548
PARTISAN REVIEW
v
I stand upon the hill of Cholm and look westward. Is it not
from there that all the evil came? Yet our eyes must always be turn–
ing back. I never look eastward. The trains rolling that way do not
concem me; but there, in the direction of Warsaw and Cracow the
horizon seems lighter, more promising and inviting. What sort of
mirage is it that misleads us, since we are here solely as the executors
of the west?
I stand upon the hill of Cholm. The agony
is
still not at an end.
The barbed wire penetrates our hearts a hundred times; we strike
our foreheads and ask: Is it possible? Why all that? It is springtime.
The cold hateful winter has gone its way. The crosses of the German
cemetery at Cholm glitter in the sun. Never have I seen a cemetery
so well tended and so bleak as this, which shelters those who fell in
the First World War. Trains on their way back to Germany come
from Kowel bringing soldiers from Kiev, Smolensk, and the Don
Basin. Freight trains are filled with women and girls, in white ker–
chiefs, who with old men and boys are being taken to Germany for
forced labor. The plunder of Russia has reached a climax, but the
hope for victory has been in vain. What, after all, has this winter
brought? The lost battle of Moscow which in hunger and cold beat
the plunderers over the head. The death of many a hundred thou–
sand brave soldiers and the hordes of prisoners who will die behind
barbed wire. It has brought death to good comrades who fell victim
to spotted fever, among them Zahn, that fine Berliner, who held
him–
self upright on the barbed wire and in the hour of decision revealed
his transcendent humanity.
It brought suffering to numberless mothers and sons and daugh–
ters who now mourn in every land their fathers, brothers, and chil–
dren. Nature had gotten hold of something enormous, immeasurable,
which it drove through all the European lands, across the Russian
steppes to the untamed rivers of the east, the Caucasus and the Urals.
In these huts of Cholm life and death gazed into each other's eyes,
and it was hunger, naked pitiful hunger that drove men to the worst.
A few ate human flesh. They sat like mourners around the dying man,
waiting tranquilly to cut him to pieces. After his last breath was drawn
or even before, the knives gleamed, pieces were cut out of the corpse
and cooked on tiny horne-made grates. Tastes good, friend, tastes good.
They were shot. Cannibalism disgusted the authorities. It could
not go on; it would mean the end of culture and, besides, it might bring
