Warsaw

by Richard Foreman

  Josefow was a village in Poland, the scene for one of the first mass executions of Polish Jews during the Second World War. The newly recruited policeman had already been disturbed by some of the events and behaviour of Germans as he helped occupy and ‘police’ Poland. He had been there when an SS commanding officer ordered a house to be burnt down containing a number of Jewish families. Those that were not burnt alive (Oscar could still hear their blood-curdling screams in his nightmares afterwards) were shot as they tried to escape the flames by jumping out of the windows, scorched, charred. The burning flesh reminded the old soldier of Verdun - but he concluded how different things had been back then also. But Oscar himself had stolen food and belongings - and turned a blind eye to his raping comrades - during the policing of Poland.

  Perhaps no one knew beforehand, bar the senior officers, of the act of genocide that was to take place on the morning of the Josefow massacre. They could all guess soon enough though. The Jewish inhabitants of the village were rounded up in the marketplace and then loaded onto trucks and taken to the forest to be "evacuated". Before the business began the soldiers in Oscar's battalion were asked if they would like to be dismissed from the shootings. A handful said yes. Most didn't however, for individual and conformist reasons. A small piece of training and advice was then given to the squad- that they should use the bayonets upon their rifles - pressing them against the cervical vertebrae at the base of the neck to act as a marker for the shot.

  Later that night the unassumingly introspective soldier asked himself the question was he brave, or a coward, to have stopped and relieved himself of his duty after his first execution? Dejection. Loathing. Oscar found it difficult to sleep. His drinking increased. A week after Josefow he still suffered nightmares. Swallowing his pride, Oscar wrote a letter to a senior official in the Party - who he had once been a gardener and friend to - and he arranged to be transferred out of the Order Police and attached to a small contingent of the regular army who were about to be posted to the newly established Warsaw ghetto.

  After vigorously polishing his boots Oscar read a little from the book Thomas had lent him - a well thumbed edition of Ernst Junger's ‘Storm Of Steel’ - until his eyelids weighed as heavy as the black mood which had threatened to undo him. Although feeling sufficiently sleepy the old Private still took a couple of the pills that he had bought from a medical orderly, to help prevent him waking up in the middle of the night.

  A few years after the war Oscar Hummel tried to understand and expatiate his experiences in Poland by recalling and writing about them. A few extracts from his memoirs, which he never published, are recorded below.

  "...As a man may see the profile of a beautiful woman in the street and for a instant be reminded of a teenage sweetheart - and an appropriate sense of fondness and wonder makes his heart skip a beat - I am still occasionally haunted by faces in the crowd which look like his. Yet no airy sense of romance or nostalgia sweeps me off my feet. No. I experience a debilitating nausea, chills. I all but have a panic attack - perhaps they even are panic attacks. I find it difficult to regulate my breathing and impossible to swallow. I feel hot and cold at the same time. I feel the urge to just sob. Time doesn't heal all wounds.

  I sometimes think that I should have stayed with my battalion in the Order Police. Perhaps if I had remained I would have similarly become desensitised to the executions and my conscience. I could have been converted! I had a Corporal during the war who argued that we were "engineered" into becoming cold-hearted killers. He spoke of how the SS wanted to depersonalise the killings - the way in which one soldier led one man off to execute him at Josefow was an over emotional and inefficient method which the SS learned from and never repeated. So too alcohol was freely available and imbibed before and during the shootings. "Good" officers also made several of us shoot at the time into a line of evacuees in order to lessen the personal responsibility of murder. A sense of competition became instilled into some officers and units. Quotas had to be fulfilled and bettered. Where, at Josefow, no one said a word against those men who refused - eventually such an act became dishonourable and cowardly... Officers perhaps did not notice the blood on their hands through the ink stains from continuously writing down their figures in the appropriate boxes. 1,500 people were murdered at Josefow. I met an old comrade from the battalion a short time after the war, who served with it throughout their clean-up operation in Poland. He said that "Josefow was nothing". Was there an element of boasting in his voice?

  But I think that my Corporal, one of the more intelligent and heroic people I encountered during the war, might have been trying to defend us too much. Or he might have even just been trying to comfort me. He would argue that it was not my fault that I had done what I had done, that I was not freely doing what I was doing. He knew too that rather than men being moulded, we were unleashed. Inhumanity and humanity are one in the same. Thomas himself related the scenes and behaviour to a Bacchic orgy: the religious fanaticism fuelled by intoxication; the wildness, bloodlust, abandonment; the mistreatment of women. Or we lie to ourselves, don't take responsibility for our actions, by saying that it was because "orders were orders" that we did what we did - which translates into the honesty of "it was better that a Jew got shot rather than me".

  ...Morbidly, masochistically, I have often wondered who my victim was - A shopkeeper? Farmer? Mayor? Did he have any children? Did he have a garden? Did he like football? After the war I gave him a name for some reason - Joseph. Joseph was my age, although privation and worry had aged his appearance. His shoes were split, his flannel trousers and shirt threadbare. His hair was dusty brown, his skin dry, almost powdery. He had a large, long head which was noteworthy for being out of proportion with the rest of his diminished body. Joseph's coffin-shaped head only made his cheeks appear more sunken, his face gaunt, his eyes bulbous.

  So Joseph was shoved into my arms by a dutiful, sadistic Sergeant Major. My first impression was that Joseph was retarded, or at the very least gormless. But he was just in shock, disorientated, terrified. For a few minutes I just stood there with him, with the rest of my battalion and its charges. Some began to pray, or sob. Joseph began to rock slightly and then tremble. He glanced around him, as if wishing to catch the eye of a friend or loved one. He began to mutter something in Polish or Yiddish. I don't know if it was a prayer. But most were silent, resigned - a few even tried to be dignified in their resignation but their fates were all the same. A few would scream or struggle, or fall down or faint - but anyone making too much of a scene was made an example of and quickly shot by an officer or zealous policeman.

  I tried my best not to make eye contact with the man I was about to murder but I couldn't help it. He had soft brown eyes. I can still see Joseph's face now, his image sometimes seems like it's stapled to my eyelids. He opened his mouth in a forced, pathetic smile. What teeth he had were yellow or black. What was going through my head at that point? I was scared, of the deed and the repercussions of not doing my duty. I kept looking around at my mates to see what they were doing, if any would take the lead. Straightaway some of them led their victims off to find a private clearing in the woods.

  At first the shots which echoed throughout the forest were few and far between. With each one however both Joseph and I flinched a little. I do not know how long we walked for, more than most I imagine. I already felt sick. Already the woodland began to smell of something unnatural. My hands shook as I tried to fix my bayonet. Joseph looked on, all the time making a face as if he were about to break into tears. The expression on my face could not have been all that dissimilar I imagine. As far as we walked we could still hear the shots ring out in the background; we also heard the occasional thud afterwards, as the murdered victims slumped to the pinecone-filled ground.

  Looking back now, I try to remember at what point I started or stopped lying to myself, for surely I must have always known that I would be put in such a position, that this was the master-plan of the regime? We were like ost
riches, putting our heads in the sand.

  It was not until after the war that the question dawned upon me - what was Joseph thinking throughout all this? I should have let him go then. I could have fired into the air, let him escape. Such were the corpses that day that littered the area - they were perhaps as numerous as any specimen of flora or tree - that one missing would have gone unnoticed. Yes he would have been executed sooner or later, but not by me. I know I was party to the murder of thousands and thousands of Jews during my posting in the Warsaw ghetto, even though I tried to stay detached from any direct duties rounding them up or processing people at the train station - but it is Joseph who I am haunted by most.

  When the tip of the bayonet touched his neck the rifle almost acted as a conduit and a similar chill which appeared to run down Joseph's spine made my frame shudder also. I had to here remove the blade from his skin. I then gripped the barrel of the gun in an attempt to forcefully cessate the trembling in my wet hands. For a minute or so I tried to pluck up the courage by scaring myself as to the trouble I'd be in if I didn't fire. I repeated the phrase inside my head as if it were an Indian mantra, "Just shoot, just shoot". In the next instance I told myself that I couldn't do it, I was a human being. I wasn't capable of such an act. He was a human being. As long as they didn't shoot me I would accept and deal with any punishment they could give out, just as long as I didn't have to go through with it. I heard my commanding officer making his way through the wood towards me. By now the shots had become so frequent that one didn't notice them so much.

  He uttered something just before I fired. It might have even been "Shalom". I closed my eyes and turned my head as I shot, but my mouth was open and some of the warm blood and brains which exploded back upon me went into it. I vomited immediately after, throwing my smoking rifle against the nearest tree...

  I have often asked myself why did we - or I - do it? There was a plurality of causes; none or all of the following can be applied.

  It was war. War is a general transgression which spawns a multitude of further individual transgressions. It re-sets the rules of environments, social interaction. Violence begets violence. Some people say that we got to Warsaw and Auschwitz quickly, but precedents and other barbarous acts had to be committed beforehand: SA beatings, Kristallnacht, Dachau, the executions in the Russian advance, the euthanasia programme. There was a gradual progression, regression. We did not change overnight, but war does change the workings and codes of a man.

  Race hatred. For some Germans the enemy wasn't the Bolshevik pointing a gun at him, or the British Tommy, but rather it was the Jew. We were a tribe fighting for our survival. The survival of the fittest. God was dead. Might was right. The Jew was different, an affront to German culture, blood. If they were beneath humanity then moral norms did not have to apply to them. Brutality was a functional necessity and even ruthlessness could be contorted into a virtue, or badge of honour, in light of the importance of our "mission".

  Yet most of us in my battalion were too old or cynical to belong to the true fanatical National Socialist generation. They tried to indoctrinate us before our task ahead in Poland by giving talks such as, "Maintaining the Purity of German Blood" and "A Goal of this War: Europe Free of Jews", but for my part the "brainwashing" propaganda only brought home to me that it was propaganda, that their ideology was warped. The same went for a number of my comrades, though not all of them.

  I cannot remember if it was a conscious or unconscious factor but the feeling of not wanting to be considered a coward or set apart from my unit also motivated my choices to some degree. I can remember returning to the barracks that day - and on subsequent days - and seeing the non-shooters ostracised by the shooters. Perhaps envy help stirred their resentment of them - that they wished too to feel the relief of being a non-shooter - but men were often bullied or taunted. I remember the scene when one of the objectors was scornfully berated by a willing executioner, "You think that you are too good to shoot? You're too weak." The desire to conform was a great motivator. I did not wish to be seen as a trouble maker.

  Can killing become a matter of routine? It seems so. It was not just in my Police battalion but also in the ghetto where I witnessed men wilfully trying to become anaesthetised to it all. Necessity was the mother of invention perhaps, for if they did not master their conscience then their conscience might have overwhelmed them.

  The reason that we did what we did during the war out of a fear of not following certain orders has its place, but the reason is not an all encompassing excuse - or panacea. Yes one was fearful of what the SS would do if you relieved yourself from certain duties or did not display the appropriate fervour towards the cause (or crusade, as a few of the thugs romantically called it). But I was never party to, nor heard from anyone else, of an instance in which someone from the battalion, or my platoon in the ghetto, was punished by a higher authority for wishing to be relieved of his duty.

  It has been argued of late that the men involved in the acts of genocide in Poland and elsewhere were systematically selected by the SS because they possessed a particular psychological profile. If it was in the soldier's make-up to have a violent nature - a deference towards authority, a lack of introspection or autonomous intelligence, a need for order and values etc - then can we not comfortably infer that there was a certain inevitability in what happened at Josefow and Warsaw? Could one not determine the outcome through the equation of their inherent natures and the environments they were inserted into? What do you expect will happen if the cages to the wild animals are left unlocked in the zoo? These arguments however do not sit comfortably with me, to the point where I find them offensive. There were no sets of psychological tests or profiling in my, or anyone else's, police battalion or army unit. It might seem easy or comfortable for these new fangled historians, psychologists and sociologists (and their readers) to argue that we are a "type" of people, or products of certain conditioning. But you would not be doing us justice if you did not condemn our actions or say that we had just been brainwashed. We are all capable of violence, blind service towards authority, ignorance and moral cowardice - that is the point. They say we did what we did because we were inhuman (the same term the Nazis sometimes coined to describe the Jews to dismiss and denigrate them) - but I say we committed such acts because we were, in Nietzsche's phrase, "human, all too human."

  ...I was at Verdun. I had known terror, horror, the reality of war. I manned the machine guns as the French ran towards us, scared, sacrificial and hateful. Hate also burnt in my eyes and I clenched my teeth as I gunned them down efficiently, mercilessly. Even before Josefow I had been a companion to death. Indeed the fields of Verdun were even more gruesome and visceral than anything that happened in the woods that day. In France the entire landscape and corpses were charred to the point that the bloodied mud and ashes, putrescent flesh, rusting helmets and machinery congealed into each other like a giant scab. Maggots and the sun bleached bones. Rats fed upon rotting rations, eating better than most of the men. But despite the bad orders, waste of life and horrors of Verdun there was a sense of honour and common decency between most of the men in the trenches. It was not genocide. We were not godless. Most of us were able to wash the blood from our hands and return to our lives after the war. We were still able to pray. But there should be no absolution for what I witnessed and participated in at Josefow and in Warsaw... But I believe that the guilt has made me a better man - not that that could, or should, prove any consolation to Joseph and his family."

  Oscar Hummel survived the war to return home to his wife. True to his behaviour after the Great War he drank too much and could not remain faithful. I do not know whether the decision was prompted by his wife's inability to have children, but in 1947 Oscar and Mary Hummel adopted two Jewish orphans. By the time Joshua and Rebecca came of age they were able to take over the family's construction company that had flourished after the War. Oscar and Mary retired to the Algarve. Mary died in February 1968, with Oscar surviving
his wife by just four months.

  11.

  A feverish energy inched itself into Jessica Rubenstein's state of mind. She was not the same young woman at the beginning of the week as she was at the close of it. She would not go gently into the night, consolidate. When possible she reduced her hours at the hospital and, when working, her thoughts were rarely directed towards her patients. They were all dead or dying she judged. Such was the potency of this new determination to survive, save her family, that Jessica even began to steal from the hospital to supplement her rations. She needed her strength and wished to look as attractive as she could again, which meant trying to put on some weight and regain her figure.

  Sometimes, in her free hours, the possessed girl could be seen, as if sleep-walking, making her way towards one of the sections of wire fencing on the edges of the ghetto. Her purpose, embracing a phantom-hope, was to catch the eye and make contact with her would-be saviour. She had not seen Thomas for what had seemed like an age. On one such occasion Jessica nearly got shot, as soldiers amused themselves by firing into the ghetto at Jews who would chance death by loitering or travelling down the street which faced out onto one of their watchtowers. Jessica barely registered the bright bullet as it hissed past her head however, focused as she was on trying to discern whether a well built soldier smoking a cigarette, leaning against a truck, was Thomas or not. It wasn't. Thomas didn't even smoke.

  Not only did Jessica stress herself out - and idly day-dream - whilst actively searching for her Corporal but so too her heart would momentarily leap - and then sink - when there was an unexpected knock upon the door. She would rush to answer it - filled with irrational promise - and then descend into abruptness when dealing with the parasitic neighbour. She would be irritable with them, or anybody else, just because they were not the gallant soldier.