some days, being alive seems too much to bear …

31 July 1942

Dear father! I am saying gooodbye to you before I die. We would so love to live, but they won’t let us and we will die. I am so scared of this death, because the small children are thrown alive into the pit. Goodbye forever. I kiss you tenderly. Your J.

Postscript by 12-year-old Judith Wischnjatskaja to a letter written by her mother, Slata, to the father. Found by a Soviet soldier in eastern Poland.

5 October, 1941

I have something else to tell you. I was actually involved in the great mass killing the day before yesterday. In dealing with the first truckloads, my hand shook slightly when I fired, but you get used to it. When the tenth load arrived, I was already aiming steadily, and I fired consistently at the many women, children and babies…We gave them a nice quick death; babies flew through the air in a wide arc, and we picked them off in flight before they fell into the pit and the water.

Letter from Austrian police secretary Walter Madner to his wife and two children.

(From the Black Book of the Holocaust compiled by Ehrenburg and Grossman.)