March 12, Sunday Morning, 1944.
...Foreman Hartwig, a man in his late sixties, quite emaciated, ailing, became friendly as I helped him with the labeling. (The same ceremony every morning. The foreman has to deliver the previous day's production, piled up on the tables, to the forwarding department. He identifies the individual commissions according to the order notes, fetches the appropriate labels, brushes paste on them out of a pot, whereupon a girl usually sticks them on the boxes. There is a tremendous shortage of workers; I produce little at the machine, so for the moment I am the paste girl. So Hartwig asked about my former profession. Then he said: "The Jews may be to blame for something, but that is not right...There will be nothing good anymore for us old people..."
"Foreman, I'm not allowed to say anything to that, I must not make any complaints, it could cost me my head."
"I know...I'm not allowed to talk to you either--but what good can the war bring us now? My youngest is in Italy, he was in Africa first, my older boy is in the far north..."
"Were you in the First World War, Foreman?"
After that we told each other about lice, rats, hospital train, etc.
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On this day in 1945, Anne Frank, the German Jewish girl whose famous diary describes her family's two years of hiding in the Netherlands, dies at the age of 15 in the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen Belsen.
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And still, Holocaust deniers such as Steve Bannon (guilty by associating with Marine Le Pen since he keeps avoiding the question directly).
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| National Front party leader Marine Le Pen, right, and former White House strategist Steve Bannon hold a press conference at the party congress in the northern French city of Lille, Saturday, March 10, 2018. Steve Bannon has given a big boost to French far right leader Marine Le Pen, telling a cheering crowd at a congress of her National Front party that "history is on our side." (Photo: AP) |
