The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

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Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,soc.history
Subject: War Criminal: Josef Kramer (Birkenau)
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Old Frog's Almanac, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: Auschwitz,Birkenau

"Josef Kramer was the commandant of the camp of Birkenau; the face he
showed when he came to listen to the orchestra was certainly not that known
to the other men and women of the camp. The only one who had said anything
about him at all was Ewa: he loved music, and it was he, with Mandel, who
kept us alive; we depended on him. He always behaved correctly with us, but
a Polish comrade who worked in the infirmary had told Ewa that he was not
immune to the sort of collective hysteria that seized the SS when the
loaded their trucks for the crematoria. On occasion he could be as wild as
the rest of them, not hesitating to shatter a woman's skull with a blow of
his club.

So this was the brute - I couldn't think of him as a man - who was about to
make his entrance. I was curious to see him. I would have liked to talk
with him, to understand. To understand - it was a mania with me. I
continued to believe that there was something to understand, that this
desire for extermination was motivated by reasons which simply escaped me.
One didn't organize death for death's sake; there must have been another
purpose, but what? Those men who, in defiance of all human laws, obeyed
those perpetrators of monstrous genocide, behind what were they taking
refuge so as to live with themselves?"

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Excerpted from......"PLAYING FOR TIME", Fania Fenelon with Marcelle 
Routier. Athenium, New York, 1977. ISBN 0-689-10796-X         p. 91
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      === The Old Frog's Almanac, Vancouver Island, Canada ===
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