The following comments were made by a survivor of Chelmo, a German concentration camp during World War II.
"When we built ovens, I wondered what they were for. An SS man told me, "To make charcoal. For laundry irons." That's what he told me. I didn't know. When the ovens were completed, the logs put in, and the gasoline poured on and lighted, and when the first gas van arrived, then we knew why the ovens were built. . . When they were thrown into the ovens, they were all conscious. Alive. They could feel the fire burn them."
How does the tone of this survivor's account differ from that of Just's?
What do we learn from this account that makes Just's memo seem all the more ethically irresponsible?
Source:
Boiarsky, Carloyn R. and Soven, Margot K. (2000). Writings from the Workplace. (6th ed.). New York: St. Martin's Press.
Original Source: Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust by Claude Lanzmann. Editors: Fayard and Claude Lanzmann. 1985.