What Did We Know? The Holocaust

What did he know and when did he know it? It’s a question everybody asks about everything. Example: the Holocaust. When did “ordinary Germans” know that the Nazis were systematically exterminating millions of humans just for being what they were? When did Roosevelt know? When did “we” know?

Having been a kid during World War II and coming to maturity only thereafter, I really cannot remember exactly when I learned the truth. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have an inkling when I was a kid during the war, but I knew everything that mattered by the time I made it to college in 1953. In any event, I’ve always assumed that a lot of people knew a lot, and early.

But there’s a fascinating bit of counter-evidence from an impeccable source. Heda Margolius Kovály was a Prague Jew carted off to the camps in 1941, to stay there until she escaped near the end of the War. “In the last of the concentration camps that held me,” she recounts, she was working as slave labor at a brickyard. One day, pushed beyond endurance, she lashed she screamed at her boss. It was a piece of suicidal folly; she could only expect to be killed, or worse.

Yet against all expectations, her boss backed off. And the next day, he transferred her to “easier” duty, lugging coal. Then:

One afternoon, toward evening, the boss appeared with two Frenchmen and ordered them to help me bring in as supply of coal. He returned about an hour later, sent them out, asked me to sit down beside him on a stone ledge in the wall of the kiln and said only: Tell me.

As long as I live I shall not forget that dark cave-like place, the black walls streaked with the reflections of flames, the old man dressed in black who listened and listened and seemed to wither, to shrink before my eyes as if, with each of my sentences, part of him faded. …

I told the old man in the Russian shirt about the ghetto in Lodz where the cesspool cleaners had whistled Beethoven as they worked and where close to one hundred thousand people had been murdered or had died of starvation. I told him how the trains would arrive from Polish villages bringing men with bloody heads and women wrapped in shawls and how, once the trains were gone, the women undid their wraps and pulled out their babies, some of them dead by suffocation but a few still alive, saved from German bayonets. I told him how, a few months later, the SS would arrive and throw these same babies into trucks and cart them off to the gas chambers. …

Kovály continues in this vein for another page or so, and then concludes:

I do not remember what else I told him. I only know that he did not say a word for as long as I spoke and, when I heard the shouting of orders outside that meant we were returning to camp and got up to leave, he remained sitting, hunched into himself, his head in his palms.

The man lived in Nazi Germany and had daily contact with a concentration camp and its inmates, yet he knew nothing. I am quite sure he did not. He had simply thought we were convicts, sentenced by a regular court of law for proven crimes.

--Heda Margolius Kovály ,
Under a Cruel Star 14-15 (Holmes & Myer ed., 1996)

Kovály's life in the camps is horrific enough, but it is only the first, short part of the book. She arrives back in her beloved Prague just in time for a second nightmare: the Stalinist takeover of 1948.