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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and Operation
of
the Gas Chambers © | |
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Contents |
Page 538 |
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Photo 1.
(Personal archives) |
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Photograph of page 79 of the
picture book “LA BETE EST MORTE!” ... La Guerre
Mondiale chez lesAnimaux" [The beast is dead ... the World
War in the animal world], Second Volume entitled “Quand la
bête est terrassée” [When the beast is down]. Illustrated by
CALVO and written by Victor DANCETTE, "printing completed in June
1945, in the hope That the Beast is well and truly dead", and
distributed as from 22nd September 1945. Editions GP.80 rue Saint
Lazare. Paris IX.
The text by Dancette is very much the
reflection of his time and now appears terribly dated, but CALVO'S
drawings are quite remarkable and their style remains unique.
Fortunately the majority of children who opened these two albums
never read a single line of them, prefering simply to look at the
pictures, which is less boring, and to dream with their eyes open.
Republished in a single volume in the second quarter of 1977 by
Futuropolis, 130 rue du Théâtre, 75015, Paris |
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Translation of
Dancette’s text: |
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1. |
"But it was again in our poor
tortured country that the Barbarians were to push back the frontiers
of ferocity. A calm, cold, ordered ferocity. They thus arrived one
day, two hundred strong, in a little village that they surrounded,
driving towards the centre the rabbits they found working in their
gardens or strolling in the sun. They emptied all the cottages, all
the burrows, all the cradles, searched in all the nooks and crannies
to make sure that no peaceful animal escaped this assemhly. They put
the males in the bars, the females and their little ones in the holy
place that even the most savage had respected up to then. All that
was done with the method and order that these people cannot do
without, even when accomplishing the most vile tasks. Scarcely an
hour after the arrival of the Barbarians, the victims had been duly
classified, labelled and put in their place. Then, on a precise
order, the atrocious massacre of the innocents
began.
Bursts of bullets laid low in the bloody straw
the unfortunates shut in the barns. After the killing squad, the
arsonists completed the work of death. For the massacre was not
enough. There had to be the fire, the pyre. In every barn
transformed into Gehenna, poor rabbits, wounded but alive, tried to
extract themselves from the corpses before asphyxia should do its
work, before the fire should devour its prey. But the flames got
closer and closer, pursued them, enveloped them and pitilessly
brought them down. And those rare victims who managed to get out of
this hell were immediately slaughtered by the Wolves lying in wait
for an innocent prey. Horror was everywhere. In the streets, in the
houses, in the fields, carnage raged. Blood trickled down the
facades, ran down the gutters, but that was still not enough. The
greatest crime was still to be committed. Wolves with fearsome
muzzles, with a ferocious look that betrayed the savage joy of a
cruelly prepared vengeance, took it without hesitating.
Yes,
children, they dared desecrate the sanctuary that even the most
barbarous of their ancestors had respected. They dared to sully this
place where mercy and charity reigned, they dared to turn into a
charel-house this haven of peace where they had crowded in the
mothers and their little ones. I lack the words to tell you,
children, what the atrocious suffering must have been of these poor
defenceless animals that the Barbarian, first asphyxiated then
burned. In what had been a sanctuary, nothing was found but
carbonised corpses, little blackened skulls, shreds of charred
flesh, bones and ashes. All the animais of this charming place
perished in this way. 892 innocents met their death. The mind
boggles before such an abomination. The imagination begs for mercy
before the diabolical sadism of a people where one can only believe
that each is born an executioner. |
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2. |
My dear little children, never
forget this: these Wolves who perpetrated these horrors were
ordinary Wolves, I mean Wolves like the others. They were not in the
heat of battle. excited by the smell of powder. They were not
tormented by hunger. They did not have to defend themselves, nor to
take vengeance for a victim of their own. They had simply received
the order to kill. Do not believe those who will tell you that they
were Wolves of a special sect. That’s not true! Believe me,
children, and I will go on repeating it until my dying breath, there
are no good and bad Wolves, there is Barbarism, which is a whole and
has only one race, that of monsters, executioners, sadists and
killers.
We sometimes have animals who are born
without legs or without ears, and we find them abnormal. But that
race is normally born without a heart. The gentlest of them is
capable of ripping your stomach open with a smile.
From that
moment a wave of terror broke over our poor country. Not being able
to confront us everywhere at once, the Wolves thought that they
could paralyze us with fear through a demonstration of diabolical
ferocity. There were mass arrests, deportations, shootings. It
seemed that the Barbarians themselves were carried away by a wave of
devilish madness. But they were simply obeying the orders of the
raging Beast, who had had difficulty in restraining the bloodthirsty
instincts of his hordes of wild animals for four years.
At
last! The Wolves could now cast off the mantle of correctness in
which the Masters of Barbarism had dressed them up in order to
mislead us the better!
At last! They would to he able to tear
off the mask and show their true features of bloodthirsty wolves. |
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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and operation
of the gas chambers
Jean-Claude Pressac
© 1989, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 538 |
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