Arthur Koestler, ‘On disbelieving atrocities’, January 1944
Tarnopol, 7 April 1943
My beloved!
Before I leave this world, I want to leave behind a few lines to you, my loved ones. When this letter will reach you one day, I myself will no longer be there, nor will any of us. Our end is drawing near. One feels it, one knows it. Just like the innocent, defenseless Jews already executed, we are all condemned to death. In the very near future it will be our turn, as the small remainder left over from the mass murders. There is no way for us to escape this horrible, ghastly death.
At the very beginning (in June 1941) some 5000 men were killed, among them my husband. After six weeks, following a five-day search between the corpses, I found his body…. Since that day life has ceased for me. Not even in my girlish dreams could I once have wished for a better and more faithful companion. I was only granted two years and two months of happiness. And now? Tired from so much searching among the bodies, one was ‘glad’ to have found his as well; are there words in which to express these torments? (…)
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Tarnopol, 26 April 1943
I am still alive and I want to describe to you what happened from the 7th to this day. Now then, it is told that everyone’s turn comes up next. Galicia should be totally rid of Jews. Above all, the ghetto is to be eliminated by May 1. During the final days thousands have again been shot. Meeting-point was in our camp. Here the human victims were selected. In Petrikow it looks like this: before the grave one is stripped naked, then forced to kneel down and wait for the shot. The victims stand in line and await their turn. Moreover, they have to sort the first, the executed, in the graves so that the space is used well and order prevails. The entire procedure does not take long. In half an hour the clothes of the executed return to the camp. After the actions the Jewish council received a bill for 30,000 Zloty to pay for used bullets….
Why can we not cry, why can we not defend ourselves? How can one see so much innocent blood flowing and say nothing, do nothing and await the same death oneself? We are compelled to go under so miserably, so pitilessly…. Do you think we want to end this way, die this way? No! No! Despite all these experiences. The urge for self-preservation has now often become greater, the will to live stronger, the closer death is. It is beyond comprehension. (…)1
The farewell letters quoted here never reached their destination. More precisely, they were not even sent off to start with. We have no idea who wrote them, nor for whom they were intended. They were discovered only by chance among a pile of clothes belonging to the victims of an SS-extermination operation against the final inhabitants of the Tarnopol ghetto in the Ukraine, in May 1943. From their contents we can make out little more than that the female writer belonged to the small remainder of Galician Jews, who, only shortly before, had formed a population of some five-hundred thousand. Less than twenty-four months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union this population had vanished. It had been gassed in the extermination camps, shot inside and around the Galician towns and villages, or starved and worked to a miserable death in the numerous ghettos and forced labor camps spread across the area.
The Tarnopol letters form one of the ‘little lumps of reality’ which made up the colossal tragedy of the Nazi genocide. The few surviving lines of an anonymous victim allow us a fleeting glimpse of the unfathomable despair that echoed millionfold throughout the murderous universe that Europe had become during the years 1939 to 1945. These six years comprise the history of the mass extinction of millions of men, women and children, of all ages and nationalities, coming from all strata of society and from every ←16 | 17→town and village within occupied Europe. Within a brief span of time and with breath-taking ease, they were deprived of their civil rights, robbed of their possessions and physically annihilated. In the end, little more was left of their one-time existence than the birth certificates in the registers of their places of origins. And for some, even this barest testimonial of life was lacking. Thus, on 1 July, 1943, six baby boys born in the ‘Gypsy camp’ of Birkenau were formally registered as ‘Z-8266’ to ‘Z-8271’. They would not live to see the end of the year. Like millions of others, they literally went up in smoke.2
From the outset, the absurd nature of Hitler’s genocide frustrated the efforts to grasp its true meaning. Above all, this applied to the pauperized and starving populations of the Eastern European ghettos, who were forced to witness their approaching doom. For many the spectacle was too much to cope with and so they desperately sought to deny its inevitability. The Polish-Jewish educator Chaim Kaplan observed such efforts of his fellow Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and noted in his diary:
The lack of reason for these murders especially troubles the inhabitants of the ghetto. In order to comfort ourselves we feel compelled to find some sort of system to explain these night-time murders. Everyone, afraid for his own skin, thinks to himself: If there is a system, every murder must have a cause; if there is a cause, nothing will happen to me since I am absolutely guiltless. […]
Tremendous intellectual effort is expended to find some motive behind all the slaughter. If there is a motive, there is a possibility of estimating the proximity of individual danger. But none of the theories have a leg to stand on; there are always incidents that do not fit the alleged motive, that are beyond calculation and unbounded by logic.3
And Kaplan also noted that the few who dared to publicly emphasize the latter were met with considerable animosity, as ‘People do not want to die without cause.’4
That the ghetto inhabitants failed to discover this cause is hardly surprising. Eye to eye with persecutors who appeared to act at total random and completely isolated from the outside world, they lacked the wider perspective required for even a modest beginning of such an understanding. But even for contemporaries with a more comprehensive outlook, the reality remained hard enough to grasp. Thus, German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who received reports on the mass extermination as late as 1943 in her American exile, initially refused to believe them as they seemed so ←17 | 18→utterly devoid of any power-political or military logic. And the leaders of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and of other Jewish organizations outside occupied Europe reacted not all that differently.5 And again, those who knew better and decided not to keep silent were met with disbelief and rejection. Typical in this respect were the experiences of the British-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler in his efforts to inform public opinion on the ongoing massacres at the European continent. In 1943 the literary magazine Horizon published a chapter on the deportations from Koestler’s new novel Arrival and Departure. Among the reactions he received were several highly negative ones, accusing the author of spreading horror stories to satisfy a morbid fantasy. On a more civilized tone, fellow writer and art expert Sir Osbert Sitwell inquired after the factual basis of Koestler’s story. It prompted a furious reaction:
Dear Sir
In your letter you asked me the idiotic question whether the events described in The Mixed Transport were ‘based on fact’ or ‘artistic fiction’.
Had I published a chapter on Proust and mentioned his homosexuality, you would never have dared to ask a similar question, because you consider it your duty ‘to know’ although the evidence of this particular knowledge is less easily accessible than that of the massacre of three million humans. You would blush if you were found out not to have heard the name of any second-rate contemporary writer, painter or composer; you would blush if found out having ascribed a play by Sophocles to Euripides; but you don’t blush and you have the brazenness to ask whether it is true that you are the contemporary of the greatest massacre in recorded history.
If you tell me that you don’t read newspapers, White Books, documentary pamphlets obtainable at W.H. Smith bookstalls – why on earth do you read Horizon and call yourself a member of the intelligentsia? I can’t even say that