2 See chapter notes for more details on Izbica.
3 Leon Feiner, the leader of the Jewish Socialist Alliance (known as the Bund), whom Karski had met earlier. For more on this meeting see Book two, Chapter two: ‘The Use and Abuse of Words: Jan Karski and Albert Speer’.
15 Walking into Whiteness
1 Most remarkably, even after the success of the English and German editions of If This Is a Man, the first Hebrew edition was only published in 1988 – a year after Levi’s death. On the wider question of several key works of the Holocaust only finding publication in 1960–1, see chapter notes.
2 In 2003, when we made this journey, the visitor numbers to Auschwitz were just under a million people a year. Since then, numbers have increased significantly, with 2,053,000 visitors to the museum and memorial site in 2016.
3 From Auschwitz Chronicle 1939–1945, ed. Danuta Czech.
4 ‘634 Jewish men and 443 Jewish woman, sent from Slovakia by the RHSA, receive Nos. 28903–29536 and 4761–5203’ (also from Auschwitz Chronicle 1939–1945). Müller’s number was 29236.
5 In 1961 Levi discovered that Topf & Söhne were advertising a ‘new and improved’ cremation method for civilian use. Levi was outraged. He asked his friend Alessandro Garrone, a Turin magistrate and human rights campaigner, to write an article for La Stampa on this subject. Garrone did so, but Topf did not respond (see Ian Thomson’s biography, Primo Levi). Levi also notes in the preface to The Drowned and the Saved, published in 1986, that ‘Topf … was still in operation in 1975 building crematoria for civilian use, and had not considered the advisability of changing its name.’ Topf was eventually declared bankrupt in 1996.
6 The interview took place in the office of the Polymerisation Laboratory, Bau 939. Reading this account recently, I suddenly remembered the curious painted triple numbers on the buildings in the chemical complex we walked past.
16 The Patience of a Hand and a Pencil
1 Information about the purchase of the Knochenmuhle from Germany, and an earlier attempt to get Rumkowski to supply one from the Lodz Ghetto, comes from Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, in the chapter ‘Erasure’.
2 See chapter notes for further information about the survivors of Chelmno.
Preface To the West
1 Über den Begriff der Geschichte (Theses on the Philosophy of History), VII, 1940.
1 A Hand in the Desert
1 From The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano.
2 The Use and Abuse of Words: Jan Karski and Albert Speer
1 For a detailed account of Karski’s remarkable rescue, see Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust by E. Thomas Wood and Stanislaw Jankowski, Chapter Four: ‘Sacrifice’. He only discovered towards the end of his life that thirty-two Poles, including two priests and a doctor, had been executed by the Germans in August 1940, in reprisal for this escape.
2 It is here that Karski, disguised as an Estonian guard, witnesses the events that are recounted towards the end of Book One.
3 A small, round receptacle, usually made of wood, but in this case silver, containing the Eucharist, used by priests to transport the consecrated host outside of the church, often to parishioners who are very sick or dying.
4 Prime Minister Sikorski later tells Karski, ‘You were crazy when you got here. We couldn’t let outsiders see you in that shape.’
5 For a detailed account of Karski’s meeting with Zygielbojm and his mission to inform the Allies about the Holocaust see the forthcoming volume of I You We Them – Book Four, Chapter One, ‘The Abyss Opens’.
6 The Bergen-Belsen trial happened in 1962 in Hanover, the Treblinka trial took place in Düsseldorf in 1964, the Auschwitz trial started in Frankfurt in the same year, and the Einsatzgruppen 1005 trial occurred in Hamburg in 1968.
7 Lines given to Speer by Esther Vilar in her play Speer.
8 Reith Lectures, ‘Respect for the Earth’, 2000.
9 Published in March 1947 as The Last Days of Hitler.
3 My Father and His Silence
1 A misquotation by Thatcher; the prayer actually opens with ‘Where there is hatred, let me sow love’.
4 The Silences of Societies in the Face of Atrocity: Germany, France, America, Britain
1 Presumably a reference to the Great Fire of London in 1666, nearly 400 years before Hitler was speaking, not 200 – indicative of his rather shaky grasp of history.
2 I look at this specific example of moral compartmentalisation in more detail in the subsequent section ‘How People in Organisations Can Kill’.
3 Ninety thousand died immediately at Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, with a further 50,000 dying of injuries by the end of December 1945; 40,000 died on 9 August 1945 at Nagasaki, with a further 40,000 dead by the end of the year.
4 From Drowning by Bullets, directed by Philip Brooks and Alan Hayling, first broadcast in 1992.
5 I am indebted to Carmen Callil’s exceptional work Bad Faith on the French fascist leader, Louis Darquier, commissioner for Jewish affairs under the wartime Vichy government, for this quotation and for other material in this section.
6 The Jeunesses Patriotes becoming the Parti National Populaire; Croix-de-Feu becoming the Parti Social Français.
7 In seventy-eight train transports, mainly from Drancy station in north-east Paris. Only 2,560 of the 75,721 people deported survived. It is also important to record that the Vichy government imprisoned over 30,000 Sinti and Roma in internment camps, many of whom were later deported to Dachau, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald and other concentration camps.
8 ‘To the memory of numerous Algerians killed during the bloody repression of the peaceful demonstration of 17 October 1961,.
9 It took until November 2015, seventy years after the end of the war, for the French government to announce that it would pay £39 million in compensation to Holocaust survivors, in recognition of the role the state railways (SNCF) played in transporting these 75,721 victims to German concentration and extermination camps (Guardian, 3 November 2015).
10 ‘France “Responsible” for Holocaust Deportations, Court Rules’ by Peter Allen, Daily Telegraph, 16 February 2009.
11 When Sven Lindqvist published Exterminate All the Brutes in 1992, the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples was arguably not as widely discussed or known as it is today. However, his principal argument, regarding the inability of historians to connect this genocide to the Holocaust, still stands.
5 Vernichtung
1 Vernichtung: German etymology, literally ‘bringing to nothing’ – but also used to mean extermination or annihilation.
2 Human Development Report, UN Development Programme 2005, cited in Colonial Genocide and Reparations Claims in the 21st Century by Jeremy Sarkin.