War stories to make you weep
By CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
Last updated at 18:23 31 August 2007
Survivors of the Nazi death camps in World War II tend to agree that what lasts longest is hope. In the spring of 1942, Samuel Willenberg was shoved out of his freight wagon at Treblinka, an extermination camp in the Polish countryside.
Here, more people were killed than all the British and American wartime losses put together, and prisoners on arrival had a 99 per cent chance of being dead within three hours. Yet through a succession of coincidences, Willenberg survived for 18 months before escaping.
Hope is the one constant in this sombre study of man's inhumanity to man. During the past two decades Laurence Rees, author of an impressive history of Auschwitz, has been filming interviews with World War II survivors.
From these he has chosen to write about 35 men, women and children whose experiences were peculiarly horrifying, either as victims or as perpetrators of evil, in the hope of finding some common thread which might explain why such dark impulses exist.
Some of them are stories of stupefying cruelty. A Lithuanian, Petras Zelionka, enjoyed taking families of naked Jews to the edge of burial pits and shooting them dead, while taking a sadistic curiosity in how they died.
During the Japanese invasion of China in which 15 to 20 million Chinese were killed, Sergeant Major Enomoto, a Japanese farmer's son, came upon a village woman whom he raped and stabbed to death; then, because his comrades felt hungry, he cut chunks of flesh from her body for them to eat.
Both soldiers had been conditioned to regard their enemies as inhuman, lower than animals. The Japanese were brutalised in training, using live Chinese for bayonet practice until killing became second nature.
Many German soldiers saw the Red Army as cannon fodder at least until Stalingrad. And many American GIs, who had scarcely heard of the Japanese, regarded them as inhuman yellow-bellies.
It made it easier for one of Rees's American interviewees, a prosperous Oklahoma lawyer James Eagleton, to muse with pride that in his two years of fighting the Japanese he never saw a Japanese taken prisoner: they were always shot dead as they came out to surrender.
Talking to Rees half a century later, some of these old soldiers still gloried in their war record.
Wolfgang Horn, a Panzer officer interviewed by Rees, laughed as he recalled the sheer joy of killing Red Army soldiers: 'They are cowards; they didn't deserve better anyhow!' The prisoners and other victims who survived the war represent the human spirit at its most resilient.
In Treblinka, Willenberg was helped by knowing that there were people even worse off than himself: the prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers. Of the 2,500 British and Australian soldiers imprisoned by the Japanese in north Borneo, only six survived.
Peter Lee, a British officer transferred from the camp, told Rees it was all about self-discipline: jettisoning hatred, anger and self-pity and living for the moment.
The same was true for the gulags where Stalin sent thousands of Red Army soldiers who had dared to surrender.
One of the saddest stories here is that of Tatiana Nanieva, a 22-year-old devoted Communist, lively and intelligent, who was working in a Soviet military field hospital when she was captured by the Germans.
Sent to a labour camp, she lived for the day when the Red Army would liberate them.
Instead, she was accused of betraying the Motherland and sentenced to six years hard labour and another three years in exile.
Rees found her in a run-down flat in Kiev, dying of bone disease, without the money even to pay for her funeral. The camera crew, deeply affected, pooled the money in their pockets to pay for it.
For every perpetrator of brutality against the defenceless there were hundreds more whose silent acquiescence allowed atrocities to take place. Rees mounts a blistering attack on the senior British officers who, at the end of the War, connived in sending Cossacks and Yugoslavians to their deaths at the hands of Stalin and Tito.
The message of this book is that although there will always be exceptional human beings, beacons of courage and humanity, 'nobody knows themselves'.
In the words of Toivi Blatt, a Polish Jew who survived Sobibor death camp: 'All of us could be good people or bad people in different situations. Sometimes when somebody is really nice to me I find myself thinking, "How would he be in Sobibor?"
