CHOLM: HEAPS OF SKULLS
541
morality, then is it so difficult to do away with the prohibition of
murder, dissolving all human bonds?
Frightful Westphal! You who in a drunken rage ran amuck
through the camp, driving your bayonet into the bodies of the heed–
less prisoners who stood in your path! What have you done? Has not
the horror crawled over your shoulder since that hour? Have you ever
thought of the gruesome spirits that you thus brought forth to plague
you and your people? But even more frightful is it that at night you
displayed on your bed the valuables you took from the prisoners at the
pomt of your bayonet. Most frightful of
all
is the fact that none cursed
you, and after such a deed, though it became known to the command,
you continued to "take care" of the prisoners.
Night over Cholm.
Something must happen. Will the Russian campaign never end?
In Germany and in other places they are becoming impatient. Things
are not moving as quickly as they had expected. The military machine
works slowly. Somewhere, maybe, the gears no longer mesh, some–
where sand has been thrown into the mechanism. Somewhere a little
ghost is watching who will have things his own way. Slow death
is
being prepared; and terror
is
its precursor. It is lovely to die. But
if one first stirs up the evil of the whole world, then surely those who
have prepared the universal ruin must perish too. The various nation–
alities in the camp are being aroused against one another, and the
gentiles are encouraged to fall upon the Jews. Death, preparing to
exterminate entire nations, strikes in various ways; men must not
only be hanged, they must also be put to the sword. To the barbed
wire with this man! There he stands from morning till night, neck,
chest, legs tightly bound to the stake, the chin, the face stretched up–
ward, so that the cord will not choke him. All day long rain drips into
his mouth, even though for the most part it is shut as tight as a trap.
What has this eighteen-year-old youth done that they crucify
him
like the One long ago who, seeking to change the world through
his teachings, suffered the will of God? Is he a fighter for Christ? Is
he a thief? Or is he neither one thing nor the other, neither believer
nor skeptic, but simply a successor of those Christians who were
persecuted for their faith?
And what crime have those three Jewish prisoners committed
that they were shot by a Gestapo agent during a routine inspection?
That gentleman was displeased by their conspicuously eastern features,
which in some book or other that he had read had been described
as repulsive and characteristic of an infamous race. The literature
