Word: crematoriums
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...business is gruesome enough: an assembly-line crematorium that makes up in volume what it cuts in price. But Harbor Lawn Mount Olive Mortuary, Cemetery and Crematory in Costa Mesa, Calif., is accused of even grislier practices. To handle its backlog of bodies, former employees claim, the mortuary crammed corpses five at a time into gas ovens built for one. The jumbled ashes were allegedly dumped into 30-gal. trash cans. Then, says Bob Kilburn, a funeral refrigeration-supply manufacturer who installed a cooler at Harbor Lawn three years ago, "they'd scoop up ashes with a pail...
...crematorium might have been a big bakeshop or a very small blast furnace. Here the Nazis carted the bodies, straight from the gas chambers. They cut them up scientifically. They could disintegrate 1,900 people...
...dean, a "hungry observer," describes the bleak utilitarianism and pinched daily life in the old Eastern European capital. Earthquake damage is crudely patched if repaired at all; the public crematorium is a factory where the dead are reduced unceremoniously to convenient size; his wife's childhood home, once a center of culture and comfort, is only a notch above a slum tenement: "Radiators turned cold after breakfast. The faucets went dry at 8 a.m. and did not run again until evening. The bathtub had no stopper. You flushed the toilet with buckets of water...
Behind the wat is a shack where the coffins are kept before cremation; and behind that, near a patch of sweet potatoes, the crematorium sits in a clearing under a shed, like a doll's chapel. There is no activity there today. But the wat itself is busy with a festival marking the last day of the Buddhist Lent. A monk in yellow sits cross-legged on a table, while children crouched in a circle burn incense. The smoke is supposed to fly to heaven in order to beckon their ancestors to descend and join them...
...phosphorescent volume, Historian Walter Laqueur quotes a war correspondent in 1945: "It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind." That something was the archipelago of Europe's death camps, where Nazi virulence reached its terminals: the medical experiment, the gas chamber and the crematorium...