The Hellish Puppet Dance
HARVEST OF HATE. By Leon Poliakov. (Elek, 21s.) , of \le\ THIS is a scholarly and fully documented study of the crld'e0 as t genocide as committed in Europe a decade and a half age.4c6 facts are clearly, almost coldly, presented, those disgusting which many of us can still only bear to contemplate when are reflected in the bronze shield of the hatred we feel for perpetrators. The long trains filled to suffocation with staith innocent people crawl across Europe to Chelmno, Ausel4 Treblinka;' in Warsaw the crowds enjoy their 1943. Easter:to while a few yards away the last survivors of the gigantic Pc1 are roasted alive in their sewers; to win a few more weci‘0601, half-life and torture, condemned Jews tear gold-filled teeth, the mouths of their dying fellows; the chief murderers 1051501 bureaucracy, exchanging memos, making money, disci, efficiency, and the mass of the German people is unintelvoll apathetic; the Pope is silent; the British make radio proPagi, of it, and turn away the few boatloads of refugees who 11 managed, incredibly, to reach and see the coast of Pale,14° families, stripped naked and whipped into the gas-chamber'', holding hands; in Warsaw a man writes: 'The punishnle11,,,t/re not only strike the Nazi cannibals but all who did nothl save a condemned people. . . .' Children born when those .V were The fa ct bein s a g wtn are not and yet thirteen add very little years oldto what we . a t,
rirete not new
know. In particular. Mr. Gerald Reitlinger's The Final Sol.11 contains as much if not more information about this ins v4
tikind. Indeed, he went to the same sources, at the same time, M. Poliakov, and had read this book in French before his n was finished. M. Poliakov, however, writes more about active and patsive Jewish resistance and about such related tters as the extermination of the gypsies. If he gives less space ° the details of the crime, he gives more to an attempt, an
4raordinarily objective attempt, to understand how it could
Ole about.
t le does not simply shuffle off the blame on some fundamental Nulty inherent in the German people, though he certainly does
a accept their shameful pretence of ignorance. Rather does he tray the whole vast massacre as a sort of hellish puppet-dance, Which obedience by killers and killed alike was the string which
handful of Satanic maniacs pulled. He raises more questions is an he answers, and he implies more questions than can be raised at a book of this length. But perhaps the most terrifying question in this : Why did almost nobody care enough to sacrifice personal national interests that were totally incommensurate with the wi tines at stake? There were a few brave men and women in the apied countries and in Germany who did care, and do. There to ere and are a few here who are still worried by such incidents ir;the refusal of the Western Allies to ransom Jews marked for d c. 4c4th in 1944. But not many. Is it nausea, is it, as M. Poliakov g.gests, simply anti-Semitism, or is it something even more ht'411ster that has been happening to our souls?
CONSTANTINE FITZGIBBON
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