We are trying to determine what the shifts in general German policy are and how these massacres will apply to us in Warsaw and the General Government Area. Have the Germans established the number of people they will need to run their slave-labor factories? Obviously the action groups were formed in advance of the invasion of Russia.
Ervin Rosenblum develops the theory of the German “apologetics.” They go to extraordinary lengths to prove their “innocence” and establish their “justifications.” This, of course, means they know they are doing something evil and feel they must cover their tracks.
The German language has been bastardized by the Nazis with their “joy through labor” ... “Aryan-master race” ... “land to live” ... “German destiny” ... “the true ones” ... “folk people” ... “führer” ... “inhuman treatment of ethnics,” etc., etc.
The whole text on behavior toward Jews also has been compounded in this new “language.” The basic “theory” is that the Jews have always been the enemies of the German people and are therefore trying to destroy them, so the Germans must destroy the Jews purely out of “self-defense.” They point up to the economic competition with classic portraits of the cunning Jew who has “always hated the German” and robs the German of his right to make a living.
Here are examples of their new double-meaning language:
Reservation—ghetto.
Legitimate war booty—wealth stolen or confiscated from Jews.
Contaminated—to be confiscated.
Sanitation measures—an excuse for mass executions.
Unpleasantness—the carrying out of mass murder.
Shot while trying to escape—a common phrase for someone killed in prison.
Resettlement—deportation with confiscation of all property.
Voluntary labor—slave labor.
Sub-humans—Jews, Slavs, gypsies, political and criminal prisoners, clergy, homosexuals (other than German), and others unfit to breathe Aryan air.
Mongrelization—the excuse to “get rid of sub-humans” who will contaminate the pure German blood lines.
Bolshevik-profiteer-warmonger—almost always used before or behind the word “Jew” to pound in the identification.
Now then, theorizes Silberberg, the playwright, the Germans go to fantastic trouble to make themselves truly believe what they are saying. The verbal acrobatics are played out. Basis: In order to live in the ghetto, one must break the law. Therefore, everyone who is alive is a criminal in the German lexicon and can legally be executed. Incredible?
Here are some of their “proofs”:
They will go to great trouble to hold a kangaroo court trial, documented fully, to punish a common thief or vagrant. They will make an exhaustive investigation over a single typhus death to “prove” their interest in human lives. They will show “shock” at the brutality of the Jewish Militia, which must be brutal to enforce their rule.
They allowed a few schools to reopen to “prove” German love of freedom of education. Because we are unable to support many schools, have no textbooks, fuel, facilities, and the children are too sick and weak to attend, this “proves” the subhuman Jews will not educate their children.
Ghettos have been made to “isolate” the warmongers and filthy Jews from the Poles. And to protect the Jews from the vengeance of the Poles once the Poles understood what the Jews had brought upon them.
More “proof of the German case: Special SS film units have entered the ghetto. They film the delousing sheds. Have you, ever seen a man fifty pounds underweight, freezing cold, and hairless? German narration shows this is a “sub-human” disease carrier, and the appearance portrays just that.
Bearded rabbis are forced to pose in the warehouses at Transferstelle beside tons of food while the narration “proves” how the Gestapo located secret caches which these old bearded Jews hoarded while their neighbors starved.
The Jewish Militia is always willing to oblige with a show of brutality which, when captured on film, finds the obvious commentary of Jew destroying Jew.
Their prize exhibits are the smugglers’ orgies. The smugglers are mostly men of low mentality, lower morality. At their clubs they gladly pose gorging food, drinking, brawling, in orgies with prostitutes. The Germans then plant garbage cans filled with scraps outside the clubs and photograph beggar children clawing around in them.
Most sinister move in the German master plan is the creation of the illusion that the Jews are doing all this to one another. The dregs of society in the Jewish Militia, the emasculated Jewish Civil Authority, the smugglers. This is “final vindication” for the Germans—of themselves.
What is next on the Nazi blueprint? Who knows? Nothing out of Berlin comes in the form of written orders (further indication of their knowledge of their evil). SS General Alfred Funk carries it all in verbally. Two phrases in the German lexicon appear more and more. We do not know what they mean and they terrify us.
En route to unknown destination.
Final solution of the Jewish problem.
ALEXANDER BRANDEL
Only a man of Rabbi Solomon’s stature would dare risk walking the ghetto streets alone at midnight. He turned the corner into Mila Street in a half trot, then slowed to a walk when his ancient legs rebelled, then took up the trot again.
At Mila 19 he grunted up the steps and pounded on the door. The girl on night watch opened it, alarmed. “Rabbi, what are you doing out this hour of night?”
“Where is Alexander Brandel?” he gasped, fighting to regain his wind.
“Come in.”
Through Alex’s office, down the corridor to the basement landing. The girl scratched a match and lit a candle and took the old man’s hand. They went down a step at a time. The stairs creaked beneath their weight. He squinted to adjust his eyes to the sudden blackness. The basement was musty and dark. An aisle cut through two rows of packing cases all marked with supplies for the Orphans and Self-Help Society. She led him down the row and stopped before a particular crate some four feet in height. She knocked on the case with six short raps, then pulled open a false door, lowered her head, and entered the secret room where Alexander and Ervin Rosenblum looked up from the voluminous notes being prepared for entry in the journal.
“Rabbi! What on earth ...”
“The news! I have just heard the news on the radio. America is in the war!”
Part Three
NIGHT
Chapter One
Journal Entry
SINCE PEARL HARBOR, EVENTS have occurred with stunning rapidity. Our first natural impulse of gladness has faded to bitter reality. America is being badly beaten in the Pacific. Suddenly we are cut off from our main source of income, American Aid. Our cash reserve can only hold us for days. We are frantically trying to find new avenues of revenue.