Читать книгу Hoodwinked - the spy who didn't die - Lowell Ph.D. Green - Страница 9

IN MINSK, Satan’s name was Wilhelm Kube, Generalkommissar Kube—General Commissar for Belarus with his headquarters in Minsk. A rabid and vile Nazi from the earliest days of the Party and incongruously, superintendent of the Lutheran Church in Brandenburg and head of the Berlin synod of the Lutheran Church. A man of God, indeed!*

*FACT: This information is accurate. Source: Ernst Klee, Das Personen-lexikon zum Dritten Reich (Fischer Verlag 2005).

When not busy saving souls in Berlin and Brandenburg, Herr Kube was busy destroying lives by the thousands in the Minsk Ghetto, a job he appeared to relish. On July 31,1942, the good General boasted in writing to the Nazi High Command that he had personally overseen the killing of 55,000 Jews in Belarus in the preceding 10 weeks, including several thousand German Jews. He expressed hope that all the Jews of Belarus would be completely liquidated as soon as the German Wehrmacht no longer needed their labour.*

*FACT: Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

His worst atrocity occurred on March 2, 1942, when 5,000 Jews were murdered to mark the Jewish festival of Purim. While it is almost too horrible for me to relate even today, I must tell you the following terrible atrocity since it played a significant role in determining my fate.

[Here there is a long pause on the tape. At first I thought there was a technical problem, but he picked up his narrative again with a trembling voice.]

How could I ever forget the evening of the Purim slaughter? I had seen a large group of slaves forced to dig a deep pit at the Ratomskaya Street ravine in the center of the ghetto, which I presumed was to accommodate the bodies of some of those who had been shot that afternoon. I didn’t see what followed, but relate here only what was told to me by dozens of those forced to watch.

The SS had apparently decided the small school that was being used as an orphanage needed to be cleaned out in order to make way for a new batch of children on their way from Poland. So all of the Minsk Ghetto children, some as young as two and still in diapers, were herded by men with submachine guns out of the orphanage, down the street, and thrown into the pit.

As those poor little children screamed in terror, some crying for their dead mothers, that great man of God, Generalkommissar Wilhelm Kube, dressed, as usual, in an immaculate uniform, arrived on the scene with a group of laughing SS officers. Kube reached into his pocket, pulled out a handful of candies, and tossed them to the terrified children below. Then waving cheerily at them, he ordered the pit to be filled and the children buried alive.*

*FACT: This atrocity is confirmed by Ernst Klee in Das Personen-lexikon zum Dritten Reich (Fischer Verlag 2005), page 346, as well as by M. Gilbert in The Holocaust, page 297, Fontana/Collins, 1987, and Reidlinger 1960 as quoted in Turonek 1989, page 118.

I could hear their screams several blocks away as I sorted through a room full of looted Jewish property in what was once one of the most beautiful opera houses in Europe.

You can hear the sadness in my voice as I tell you this. It still provides nightmares. When you are faced with daily horror and unspeakable conditions such as existed in the Minsk Ghetto, you either develop an ability to block everything out or you die. You shut down a part of your brain. The more you endure, the more layers of a cocoon of denial you wrap around your soul. A dozen women machine-gunned on the street—the shock, the revulsion, and the rage get buried deeper and deeper. A body still twitching from the hangman’s noose—thank God it’s not me! Move on!

Nothing matters but your own survival. But children? How do you ever get used to the sight, or as with me, the sounds of terrified, helpless children being buried alive? There is no blanket of denial thick or heavy enough to repress those memories for long. Believe me, I know. Oh, how I know.

Many concentration camp survivors say they still feel vestiges of guilt. Why did they live when millions around them died? I have no such feeling. I have many painful memories that still haunt me, but no guilt. My guilt was cleansed by Satan’s blood!

Until the night of the Purim slaughter I now realize that I was in a state of shock. A zombie, I think, is how some would describe it. It’s a wonder I could function at all when you consider what happened.