and The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution.
Beorn applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Waitman Wade Beorn's website.transport of around five thousand people. Thus, when the train with “All Wheels Rolling for Victory” written on its side arrived on March 31, 1942, the night before Passover, everyone on board was murdered well before the Seder dinner would have started.104 Bełżec only killed by day, so late-arriving trains stood full of victims until the next morning. A month or so later, the camp ceased operations for six weeks while a larger concrete and brick building with six gas chambers was constructed.Page 99 of my book appears in chapter 4 “A Tragic Life” which deals with the history of the Lviv ghetto during the Holocaust. This page discusses the first major deportation of Lviv Jews to the Nazi extermination center of Bełżec. It focuses on the experience of people losing their members of their families during this March Aktion and briefly touches on how their possessions ended up in the Janowska forced labor camp (which the book focuses on). I also discuss the uncertainty that many in the ghetto felt about what had happened to those killed in this early deportation. Rumors flew throughout the ghetto about what had happened and even how people had been killed. This was, of course, understandable at this early stage.
Between March 17 and April 1, fifteen thousand Jews from Lviv were murdered in the first gas chamber at Bełżec. Their clothes, however, returned to Janowska. The disappearance of family members caused great worry in the ghetto. While Jerzy Chyrowski successfully hid, other members of his family were not so lucky and ended up on the trains. With a kind of detachment present in many survivors’ testimonies, Chyrowski simply said that “a part of my family lost their lives during the March Aktion.” Klara Szpilka found herself in the Janowska camp with her family during the roundup. She told authorities that there was a selection, and the rest of her testimony no longer mentions family.
Those left in the ghetto were unsure at first about the meanings of the deportations. Abraham Goldberg testified that “at the time of the March action, it was generally not known what Bełżec was and it was a called a resettlement action. One did not have a lot of illusions, but we did not know anything about an extermination camp.” Samuel Drix wrote that “when the old people were taken I was truly perplexed and believed this was really a resettlement. When I heard rumors of what had happened to them, I simply couldn’t believe it. I had not known or even heard rumors before this that the Germans were committing mass murders of people who could not possibly be a threat.” Rumors circulated in the ghetto. Rabbi Kahane heard that killing was done by electrocution, gas, or steam. Other rumors mentioned the creation of soap from the bodies. As late as 1944 after liberation, David Manusevich told the Soviets with some conviction that the Germans had created a soap factory in Bełżec where they “processed human bodies into soap.” This confusion is, of course, understandable. Lviv’s Jews had only an informal network of news to rely on, though it would become increasingly clear what Bełżec really was. Ironically, the outside world was better informed. The Polish underground government,
The Page 99 Test mostly doesn’t work, at least not explicitly. My book is about the Janowska forced labor camp and most of the book obviously focuses on the detailed history of this place. However, in a more subtle way, the test might work in the sense that while the chapter was focused on the Lviv ghetto, Janowska shows up here as well because it played a role.
One of the things I do in the book is to show how the Janowska camp played several roles simultaneously: slave labor camp, transit camp, and extermination site. Page 99 highlights how the camp played its role as a transit camp. Many of those deported to Bełżec, like Klara Szpilka, were first sent to the camp before being loaded onto trains…and their belongings returned to the camp to be repaired and reused.
Between the Wires is an integrated history of the Holocaust using Janowska and Lviv as a vehicle. It includes the voices of survivors like those highlighted on page 99 as well those of perpetrators and bystanders. It also connects the story of the camp with the larger story of the Holocaust both in Lviv and surrounding areas and in Europe as a whole. In this way, I bring to light the history of the most important Holocaust site most have never heard of.
--Marshal Zeringue
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