Friday, January 27, 2023

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

 One of my neighbours was in Auschwitz, and decades later I could hear him scream at night. He drank heavily and would often be falling down drunk while trying to climb the stairs to his apartment. I'd been reading Tadeusz Borowski's "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" and I'd asked if he knew him. "Polish guy? Yeah I knew him" They both had worked in the section of the camp nicknamed 'Canada' because it was where new arrivals had their belongings taken away before they were killed and what the Nazis didn't take for themselves made the prisoners that worked in Canada relatively wealthy.  He was a Ukrainian Catholic and virulently anti-semitic, despite having been in a place where a million Jews were murdered, because "They killed Jesus!" as he said.


No comments:

Post a Comment