“They are
barefooted, armed with clubs and knives, dressed only in shirts and trousers,
but their thirst for blood is inexhaustible. They manage to break into the town
following the members of the careless expedition. Once inside, they spread
terror; the assault on the walls takes
only a few hours. A crowd of survivors gathers in Saint-Nazaire Cathedral, and
in the churches of La Madeleine and Sainte-Jude. The soldiery break down the
doors and slaughter everyone: the new-born, women, cripples, elders, and priests
celebrating mass. Bells toll for the dead. Extermination is total.”
On this
date, July 22, in 1209, the people of Béziers, in
the Languedoc region of southern France, were slaughtered in the first major engagement
of the Albigensian Crusade. Earlier in the month, Pope Innocent III had called for a crusade against the Catharist heresy, also called Albigensianism after the city
of Albi where the movement started. The army of soldiers and mercenaries was
led by the Abbot of Citeaux, Arnaud Amalric, who said, probably apocryphally,
Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. This came in reply to being
told there were faithful Catholics among the inhabitants of Béziers: “Kill
them. For the Lord knows those that are His own.” The town was pillaged and
burned. Herbert writes:
“Pierre de
Vaux-de-Cernay, a Cistercian monk and chronicler of the expeditions against the
Albigensians, wrote that in La Madeleine alone seven thousand were slaughtered,
which probably is an exaggeration. Historians estimate, however, that some
thirteen thousand ‘innocent’ people were killed in Béziers. What makes this
figure even more terrifying is that inhabitants were put to the sword without
discrimination.”
This was
written by a Polish poet who was 15 in 1939 when the Soviets invaded Lwow,
which later was captured by the Nazis, then re-captured by the Soviets. Herbert
fought in the underground. He recounts the slaughter of the Cathars in the
context of the Holocaust and the Soviet murder of millions. If there is any
hope in Herbert’s essay, any sense that something of value survived, it’s in
his mention of the three Albigensians who escape with “the remaining treasure,
the holy books” – that is, with the gifts of civilization. This echoes three
lines from the title poem in Herbert’s Report from the Besieged City
(trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1985) written after Wojciech Jaruzelski’s
neo-Stalinist crackdown in December 1981. The hope is attenuated but real:
“and if the
City falls and one man survives
he will
carry the City inside him on the paths of exile
he will be
the City”
In one of
those strange convergences that echo through history, July 22 in 1942 was the
start of the Grossaktion (“Great Action”) Warsaw, the Nazi code name for
the deportation and murder of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. Some 400,000
Jews had been packed into an area measuring 1.3 square miles. That summer more than a quarter-million of them were sent in cattle cars to the recently
opened Treblinka death camp, fifty miles northeast of Warsaw.
Two years
later, Vasily Grossman, Soviet war correspondent and future author of Life and Fate, was among the first
journalists to visit the remains of Treblinka and collect eyewitness accounts. His
article “The Hell of Treblinka” was published in the Soviet literary journal Znamya
(Banner) in November 1944, and later entered as evidence during the Nuremberg
Trials. Grossman writes:
“Killing
turned out to be supremely easy—it does not entail any uncommon expenditure.
“It is
possible to build five hundred such [gas] chambers in only a few days. This is no
more difficult than constructing a five-story building.”
[“The Hell
of Treblinka” is collected in The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays;
(trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Olga Mukovnikova; New York Review
Books, 2010).]
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