*Sho'ah

The best way we can honor Simon Wiesenthal is to remember.

You can take a virtual tour of Auschwitz.

Or buy Terrence Des Pres's The Survivor and familiarize yourself with the term "excremental assault". (An excerpt in the extended.)

Do either of these and I don't think you'll forget the images.

Everybody in the block had typhus...it came to Belsen Bergen in its most violent, most painful, deadliest form. The diarrhea caused by it became uncontrollable. It flooded the bottom of the cages, dripping through the cracks into the faces of the women lying in the cages below, and mixed with blood, pus and urine, formed a slimy, fetid mud on the floor of the barracks.

There was one latrine for thirty to thirty two thousand women and we were permitted to use it only at certain hours of the day. We stood in line to get into this tiny building knee-deep in human excrement. As we all suffered from dysentery, we could rarely wait until our turn came, and soiled our ragged clothes, which never came off our bodies, thus adding to the horror of our existence by the terrible smell which surrounded us like a cloud.

Excremental assault was employed by the Nazis on purpose to dehumanize the Jews. It's easier to kill a disgusting, unsanitary animal than a fellow human being.

Posted by Jennifer at September 20, 2005 10:34 AM | TrackBack

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