Word: umschlagplatz
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...Park. The story has been told before--a once thriving Jewish community, the largest outside New York, squeezed incrementally by humiliation, poverty, hunger, cold, starvation, epidemics of typhus and tuberculosis, marauding Nazis who murdered on a free-lance basis, and at last, mass systematic deportations, the hopeless trudge to Umschlagplatz (the transshipment station) at the end of Zamenhof Street, and the trains to "resettlement," which meant to death camps like Treblinka...
Author Levin ranges skillfully through Berlin ministries, where Nazi bureaucrats enthusiastically pursued their policy of Endlosung ("final solution") for the Jews, to Warsaw's Umschlagplatz, a transfer point to Treblinka, where a child's tongue was cut out "with a pocket knife for making a face at a guard." One chilling passage portrays Eichmann himself, standing over a killing pit near Minsk and watching a pleading Jewish mother hold up her baby just before the bullets strike. "I was so close that later I found bits of brains splattered on my long leather coat," Eichmann said afterward...
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