Word: branded
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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DESPERATE MISSION (310 pp.)-Joel Brand's story, as told by Alex Weissberg-Criterion...
...Edinburgh when the "resurrectionists," i.e., men who stole fresh bodies for surgical research, flourished a century or so ago. A true resurrectionist, who dealt in live bodies while practicing a trade in mercy on the bloody landscape of the Europe of the 19403, is a man named Joel Brand. He told his story to a German journalist, Alex Weissberg, who put it down baldly and brutally. Fine writing would be an offense against the appalling facts of this bitter memoir...
During the war Joel Brand, now 52, was a leader of a Jewish underground group in Hungary whose purpose was quite simply to help Jews to stay alive. There were other such groups; Brand's was called the Waada Ezra we Hazalah, a Zionist group to whom the age-old dream of return to Palestine had been converted by the Hitler terror into life-or-death urgency...
...Nazis had "decided on a 'total' solution of the Jewish question." The operation, says Brand, "was given the official title of 'Night and Fog,' and the German genius for organization now celebrated its most gruesome triumph." Against this, Brand's only weapons were bravery and bribery. The Nazis had discovered that Jews could not only be killed but bought and sold. Thus, by a cruel twist, Brand found himself a specialist in the traffic in human flesh...
Monstrous Proposition. The time came when the most monstrous proposition in history was offered to Joel Brand. On April 25, 1944, Brand was taken before an SS lieutenant general called Adolf Eichmann. who told him: "I am prepared to sell you one million Jews. Blood for money: money for blood. You can take them from any country you like, where-ever you can find them. Whom do you want to save? Men who beget children? Women who can bear them? Old people? Children? Sit down and tell me." Brand sat down...