Am I a Murderer? by Catel Perechodnik, translated by Frank Fox
Cargas, Harry James
WHEN NO CHOICE IS MORAL Am I a Murderer? Catel Perechodnik, translated by frank Fox Westview Press, $25, 288 pp. Harry James Cargas An incident from the early fifties, when I was an...
...The chaplain waved me away: "Don't worry about it...
...Among his tasks was to help decide who went on the next trains to Auschwitz...
...In a last effort to get attention, he punctuated his final letter condemning the lethargy by his own suicide...
...And what of the Pole in exile, Shmuel Zygelbojm, who appealed repeatedly but in vain to the unbelieving Allies to act on the atrocity reports emanating from the ghettos...
...Was that response wholly unacceptable...
...Frank Fox, who translated the diary, tells the essence of the story in a Foreword: "Perechodnik and other policemen [help] eight thousand Otwock Jews into the town square, where they are loaded into boxcars...
...He betrayed Jews to save his family...
...The writing at first seems cold, detached, fully objective, but Perechodnik's crimes batter his spirit and he cannot remain emotionless...
...it was standard Nazi practice to liquidate new mothers immediately, since they were considered to be poor workers...
...it finally came into the hands of Fox, who prepared it for publication...
...Harry James Cargas An incident from the early fifties, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan: Sitting in the lounge chairs of the Newman Club, a group of us discussed at length and with all seriousness whether it was a sin to stop at a red light in a very small town at 3 a.m., and then, with no other car in sight, to drive on before the signal turned green...
...Just before his own death during the war, probably by his own hand, Calel Perechodnik gave the document to a friend...
...The policemen are promised immunity for their own wives and children, but the German enemy deceives them...
...A problem was raised: It is clear that the dog circles the tree, but does it circle the squirrel, which keeps the tree between himself and the dog...
...One day a new prisoner in the early stages of pregnancy was brought to the camp...
...The wheelbarrow woman then strangled the baby to save its mother's life...
...Did he have the moral right to do that...
...There is a story, well known to those working in Holocaust studies, of a woman in a death camp who was the only prisoner with access to the entire camp, because her assignment was to collect the corpses of those who had collapsed and died from hunger, despair, illness, and carry them by wheelbarrow to a place of disposal...
...Perechodnik watches in horror as his wife and daughter are loaded into wagons headed for the Treblinka death camp...
...When her time came, the wheelbarrow woman placed her under some corpses, took her to a remote part of the camp, and helped her to bear the child...
...Perechodnik begins by saying that, though he is not a man of faith, this memoir is his deathbed confession...
...But he helped destroy that child...
...I know a Holocaust survivor who, as a girl in hiding with others, watched her father smother her infant brother, whose cries would have betrayed the presence of all those in concealment...
...the traffic signal debate of my college days seems ineffably trivial...
...These are surely serious questions, and there are many, many others...
...The book encompasses a detailed account of ghetto life under the Nazis, a time of misery and desperation relieved only slightly by rare acts of kindness toward the Jews...
...But today I weigh such matters in a different context...
...The other prisoners, eager to protect new life in the midst of death, rallied to her support, sharing their meager rations with her, hiding her in the midst of roll calls, helping her in her work...
...but the betrayer was betrayed...
...but its focus and significance lie in its pitiless self-examination...
...Dare we throw stones at this man...
...About a third of the way through he refers to the ''fairy tale" believed by some, that "the heart is a chamber of delicate membranes that cannot stand suffering or emotion, and that they burst, causing death...
...After studying and reflecting on the Holocaust for more than thirty years, I continue to learn about the vastly more difficult moral dilemmas faced by victims of the persecution, dilemmas to which they had to respond immediately and decisively...
...They will certainly not burst and will outlast the most enduring steel...
...Perechodnick tells us that one day, after his family was shipped out, "I saw in the Polish neighborhood a girl pushing perhaps a two-year-old child in a carriage...
...We read, "These diaries are that fetus...
...May my death be a resounding cry of protest, against the indifference...
...My legs buckled under me...
...I recognized my daughter's stroller...
...After much discussion, James resolved the issue, at least for himself, by concluding that "It doesn't matter...
...The most recent revelation came through the posthumous publication, under the title Am I a Murderer?, of a document that had lain undiscovered for half-a-century, the personal history of a Jew named Calel Perechod-nik who became a ghetto policeman in Poland and collaborated with the Nazis in the hope that he could thereby save his own life and those of his wife and daughter...
...Much of his work has dealt with aspects of the Holocaust...
...The question I put to the chaplain in Korea now pales in significance...
...Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Warsaw Judentrat (the Nazi-appointed ghetto administration), was condemned by some Jews for collaborating, praised by other Jews for doing his best to ease the burden of victims under previously unimaginable conditions...
...Later he writes that he always wanted a child, to remember him after his death...
...Not so: "Today I would advise those who construct fighter planes to build them out of heart membranes...
...When Czerniakow got the order to begin sending children, he killed himself...
...I felt then, and still feel, that my questions were real and significant...
...Are we in any position to judge...
...Was Zygelbojm's death a violation of God's law...
...Pain fills every word of the record...
...And what of the women doctors in the camp, including some who opposed abortion in principle, who performed them (gruesomely, without medical aids, sometimes even without water) to save the mothers from Nazi execution...
...These are questions that occur often to students of the Shoah...
...He writes of his urge to strangle this baby who lived while his own did not...
...What is to be said of her act...
...While camping after hunting, William James and friends watched a dog chase a squirrel around a tree...
...Should he have tried to save his family at the expense of others...
...After the war the wheelbarrow woman said she would dedicate her life to having children...
...The general practice was to try to protect the rabbis, the intelligentsia, and the children, who would form a core for regenerating Judaism...
...Telling the story, he blames himself completely, never offering any mitigating circumstances...
...Later, in combat in Korea, I recall asking a chaplain about moral problems involved in killing—and also of the possibility of being killed while at the height of one's rage over seeing a friend killed right beside you...
...Harry James Cargas, a professor of literature and language at Webster University, Saint Louis, has published 2,500 articles (including this one) and thirty-one books...
...How difficult some philosophical questions can be...
Vol. 123 • July 1996 • No. 13
