celebrate their birthdays. Today I would buy lots of birthdays for Hurbinek. Today I would buy lots of birthdays for the children whose deaths are described on Erika Fisherkant’s record cards.
5
Shove, knock down, terrorize, beat, disembowel, spit on, open up, slash, insult, tear apart, aim at, shoot, execute, nail down, throw down, dismember, hang, crush, decapitate, inject, trepan, disfigure, amputate, triturate, burn, strike, stab, electrocute, rape, infect, torture, deceive, drill, inflate, behead, cut, skewer, bury, strangle, beat and tear apart are verbs the Nazis applied to children.
6
I don’t know how much blood from children in Auschwitz and other camps was used for transfusions for the wounded of Stalingrad and other eastern fronts, but it was a lot. The biggest real act of vampirism in the whole of history. Erika’s Foundation opened a line of investigation into the use of children who were forced to be “providers” of blood and skin for people with burns. The dossiers were labelled TRANSFUSIONS or GRAFTS . The doctors in Auschwitz began to siphon blood from many children and adolescents, when there began to be a general shortage in Germany from 1942. It was considered wasteful to send them to the gas chambers without making use of their blood and their skin that was used in grafts needed by soldiers who’d suffered serious burns, whose faces, arms and legs needed reconstructing for aesthetic reasons. Didn’t the Reich make use of the clothes, hair and teeth of the undesirables it was gassing? Well, why not get blood from children, from the healthiest—they won’t be needing it! It was clearly reasoning based on a sound grasp of logic and economics.
In 1943 many of these children were moved to field hospitals, where they were shot dead as soon as they’d done with them, then buried in trenches that had been abandoned or blown open by mortar fire. For many years people believed that those children had died according to the usual Auschwitz procedures.
The idea was Josef Mengele’s, better known in the camp as the Angel of Death, and it came to him as a result of a vision inspired by a crucifix his mother Walburga had given him. Walburga Mengele was extremely religious and brought her three children up to be strictly observant Roman Catholics on the farm where they were born in Günzburg in central Bavaria. She gave each of them a mother-of-pearl crucifix that Josef always carried with him, that had been blessed by the Bishop of Ulm, the nearby regional capital and a city that Ahasver, the wandering Jew, once visited, something the Mengele family probably didn’t know. The blood running down Christ’s body on the cross gave him the idea when he was a lieutenant on the Ukraine front in 1941. He traveled across the Ukraine as commanding officer of a terrible
SS Einsatzkommando
. It isn’t difficult to imagine his batallion cleaning out villages and surrendering to the orgies of extermination that film-maker Elem Klimov recreates so admirably, so starkly in his films. His ideas about using the blood of children and adolescents were immediately backed by Himmler and Eichmann, who used to receive his absurd reports on the unheard-of genetic possibilities opened up by his experiments in the terrain of human inheritance. He started to put them into practice in 1943 when he reached Auschwitz as a doctor to carry out his experimentation on the impurity of inferior, non-Aryan races.
His name still makes my hair stand on end and even more so when I see photos of him as an old man in Paraguay in the 1970s. Ever since I began to watch documentaries on the Second World War, one name has always terrified me: Mengele. There is something primitive about the three euphonious syllables of his name, as if he were a kind of monstruous, if not unreal, wizard. And yet, just like Adolf Eichmann, he was a man who looked ordinary and was cold and calculating in a methodical, mean way.
Even more primitive for me in
5
Shove, knock down, terrorize, beat, disembowel, spit on, open up, slash, insult, tear apart, aim at, shoot, execute, nail down, throw down, dismember, hang, crush, decapitate, inject, trepan, disfigure, amputate, triturate, burn, strike, stab, electrocute, rape, infect, torture, deceive, drill, inflate, behead, cut, skewer, bury, strangle, beat and tear apart are verbs the Nazis applied to children.
6
I don’t know how much blood from children in Auschwitz and other camps was used for transfusions for the wounded of Stalingrad and other eastern fronts, but it was a lot. The biggest real act of vampirism in the whole of history. Erika’s Foundation opened a line of investigation into the use of children who were forced to be “providers” of blood and skin for people with burns. The dossiers were labelled TRANSFUSIONS or GRAFTS . The doctors in Auschwitz began to siphon blood from many children and adolescents, when there began to be a general shortage in Germany from 1942. It was considered wasteful to send them to the gas chambers without making use of their blood and their skin that was used in grafts needed by soldiers who’d suffered serious burns, whose faces, arms and legs needed reconstructing for aesthetic reasons. Didn’t the Reich make use of the clothes, hair and teeth of the undesirables it was gassing? Well, why not get blood from children, from the healthiest—they won’t be needing it! It was clearly reasoning based on a sound grasp of logic and economics.
In 1943 many of these children were moved to field hospitals, where they were shot dead as soon as they’d done with them, then buried in trenches that had been abandoned or blown open by mortar fire. For many years people believed that those children had died according to the usual Auschwitz procedures.
The idea was Josef Mengele’s, better known in the camp as the Angel of Death, and it came to him as a result of a vision inspired by a crucifix his mother Walburga had given him. Walburga Mengele was extremely religious and brought her three children up to be strictly observant Roman Catholics on the farm where they were born in Günzburg in central Bavaria. She gave each of them a mother-of-pearl crucifix that Josef always carried with him, that had been blessed by the Bishop of Ulm, the nearby regional capital and a city that Ahasver, the wandering Jew, once visited, something the Mengele family probably didn’t know. The blood running down Christ’s body on the cross gave him the idea when he was a lieutenant on the Ukraine front in 1941. He traveled across the Ukraine as commanding officer of a terrible
SS Einsatzkommando
. It isn’t difficult to imagine his batallion cleaning out villages and surrendering to the orgies of extermination that film-maker Elem Klimov recreates so admirably, so starkly in his films. His ideas about using the blood of children and adolescents were immediately backed by Himmler and Eichmann, who used to receive his absurd reports on the unheard-of genetic possibilities opened up by his experiments in the terrain of human inheritance. He started to put them into practice in 1943 when he reached Auschwitz as a doctor to carry out his experimentation on the impurity of inferior, non-Aryan races.
His name still makes my hair stand on end and even more so when I see photos of him as an old man in Paraguay in the 1970s. Ever since I began to watch documentaries on the Second World War, one name has always terrified me: Mengele. There is something primitive about the three euphonious syllables of his name, as if he were a kind of monstruous, if not unreal, wizard. And yet, just like Adolf Eichmann, he was a man who looked ordinary and was cold and calculating in a methodical, mean way.
Even more primitive for me in
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