AMOS OZ
555
heat. It's hard to tell."
In Vilnius (Vilna), in the Ponari woods, they didn't burn the bodies at
first, but buried them in mass graves. And that was no good. On this point,
too, one of the Nazis interviewed agrees: The graves were shallow, so the
soil expanded and cracked from the gases emitted by the swelling corpses,
creating a terrible stench. "Schrecklich, sehr Schrecklich." "It was awful," and
there was a danger ofepidemics. Another way had to be found.
"They buried them," says Yitzhak Dugin, fonnerly of ViIna, "like sar–
dines in a can. They put all the Jews of Vilna and its vicinity into the soil at
Ponari. Ninety thousand altogether. But on January 1, 1944, we got an or–
der from the Gestapo commander ofVilna to open up all the ditches; to take
the bodies out and burn them so that no trace would remain. They gave us a
plan: to start from the beginning-to start by opening the oldest ditches. When
we got to the last ditch, the bodies were still fresh and in very good condition,
because of the cold. When the last mass grave was opened, I dug up my
whole family. My mother and my sisters. Three sisters and their children.
They had been in the earth only four months, and they hadn't rotted because
of the cold. I recognized them by their faces and by their clothes. Twenty–
four thousand people were buried in that ditch. The deeper you dug, the
more you saw bodies pressed together flat like boards. You'd take a body
and it would crumble completely right away. At first they wouldn't let us use
tools. They told us: Get used to doing it all with your hands.
If
we cried,
they'd beat us mercilessly with sticks. They also didn't let us use the words
'bodies' or 'victims.' They forced us to use the words 'Figuren' or 'Dreck' or
'Shmattes.' If you said 'victims,' you got a beating. We had to burn these
Figuren
so that no trace was left of them."
In the woods around the Sobibor death camp, too, they tried to cover
their tracks, to obliterate every trace. A Polish witness says that in Tre–
blinka, after the camp was closed in 1943, the Germans went to the trouble
of planting pine trees, "five-year-old saplings they were," so that by 1944
you could no longer see any sign ofwhat happened there.
Lanzmann hasn't found anyone to ask about the reason for this Ger–
man discretion: Was it fear of punishment in case Germany lost the war? If
so, then punishment by whom? Was it shame, perhaps? But
if
so, then shame
before whom?
At the time of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the West German
newspaper
Nuremberger Nachrichten
published, on April 26, 1961, the fol–
lowing statement: "In light of the preconceived notions that, partly due to
insufficient information, partly due to lack ofunderstanding, and partly due to
simple malice, have accumulated in the minds of certain people, especially
abroad, concerning National Socialism and especially its racial policy, we have
