558
PARTISAN REVIEW
Jewish women outright, the SS Fuehrer became hysterical. One result of this
experience was an order from Himmler that henceforth the women and
children should not be shot but dispatched in the gas vans." (Both quotes are
from William Shirer,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.)
Next, the camera zeroes in on a mountain of suitcases at the museum
in Auschwitz. Each suitcase bears the name of its owner, his address, and in
some instances the date of his birth. The first suitcase we see belonged to
one Mary Kafka. The last one was that of Herman Pasternak.
The Poles: a slim locomotive driver who, fortified by special vodka
rations from the Germans, once drove the deportation trains ofJews to the
Treblinka death camp, now once again drives a train to the Treblinka station.
Upon reaching the station sign he stops, twists his body partway out ofthe
driver's cab, and turns to the Jews who are no longer there. His face
resembles that of an old fox; he moves his hand across his throat in a slow
gesture of slaughter. All the survivors remember that, at each stop, Polish
villagers made the same gesture across their throats at the sight of the
packed trains. "We only wanted to warn them," the Polish witnesses explain.
But the gesture expresses malice and sadism.
"We went on working as usual in the fields nearby," Czeslaw Borowy,
a fat, merry peasant, recalls, and the neighboring farmers confirm his story:
"Sometimes we'd hear terrible screams."
"Wasn't it hard for you to work, hearing these terrible screams?"
Claude Lanzmann asks.
"You get used to it. You can get used to anything."
There were sixty to eighty cars in each transport, Borowy adds. The
fat rich Jews from abroad arrived in fancy sleepers. Our Jews, the Polish
ones, he says, came hungry and thirsty. They waited inside the cars. They
cried and begged for water. Some of them were naked. "Sometimes we gave
them a little water to drink. Us. The Poles.
It
was very dangerous. You could
have got killed for doing it."
"Was it cold?"
"It
was very cold. Fifteen, twenty degrees below zero."
The train driver with the foxlike features stands pensively in the Tre–
blinka station.
"Why are you sad?" asks Lanzmann.
"Because they killed a lot of people. Now I don't understand anymore
how one human being could do
this
to another human being."
Lanzmann interviews Abraham Bomba, a barber now living in Holon,
on a boat near the seashore, with the luxury hotels ofTel Aviv in the back–
ground against a dazzling blue sky. "The Jews always dreamed," he says.
"They always had this dream that one day the Messiah would come and
