EDITH KURZWEIL
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ver pitch. Indeed, by postulating that the Nazis systematically were de–
humanizing their victims, he sharply separates their followers from today's
Germans. But Goldhagen fails to address the fact that the elimination of
the Jews (and the resettlement of Poles) was part of Hitler's larger aims -
providing Germans the
Lebensraum
he had promised them; and that anti–
Semitism also was rampant in most of Europe. Organized hatred, he ar–
gues, managed to turn feeling men (and some women) into monsters who
killed at work and yet went on functioning as exemplary members within
their families.
Ruth Glasberg Gold's memoir confirms Goldhagen's hypotheses. Af–
ter the Soviets occupied her native province of Bukovina in 1940, and
the Germans invaded in June 1941 - on her eleventh birthday - the
"Romanian vanguards enter[ed] our ciry, attack[ed), plunder[ed), and
murder[ed] thousands of Jews . .. [and] the Einsatztruppen executed
every Jew they encountered." Her many relatives in Czernowitz, and in
the rest of the country, died - either slaughtered by soldiers or by fellow
villagers with whom they once had lived in harmony. Until November
1941, the Romanian
baksheesh
offered a precarious means of survival for
some. Then, unexpectedly, all the Jews were herded into tightly packed
cattle cars. Four days later, when they were ordered to descend and
squeeze into the camp of Marculeshti, some of the elderly and the babies
already had died; they stumbled over ditches full of bodies; and they
found out that from there "Jews were being sent to various 'points of
transfer' to Transnistria." Pain and degradation, hunger and thirst, cold
and fear were as unbearable as were the Germans' arbitrary shootings, oc–
casional drownings, and beatings, and the forced marches. Corpses "were
everywhere: in barns, in the cellars, and inside the houses. Inevitably the
dead became part of our environment." Ruth was forced to trek to one
after another of the infamous Transnistrian camps - between 1941 and
1944. There were over one hundred, most of them set up in former Jew–
ish ghettos. Her family eventually ended up in a tiny three-room house,
twenty people to a room: they considered themselves lucky, because their
room - without doors or windows and a leaky roof - had a tiny make–
shift stove that allowed them to melt snow into drinking water. "There
was no escape from death....
It
was everywhere, permeating every pore.
We inhaled, smelled, and watched it all the time." Her father died first;
then her brother; then her mother. Ruth recalls the horrendous details as
she observed them - how she could not relinquish her mother's dead
body, the piled-up corpses waiting for the arrival of the gravediggers, and
how lapsing into daydreams and hallucinations about her earlier child–
hood kept her alive. She describes being cared for by one "foster family"
