germans with their blond hair and lanky build, in the huts, complain-
