For the past few days, amid this global reckoning with racism and white supremacy, I have been reading Reckonings by Mary Fulbrook. To summarise its 500 or so pages into a sentence probably does the work a disservice, but it’s largely about how many senior Nazis were able to escape justice after the war.
A passage from the book leapt out at me when I first read it and is yet to leave me alone. It concerns a guard at Treblinka concentration camp known as Sepp who, according to the recollections of survivor Jankiel Wiernick, "took special delight in torturing children". As they stood, terrified, often held by their mothers, waiting to be gassed, Wiernick recalled that Sepp "would frequently snatch a child from the woman's arms and either tear the child in half or grab it by the legs, smash its head against a wall and throw the body away."
The horror of the Holocaust is so vast and the images of it so ubiquitous that it can be hard to comprehend. Maybe that’s why this description, with all it’s violence, hits so hard. You can’t imagine six million dead, but you can imagine one murdered child.
