542
PARTISAN REVIEW
of the Third Reich aroused the murderous instincts of mankind,
making room once more for that devil who had been banished, we
imagined, from European lands and who is now doing his handiwork
in the name of a higher race of man. And what reason was there to stir
up the Ukrainians in the Jewish block, putting to use the anti-Semitic
instincts of those people so as to make them lay hands on their fellow
prisoners, whom they robbed and beat almost to death? For you,
decent Ukrainians, shortsighted as you sometimes were, failed to buy
off your lives by means of this Gestapo-incited attack. When things
came to such a pass that they would have liked to ship you home to
Kowel, to Lemberg, to Chernowitz and Mogilev, you were so famished
that you broke down on the march, dying by the hundreds in roadside
ditches. When the Polish civilians wanted to give food and cigarettes
to the starving prisoners being marched through the town in a labor
detachment, they were beaten by the Gestapo, and if .any Jewish intel–
lectqal was caught doing it he was arrested and shot. And how
vividly I remember an Austrian officer who ran a rowdy guard
through the .arm because he was driving the defenseless prisoners
back into the ranks with his bayonet after they fell on a farm
wagon loaded with turnips.
If
that time seems not wholly lost it
is because of the image that remains in my mind of a few soldiers
who dared to act in the name of a moral principle. Two strokes,
three, ten, a hundred-yet one man, somewhere among those soldiers,
dared to remember his humanity. That too one must not forget.
Night over Cholm. The sun rises blood red in the east. The day
is wet and cold. What will it bring?
We march out of the gate. Large puddles dot the road. The
staff-sergeant orders us to sing. Now the song rises thinly through the
morning air. But it seems to us that instead of marching forward we
are marching backward or round in circles, as if we, who .are ap–
parently "free" men, were prisoners too. The road leads by wretched
huts, here and there in the misty morning a light shines, some shadow
whisks across the road, disappearing into the ditch or into the wet
mist. A thief? A phantom? A fugitive? Perhaps one who has been
lucky in breaking out of the camp? We don't know. Do we really want
to know? The road goes on, our feet shuffling on the soaking track,
ever deeper slime; it is hard to keep in step and our mood grows
blacker and blacker.
The camp is one long gutter made up of water-holes and duck–
board trodden to pieces. Our eyes light on little pools of blood, easy
to distinguish by their reddish brown, jellied mass. Throngs of
