everything they could take (one light truck could easily hold goods from ten
shops; great booty indeed!), leaving only bare walls.
One day, 12 Jewish youths were seized for labour, led out of the city to
where a machine gun had been mounted. One of the Germans declared that all
of them would [3] be shot. “I give you five minutes to pray and 3 hours to dig
a hole in which you will be buried,” he finished his sp eech. It is easy to imagine
what effect this statement had. Some Jews threw spades on the ground
and said that it made no difference to them. The other, who were indeed
adults, started to cry loudly, still others were begging the Germans not to
do this (“How can we be guilty of having been born Jews?” was one of their
main arguments), but the latter remained unyielding. “If you finish in three
hours, you will die an easy death. Otherwise...” — this aposiopesis¹³⁰⁷ was
very meaningful...
Having no choice, the Jews began digging, rushed not only by words,
but also not infrequently by blows with rifle butts. When the Germans estimated
that the hole was deep enough, they ordered the Jews to stop working.
One of them declared his readiness to deliver to the victims’ families
pieces of paper with a few words, money and [4] the trifles they had on them.
Naturally, it caused a new burst of sobbing and begging, but the soldiers
remained unyielding.
“Are you ready now? Can we shoot?” the soldiers who operated the
machine gun asked impatiently. After 30 long minutes of mental tortures,
which made the repertoire of the Inquisition pale, these poor Jews were told
that two dead horses, which were decomposing nearby and contaminating the
air, would be buried in the hole. It was only a joke. Hilarious, a very sophisticated
joke. It is interesting, however, that all that time everyone had ‘held
up’ tolerably: they had been crying, begging, moaning, but no one had broken
down; when it was declared that they would not be shot, two went into a psychic
shock, which was so intense that they fell on the ground with symptoms
of some convulsions (since that day, one of them, Krajanek, [5] has suffered
from some kind of nervous system disease).
1307 (Greek) breaking off of speech; a figure of speech consisting in passing something over in silence, the ending to be supplied by the imagination of the listener. Judging from the use of foreign words, the testimony was probably recorded or elaborated on by Daniel Fligelman, but the handwriting is of somebody else.
