Chapter 90 Chapter Eighty-Nine

A Jew's Journey (from Ellen Jastrow's manuscript) On October 24, 1944, Natalie and I both received our banishment notices.We will leave here on October 28th with the eleventh group of deportees.It's no use asking for care.No one can be exempted from the batches included in October. Theresienstadt has become a desolate and terrible scene.Perhaps only twelve thousand remained.In less than a month since filming stopped, the train has carried away nearly 20,000 people, all under the age of sixty-five.If you are older, you can still live in peace for a while, unless you offend the authorities like me.As for those young and strong, capable and good-looking, they have all left.In the crowded and bustling Jewish Quarter, the old people who remained walked up and down the almost empty streets, hungry and frightened.Public facilities in the town have been destroyed.There is nowhere to serve hot food, not even the poor scraps of old.The chef is gone.Garbage piles up because no one removes it.In the empty barracks, discarded clothes, books, carpets, and photographs were strewn all over the floor.No one cleaned it, and no one thought of stealing.The hospitals are empty because all the patients have been sent away.Everywhere is the smell of decay and mildew after people leave.

The deceptions of that beautification campaign—the strange signposts, the shop windows, the bandstand, the cafes, the kindergarten—all decayed in the bleak weather: the colors were dull, the paint was peeling.Although there have been repeated orders and severe punishments, those old people still steal the planks of these Potemkin buildings and use them as firewood.Can't hear music now.Few children remained, except those whose parents were interracial, the children of veterans, city officials, or "well-known people."However, in the eleventh batch of repatriation this time, more than 2,000 people were to be sent away, and it was like a sickle cutting into these classes that received special care.Many children were among the group of people who left.

I offended the authorities by refusing to cooperate.The new senior elder to replace that poor Epstein who mysteriously disappeared in late September is Dr. Memelstein, a former rabbi and university lecturer in Vienna.The elder appointed me as his main assistant, and I knew that this was the order of the SS.Its purpose is nothing more than: if the war ends suddenly, they can decorate the facade again.These guys with ulterior motives must be planning this way: For them, if an American Jew is allowed to serve as a senior employee here, it will be a problem.To welcome the victors, it will look better.However, it now appears that the war will not end soon.Both the Eastern and Western fronts seemed to be at loggerheads through this winter, and the crimes of the Germans would only intensify for many months to come, perhaps only unabated, because this was their last chance to commit crimes.

For hours, Mermelstein tried to convince me, babbling flattery and reason.In order to interrupt him, I said that I was going to think about it.Natalie's reaction was the same as mine that night.I pointed out to her that if I were to be removed for refusing this, she would presumably be on the same path as me. "You see," she said, "but don't accept it for my sake." To reply to Mermelstein the next day, I had to wait again to listen to his nonsense, and he ended up threatening, snarling, begging, and actually weeping at me.No doubt he was afraid to convey my refusal, afraid of offending his master.In the last few pages of my diary, I might as well introduce the characteristics of this man, and his thoughts.He represents a type of person.There must be figures like Mermelstein all over Europe.To put it simply, his idea is: if the Germans are allowed to supervise us directly, they will be far more brutal than the Jewish managers, and they will not be as willing to act as a buffer force to carry out the orders of the Germans like the Jews; They let the Germans vent their anger on them when they put off time, made an intercession, avoided everything, and at the same time endured the hatred and contempt expressed by the Jews; Man saved from death.

I retorted that although this was the case in Theresienstadt in the past, the staff now only organize the deportation and send some people away, and I don't want to get involved in such matters.I will not mention that such workers appoint fellow Jews to die only to preserve their own lives, or, at least, to postpone their own doom.Epicurus said it well, everything in this world has two ways to deal with it.I don't blame Mermelstein.He also had some truth in saying that things would get worse if Jews like himself did not carry out the orders of the Germans and try to relieve their pressure.However, I don't want to do that.When I refused him, I also knew that I would suffer, but I never gave in.

When he said those flattering words to me, he also asked me to consider that the two were both scholars.The disciplines we study are related because he taught ancient Jewish history at the University of Vienna.I've heard him lecture in the ghetto here, but I don't think his learning is anything special.He cites Frevius.The deeds of Josephus, tried to justify themselves; the Jews hated this Josephus, although his purpose was entirely for the benefit of his countrymen, but they all thought he was a spy and tool of the Romans.History has had mixed reviews of Josephs at best.People like Mermelstein will not end well.

He scares me to this day, just like when the SS was angry. At first, he scowled and warned me with a stern face, but then wept bitterly.He wasn't acting (otherwise he would have been good at it), because he literally burst into tears.His burden was too heavy, so he couldn't help crying bitterly.He respected me almost the most in the ghetto.At this stage of the war, as an American, I was in the best position to deal with the Germans and do something good for everyone.In order to get me to change my mind and not go to the small castle, he did not kneel down to me and persuaded me to share his terrible responsibility with him.He could no longer take on that alone.

I told him that he had to be reluctant to do this matter, and if something bad happened to me in the future, I was ready to endure it with my weak body.Having said that, I left and let him shake his head and dry his tears.That was almost three weeks ago.For several days in succession, I have been pinching a sweat.I am not at all braver than I was, but there are things worse than pain, worse than death; There is no escape from pain and death.Well, he'd better go his own way. I heard nothing more after that, but today the disaster came.I believe that this incident can not blame Mermelstein.Of course, it was he who signed the order, just as he signed the orders of all the other deportees.But, in fact, my name was already on the list opened by the SS.Since they can't use me anymore, and they don't want to force me to do anything like they did with the last visit to the Red Cross, they're going to kill me.Unless they can pull me to their side and be their tool, that is, as an accomplice or something, when the Americans come, they will not want someone like me by their side.It was the same when the Russians came.

The notice came in the morning, when Natalie was going to the mica factory.This kind of thing has become commonplace, and it is more or less expected by the two of us.I offered to go to Mermelstein and just said I had reconsidered the issue.This is the truth.I pointed out to her that she still needed to live for her son, and that although we hadn't heard from him for months (we had been cut off from all contact with the outside world), she had every reason to hope he was okay Yes; and one day when this long nightmare wakes up, if she is alive at all, she will find him. With a hint of fear in her nervousness, she said melancholy (I want to write down this brief conversation before I put away these pages): "I don't want you to send the whole train of Jews to the city to protect me." Walk."

"Natalie, that's what I told Mermelstein. But we know that people who are deported always leave." "However, that was not done by you." I am moved.I said, "Ye-bores v 'el va-haros. She learned some Hebrew from me and a few other Zionists, but not much. She looked at me in bewilderment." I explained: "This is a quote from the Talmud.What I have just said is one of the three things that a Jew would rather die than do under coercion.It is better to be killed than to kill. " "I call this the general rule." "According to Hillel, the entire teaching of Judaism is a general rule."

"And two things that a Jew would rather die than do?" "Worshiping false gods and committing adultery." She was thoughtful, then like Mona.Lisa smiled at me like that and went to the mica factory. I'm Jewish Ellen.Jastrow begins his account of a journey in December 1941 on a boat in the port of Naples.The ship is going to Palestine.My niece and I left the ship before it could lift anchor and were detained in Siena.With the help of some underground workers, we escaped from Fascist Italy and planned to return to the United States via Portugal.By some misfortune and misjudgment we were sent to Theresienstadt. Here, having witnessed the barbarity and hypocrisy of the Germans, I am ready to record the truth in simple and sloppy words.I don't count a fraction of the pain, brutality, and moral decay I've witnessed in everyday life.However, Theresienstadt has been called a "model ghetto".What I've heard about what the Germans did in concentration camps like Auschwitz is beyond the bounds of human experience.We can no longer describe it in words.Therefore, I always record what I hear in the simplest words that come to mind at any time.In recent centuries there was perhaps only one such as Chusididedis who narrated these things so that they might be imagined, believed, and remembered.Perhaps there is a Chusididedis now, but I am not like him. I am going to die now.I heard that healthy young people can stay and work when they arrive in Auschwitz, so my niece can still live.I am sixty-eight years old this year, and I am almost short of the seventy years mentioned in the Bible.I now believe that millions of Jews perished at the hands of the Germans when they lived only half their lives, or less than half their age.A million of them, or more, must have been young children. It will be a long time before people understand this one thing about human nature, these unprecedented things that the Germans have done.These few scribbled manuscripts provide evidence of the real situation at the time, but only a poor scrap of evidence.When the scourge of the National Socialists has passed away, such records will be found all over Europe. I am a man of some savvy for the study of the Talmud, and I understand it quickly, but not deeply enough, and my writing is beautiful, but not forceful.I was a gifted child, and I am most proud of my teenage years.My parents brought me from Poland to America.There I wasted my talents trying to please the heretics.As a result I became an apostate.I completely abandoned my Jewishness, and I just wanted to imitate other people and make them happy with me.In this respect, I am successful.This period of my life was from the time I went to New York at the age of sixteen until I came to Theresienstadt at the age of sixty-six.Here I am in the hands of the Germans, and I am Jewish again, which is what they forced me to do. I have been in Theresienstadt for almost a year now.I feel that this year is more precious than the fifty-one years of my ordinary life-that is, the fifty-one years of imitating other people.Humiliated, starved, oppressed, beaten, terrified; in these circumstances I found myself, my God, my self-respect.I am terribly afraid of dying.I was terrified by the plight of my fellow citizens.But I experienced in Theresienstadt a strange, poignant sense of well-being that I had never experienced when I was a professor in America and living the life of a famous writer in a Tuscan villa. of.I am back to my nature.I taught the Talmud to bright-eyed, quick-thinking Jewish boys.Now they are all gone.I don't know if there is still one of them alive.And yet, those words of the Talmud are on our lips and burning in our hearts.My whole life is to pass on that flame.The world had changed so much that I couldn't get used to it, and finally I came to Theresienstadt.When I got here, I finally adapted to this change and recovered my true colors.Now, I'm going back to Auschwitz, to the place where I went to the rabbi school and then abandoned the talisman, and once there, my journey as a Jew will be over.I am ready. Look, there is so much to write about Theresienstadt!Why, if a good angel would grant me even a year to tell my story from childhood!Yet these scattered notes, more than anything else I have written, will be a sign of that vast void which is my grave. O earth, do not cover their blood! Ellen.Jastrow, Theresienstadt, October 24, 1944