TINKES: There were about five goods trains standing ready at the northern railway station and the Jews were fetched out of their beds. Those who could actually prove that they had been French citizens for more than ten to twelve years were allowed to remain, but all the others who had integrated since then, refugees and foreign Jews, were taken away. The French police broke in on them suddenly, pulled them from their beds, packed them into lorries and off the goods trains went—off towards RUSSIA; the lot of them were transported away to the East. Of course there were fantastic scenes; women jumping out of third-floor windows into the street and so on. Nothing was done on our side—it was all the French police, who did that, who carried out the whole business, none of us took part. I was told—I can’t know whether it is true or not, anyhow there was some garrison duty (?) man who had worked in a Russian P/W camp for a long time in the general “Gouvernement”—I once had a talk with him out there, we happened to meet in the train and the conversation came round to that subject. “Yes,” he said, “the transports arrived at our place. I was beyond WARSAW, near DEBLIN, and they arrived there and were de-loused and that was the end of it.” I said: “Why de-loused? If a man comes from FRANCE, he doesn’t need to be de-loused.” “Well,” he said, “they are transit camps for soldiers coming from the eastern front, they are de-loused there and then go on leave; and the Jews from the West go to those de-lousing camps too. There are large tanks there, only the Jews get a different de-lousing mixture in their bathing tanks. It takes perhaps a half an hour or an hour, when there are about 200 men in it, and then you can’t find anything but a few gold teeth, rings or something, everything else has been dissolved. That is drained off…. . camp.” That was the way they de-loused the Jew! They put them into these baths, he said and once they were all in, an electric current is passed through the whole thing; that knocks them over and then the acids are added which dissolved the whole damned lot completely. Of course it made my hair stand on end!296
This story weaves historically accurate details and imaginary elements together into a rumor about how the bodies of victims were completely destroyed. The parts about Jews being deported from France and deceived as to the purpose of the “delousing” are based on fact. Victims heading into the gas chambers were told they were going to be disinfected. The bits about baths with electric currents, into which acids are then poured, were a product of the sort of imagination typical of rumors.
Rumors are an emotional form of communication, spreading a feeling of something monstrous or uncanny. As such, they express an element that rarely occurs in the soldiers’ conversations: feelings.
