The author, in an autobiographical document, reveals his thoughts and accusations towards the people and the anti-Semitic governments in Poland in the past and present, who refuse to restore citizenship to those whose ancestors were expelled after the war or murdered in the Holocaust. Of the three million Jews who lived in Poland for a thousand years, not even one remains in Poland today. All the property they accumulated over hundreds of years was nationalized and stolen.
Genre: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / JewishThe first time in my life that I heard the term "Holocaust," I was thirteen years old. On my way home from school, I saw the newspaper sellers running down the street and shouting enthusiastically, "They caught Eichmann. The Mossad caught the Nazi beast.". And I didn't know who Eichmann was; I had never heard of him.
Then, his trial began in Jerusalem. The trial was broadcast in its entirety, and we were all attached to a radio transistor that we didn't move anywhere without. School classes were suspended while the testimonies were being given, and everyone sat tense and listened.
At the trial, many witnesses appeared, including extermination camp survivors who testified for long hours with breaks. Some of the testimonies broke down and fainted; some asked for water while giving their testimony when their throats were hoarse from crying. In his monotonous voice and gruesome descriptions, the prosecutor on behalf of the state of Israel, Gideon Hausner, did not conjure up a single image in my mind. I heard the things, but they were not tangible to me. There was talk of the "Holocaust of the Jewish people," but the descriptions were so horrific that the mind refused to contain them. Names of entire communities that were wiped out—one hundred thousand here, eighty thousand there—we are talking about hundreds of thousands, whole towns of women, men, old people, and children. In one village, the Poles burned to death sixteen hundred people who were crammed into a barn that was set on fire—Jews, of course—and in the Lublin ghetto, thousands or tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, were crammed. But where is Lublin? And what happened to those Jews? Is this man with the distorted face who sits in the glass cell in the court in Jerusalem the sole culprit of all these atrocities?
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French
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Already translated.
Translated by Chloé CARDOSO
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