Putin merece um Nuremberg-2 só para ele: leiam Benjamin B. Ferencz sobre o Direito Internacional Humanitário

 

Enforcing International Law—A Way to World Peace: A Documentary History and Analysis

1983

Author

By Benjamin B. Ferencz

Publisher

Oceana Publications

ISBN

0379121476

Download Volume 1

Introduction By Louis B. Sohn*

Athens, Georgia, February 1983

This is the third part of a grand trilogy. In the first two parts, Benjamin B. Ferencz presented collections of documents relating to the efforts to define aggression, the supreme international crime, and to proposals for the establishment of an international criminal court for the punishment of individuals guilty of international crimes. The new book is even more ambitious. Mr. Ferencz has attempted this time to trace, through important documents, the evolution of the idea of enforcing international law on States which have committed a gross violation of a basic principle of international law.

Many years have elapsed since Payson S. Wild wrote an excellent historical book on Sanctions and Treaty Enforcement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1934). Ironically, the main international experiment with sanctions, the unsuccessful attempt of the League of Nations to stop Mussolini’s attack on Ethiopia, happened one year later, in 1935. Many books have been written since then, trying to explain why this effort to enforce international law has failed, and more recently there has been another series of books on sanctions against Rhodesia and South Africa.

Mr. Ferencz provides both a history of ideas about international enforcement since ancient times and a thorough documentation of proposals on the subject since the sixteenth century to the present. He points pout that already the first writers on international law have emphasized the importance of devising means for ensuring compliance by States with the rules of international law. He notes that in the nineteenth century international agreements were made which were designed to increase compliance with humanitarian rules of international law not only in times of peace but even in times of war. This lawmaking process culminated in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, and was followed by the Geneva Conventions of 1929 and 1949 and the Geneva Protocols of 1977.

In earlier centuries law enforcement depended very much on self-help, retaliation and reprisals, as well illustrated in Evelyn S. Colbert’s Retaliation in International Law (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1948). Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries reprisals were gradually transferred from private hands to public ones and privateers were replaced by naval vessels (see A.E. Hindmarsh, Force in Peace 52-56 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1933). Another transfer occurred in the twentieth century, when an effort was made to substitute enforcement of international law by international organizations for enforcement by individual States or groups of States. As noted before, the League of Nations – though successful in some cases – was not able to stop aggression by Axis powers in the 1930’s, not only in Ethiopia, but also in China and Czechoslovakia.

The framers of the United Nations Charter were determined to avoid the mistakes of the League and the eminent French statesman, Joseph Paul-Boncour, reported with pride to the United Nations Conference at an Francisco in 1945 that “this flaw has been eliminated,” as an international force will be placed at the disposal of the Security Council to ensure respect for its decisions. He cited Pascal’s statement that “[s]trength without justice is tyrannical, and justice without strength is a mockery.” The forces to be provided by Member States under Article 43 of the Charter will give the UN “unquestionable superiority…over an aggressor rising alone in rebellion.” He concluded: “That is the great thing, the great historic act accomplished by the San Francisco conference, which gives to the world the hope, based on an oblivious reality, that henceforward it may live in peace.”

Unfortunately this prophecy was not fulfilled, as it was premised on the unity of the permanent members of the Security Council which disintegrated almost immediately after the Second World War was terminated. As Mr. Ferencz documents it in his book, one consequence of the disunity of the Big Powers was the inability to agree on the composition of the United Nations military force. Consequently, when the Korean crisis arose in 1950, the United Nations had to improvise and to rely on voluntary contributions by seventeen States in order to repel the North Korean and Chinese aggression. The United Nations article in other cases has been limited to peacekeeping forces, policing a truce or an armistice line, and to economic sanctions. In some cases, such as the war between Iran and Iraq, the United Nations has not been able to stop the hostilities, and was obliged to concentrate on mediation efforts.

Mr. Ferencz found it necessary to broaden the scope of his book to include documents relating not only to the enforcement of law and maintenance of peace, but also to international law-making, peaceful settlement of disputes and the achievement of economic and social justice. As he points out in his Afterward, there is a close connection between all these aspects of international order. To achieve peace, progress must be made in all areas. Without such progress, international law enforcement will not become a reality. One has to agree also with his statement that it is not rational to conclude that “humankind can invent the means of destroying the world yet lacks the intelligence to prevent it from happening.”

For all those who believe that pour globe is not doomed to destruction and that the combined efforts of people of good will can bring about a better future, this book is an indispensable tool. It documents clearly that, step by step, humanity has made considerable progress toward building the institutions needed to achieve peace and justice, and that only a few additional steps – suggested in several documents included in this book – have to be taken to reach that goal.

* Bemis Professor of International Law

Nazistas ladroes: obras roubadas, confiscadas de judeus (Le Monde)

Près de 1 500 tableaux confisqués par les nazis découverts à Munich

Le Monde.fr avec AFP | 03.11.2013

Près de 1 500 tableaux de maître, propriétés de collectionneurs juifs, auraient été retrouvés en 2011 dans l'appartement d'un octogénaire à Munich, révèle dimanche 3 novembre l'hebdomadaire allemand Focus. Une découverte qui jusqu'ici n'avait pas été rendue publique et que le parquet d'Augsbourg, compétent dans cette affaire, n'a pas voulu confirmer.

Parmi les toiles, d'une valeur totale de près de 1 milliard d'euros, figureraient des œuvres de Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, et de grands noms allemands comme Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Max Beckmann et Max Liebermann.

D'après Focus, le père de l'octogénaire, Hildebrand Gurlitt – célèbre collectionneur allemand –, avait acheté ces tableaux dans les années 1930 et 1940 : des toiles soit confisquées par les nazis à des juifs et revendues ensuite, soit vendues à bas prix par des juifs en fuite, soit saisies par les agents du IIIe Reich parce que considérées comme de "l'art dégénéré" – par opposition à l'art officiel prisé par Hitler – et revendues ensuite par les nazis.

UN "MATISSE" DE LA COLLECTION DE PAUL ROSENBERG

Hildebrand Gurlitt, peu apprécié des nazis au départ à cause d'une grand-mère juive, sut se rendre indispensable auprès des dignitaires du IIIe Reich grâce à ses innombrables contacts et ses immenses connaissances dans le domaine de l'art. Il fut ainsi chargé par le ministre de la propagande, Joseph Goebbels, de vendre dans des pays étrangers des tableaux d'"art dégénéré" exposés dans des musées allemands. Après la seconde guerre mondiale, le collectionneur sut se défendre de ses accointances suspectes en mettant en avant ses origines juives et sa non-appartenance aux organisations du Reich. Il affirma également avoir aidé des juifs et des artistes persécutés en achetant leurs biens.

Pendant près de cinquante ans, le fils avait gardé ces tableaux dans des pièces sombres de son appartement. Au fil des années, il les avait vendus et avait vécu du fruit de ces ventes. Selon le journal allemand, son comportement suspect a amené la police allemande à perquisitionner son appartement en 2011, ce qui leur a permis de découvrir les tableaux. Parmi les œuvres découvertes, se trouve un tableau d'Henri Matisse qui avait appartenu au collectionneur juif Paul Rosenberg, forcé d'abandonner sa collection lorsqu'il avait fui Paris.

Saving Italian art, from Nazis and from Allied bombs - book review

‘Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis’ by Robert M. Edsel

By Andrew Nagorski

The Washington Post: July 12, 2013

SAVING ITALY The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis 
By Robert M. Edsel 
Norton. 454 pp. $28.95

In 1914, shortly after Germany invaded neutral Belgium, the German authorities exacted revenge for the shooting of several of their soldiers on patrol in Louvain. They executed more than 200 civilians, then methodically set fire to homes and to the University of Louvain’s library. About 250,000 books went up in flames, including 800 that had been printed before the year 1500. Rebuilt and lavishly restocked between the wars, the library once again went up in flames in May 1940, the result of German shelling in World War II. This time, 900,000 books were reduced to ashes, 200,000 of which had been donated by Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
Wars routinely destroy not just lives but cultural treasures. Yet Robert M. Edsel keeps demonstrating that, for all its horrors and destruction, World War II included unprecedented efforts to preserve Europe’s artistic masterpieces as the Allies retook the continent.
In his earlier book “The Monuments Men,” Edsel focused on the American and British museum directors and art historians who were assigned that task in northwest Europe. (George Clooney is now directing and starring in a film based on that volume.) In “Saving Italy,” he zeroes in on members of the same unit sent into the field during the Italian campaign that started in 1943, when the Allies mounted their drive to topple Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime and expel the country’s German partners-turned-occupiers.
And what a dramatic story it is, given the extent of Italy’s artistic heritage, the looting of the retreating German forces and the intrigues within the German high command as they recognized they were fighting a losing battle. At the heart of Edsel’s lively narrative are the two most important art specialists dispatched to Italy in 1943: Deane Keller, 42 that year, a Yale art professor with an in-depth knowledge of Italy, and Fred Hartt, 29, a rising star of the Yale University Art Gallery. Because Keller was self-effacing while Hartt was expansive and attracted publicity, the two were occasionally at odds. But they shared the same passionate commitment to their mission.
During a nighttime raid on Milan in August 1943, the Royal Air Force offered an object lesson about how much was in jeopardy. A bomb landed 80 feet from Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” destroying the wall of the refectory of a Dominican monastery. Thanks to strategically placed sandbags and scaffolding, the painting survived, but initially no one dared risk digging through the debris to see whether it really had.
Such episodes compelled Allied commanders, from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower on down, to pay more than lip service to the notion that their offensives should seek to minimize the destruction of cultural treasures. While the safety of their troops always came first, much could be done to that end, whether it was a matter of keeping troops from billeting in architectural jewels or of more selective targeting.
Most of the art specialists, as Keller put it, saw themselves as engaged in “a personal crusade” to save whatever they could. Their biggest frustration was that they often felt like bystanders, able to move in only after the destruction had taken place. After assessing the American bombing of Padua, which included a direct hit on the Chapel of Mantegna with its famed frescoes, Hartt despaired, “I should characterize the situation as desperate.”
The other source inducing high anxiety: the looting of the art treasures by retreating German forces. Ironically, the Germans had learned some lessons from World War I and enlisted their own art specialists to avoid the kind of wholesale destruction that had been evident at Louvain. But they wanted both to claim credit for preserving the treasures and to send them home.
Most infamously, Hermann Goering demanded a steady flow of priceless objects from Monte Cassino, Florence and elsewhere. Keller, Hartt and their Italian counterparts were continually trying to trace the Germans’ stunning hauls, and how they largely succeeded makes for a riveting read. So do some of the other spectacular successes in undoing the damage of warfare. In Pisa, a city hit hard by American bombers and German artillery, Keller orchestrated a massive effort to save the gorgeous frescoes of the Camposanto, with a team of engineers and workers erecting protective covering while they also gathered up countless specks of painted plaster for reassembling later. For his role in returning a vast trove of art to Florence, Hartt was named an honorary citizen of that city after the fighting ended.
Edsel’s larger point in this and his previous book — and through the work of his Monuments Men Foundation — is that the achievements of both men and their colleagues should be “a source of pride for all Americans.” While he was deployed, Keller did not think that such a moment of recognition would ever come. He suspected that the larger narrative of the global conflagration would overshadow everything else. At a time when millions were dying, the fate of Italy’s masterpieces could easily be seen as a mere footnote. “I wonder if this whole story will ever come out for people to know about and to realize — I doubt it,” Keller wrote in a letter to his wife.
On that particular point, Edsel’s book proves him dead wrong.

Andrew Nagorski is vice president of the EastWest Institute and the author of “Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power.”

Os diarios de Rosenberg, o teorico do antisemitismo nazista, revelados nos EUA

A matéria abaixo me traz à lembrança o excelente romance histórico -- baseado em fatos reais - de Irvin Yalom, The Spinoza Problem, que li na versão em francês, e que trata justamente de Rosenberg e sua "coleta" dos livros de Spinoza. Seria interessante saber se nos diários existem notas sobre essa "incursão literária" pela Holanda, em busca dos livros de Spinoza.

Os interessados podem ler: The Spinoza Problem: A Novel (ver na Amazon, ou na Abebooks, onde acabo de recomprar o livro, na versão em inglês, o original; custou menos de 2 dólares).

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Alfred Rosenberg Diary Found: U.S. Finds Long-Lost Documents Of Top Nazi Leader And Hitler Aide

Reuters  |  Posted: 06/09/2013 6:00 pm EDT 

By John Shiffman

WASHINGTON, June 9 (Reuters) - The U.S. government has recovered 400 pages from the long-lost diary of Alfred Rosenberg, a confidant of Adolf Hitler who played a central role in the extermination of millions of Jews and others during World War Two.

A preliminary U.S. government assessment reviewed by Reuters asserts the diary could offer new insight into meetings Rosenberg had with Hitler and other top Nazi leaders, including Heinrich Himmler and Herman Goering. It also includes details about the German occupation of the Soviet Union, including plans for mass killings of Jews and other Eastern Europeans.

"The documentation is of considerable importance for the study of the Nazi era, including the history of the Holocaust," according to the assessment, prepared by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. "A cursory content analysis indicates that the material sheds new light on a number of important issues relating to the Third Reich's policy. The diary will be an important source of information to historians that complements, and in part contradicts, already known documentation."

How the writings of Rosenberg, a Nazi Reich minister who was convicted at Nuremberg and hanged in 1946, might contradict what historians believe to be true is unclear. Further details about the diary's contents could not be learned, and a U.S. government official stressed that the museum's analysis remains preliminary.

But the diary does include details about tensions within the German high-command - in particular, the crisis caused by the flight of Rudolf Hess to Britain in 1941, and the looting of art throughout Europe, according to the preliminary analysis.

The recovery is expected to be announced this week at a news conference in Delaware held jointly by officials from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Department of Justice and Holocaust museum.

The diary offers a loose collection of Rosenberg's recollections from spring 1936 to winter 1944, according to the museum's analysis. Most entries are written in Rosenberg's looping cursive, some on paper torn from a ledger book and others on the back of official Nazi stationery, the analysis said.

Rosenberg was an early and powerful Nazi ideologue, particularly on racial issues. He directed the Nazi party's foreign affairs department and edited the Nazi newspaper. Several of his memos to Hitler were cited as evidence during the post-war Nuremberg trials.

Rosenberg also directed the systematic Nazi looting of Jewish art, cultural and religious property throughout Europe. The Nazi unit created to seize such artifacts was called Task Force Reichsleiter Rosenberg.

He was convicted of crimes against humanity and was one of a dozen senior Nazi officials executed in October 1946. His diary, once held by Nuremberg prosecutors as evidence, vanished after the trial.

A Nuremberg prosecutor, Robert Kempner, was long suspected by U.S. officials of smuggling the diary back to the United States.

Born in Germany, Kempner had fled to America in the 1930s to escape the Nazis, only to return for post-war trials. He is credited with helping reveal the existence of the Wannsee Protocol, the 1942 conference during which Nazi officials met to coordinate the genocide against the Jews, which they termed "The Final Solution."

Kempner cited a few Rosenberg diary excerpts in his memoir, and in 1956 a German historian published entries from 1939 and 1940. But the bulk of the diary never surfaced.

When Kempner died in 1993 at age 93, legal disputes about his papers raged for nearly a decade between his children, his former secretary, a local debris removal contractor and the Holocaust museum. The children agreed to give their father's papers to the Holocaust museum, but when officials arrived to retrieve them from his home in 1999, they discovered that many thousands of pages were missing.

After the 1999 incident, the FBI opened a criminal investigation into the missing documents. No charges were filed in the case.

But the Holocaust museum has gone on to recover more than 150,000 documents, including a trove held by Kempner's former secretary, who by then had moved into the New York state home of an academic named Herbert Richardson.

The Rosenberg diary, however, remained missing.

Early this year, the Holocaust museum and an agent from Homeland Security Investigations tried to locate the missing diary pages. They tracked the diary to Richardson, who was living near Buffalo.

Richardson declined to comment. A government official said more details will be announced at the news conference. (Reporting by John Shiffman in Washington and Kristina R. Cooke in San Francisco; Editing by Blake Morrison and Leslie Gevirtz)

Holocausto nazista: bem mais extenso do que o conhecido (NYT)

News Analysis

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Collection of Eugenia Hochberg Lanceter

A group of Jewish women at the entrance to the Brody ghetto in Eastern Galicia, 1942. The sign is written in German, Ukrainian and Polish.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

The New York Times,  March 1, 2013

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

Multimedia

Map

Ghettos for Jews in Eastern Europe

Map

SS Concentration Camps

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear.

The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions.

The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.)

The existence of many individual camps and ghettos was previously known only on a fragmented, region-by-region basis. But the researchers, using data from some 400 contributors, have been documenting the entire scale for the first time, studying where they were located, how they were run, and what their purpose was.

The brutal experience of Henry Greenbaum, an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor who lives outside Washington, typifies the wide range of Nazi sites.

When Mr. Greenbaum, a volunteer at the Holocaust museum, tells visitors today about his wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps.

But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his memory as deeply as the concentration camp number — A188991 — tattooed on his left forearm.

In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.

First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.

Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.

By the age of 17, Mr. Greenbaum had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was on his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945. “Nobody even knows about these places,” Mr. Greenbaum said. “Everything should be documented. That’s very important. We try to tell the youngsters so that they know, and they’ll remember.”

The research could have legal implications as well by helping a small number of survivors document their continuing claims over unpaid insurance policies, looted property, seized land and other financial matters.

“HOW many claims have been rejected because the victims were in a camp that we didn’t even know about?” asked Sam Dubbin, a Florida lawyer who represents a group of survivors who are seeking to bring claims against European insurance companies.

Dr. Megargee, the lead researcher, said the project was changing the understanding among Holocaust scholars of how the camps and ghettos evolved.

As early as 1933, at the start of Hitler’s reign, the Third Reich established about 110 camps specifically designed to imprison some 10,000 political opponents and others, the researchers found. As Germany invaded and began occupying European neighbors, the use of camps and ghettos was expanded to confine and sometimes kill not only Jews but also homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe. The camps and ghettos varied enormously in their mission, organization and size, depending on the Nazis’ needs, the researchers have found.

The biggest site identified is the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, which held about 500,000 people at its height. But as few as a dozen prisoners worked at one of the smallest camps, the München-Schwabing site in Germany. Small groups of prisoners were sent there from the Dachau concentration camp under armed guard. They were reportedly whipped and ordered to do manual labor at the home of a fervent Nazi patron known as “Sister Pia,” cleaning her house, tending her garden and even building children’s toys for her.

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.

The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.

In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.

Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

Eric Lichtblau is a reporter for The New York Times in Washington and a visiting fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

A version of this news analysis appeared in print on March 3, 2013, on page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking.

2094) Holocausto: nunca esquecer, jamais

Um conto de quem esteve no inferno, e miraculosamente, sobreviveu...

Eu nunca estive lá. Será?
Beyla Genauer*
Originalmente publicado no livro Galo de Chagall (1994)

O último vagão, um trem sem fim. Estávamos espremidos como sardinhas em lata. Uso esta expressão porque ela é universal. Não sei como descrever estes vagões sem janelas, sem portas, sem frestas, sem ar, carregados com homens-espantalhos de barbas brancas e compridas. Não eram vermelhas. Como, quer meu amigo. Eram brancas. Eu vi.

E aquelas mulheres vagas, com os lenços amarradas sob os queixos. Não, eles não eram multicoloridos como insiste o mesmo amigo. Eram negros. Eu vi. Não vi crianças. Onde estariam? E eu, como fui parar lá? Não sei. E meu pai? E minha mãe? E meus irmãos? Onde estariam? Não sei.

Os homens eram altos, muito altos. Magros, muito magros e todos iguais. Listas. Vestiam listas. Não, não eram como roupas de prisioneiros, que são listadas. Uma espécie de caftans com listas. Listas como as da túnica de seda de José, filho de Jacó. Sim aquele da Bíblia. Aquele que os irmãos venderam aos egípcios por puro ciúme. Aquele que perdeu a túnica nas mãos da mulher de Putifár ao fugir dos seus anseios sexuais.

As rodas do trem ecoavam listas, li-tas, li-tas, li-tas. Na cabeça os homens não tinham solidéus, o que seria próprio. Ostentavam algo entre sztreimel-casquete-capuz de Klu-Kux-Klan. E os olhos! Olhos de judeus, olhos de judias. Grandes, assustados, apavorados, enterrados na cabeça com olheiras negras que chegavam até as barbas, até os lenços.

Confinados em trens de gado. Gado pensa? Não sei. Mas eu, confinada, comecei a pensar. Penso, logo existo. Se existo, preciso agir. Fazer o que? Fazer o que? Fazer o que? As rodas do trem começaram a falar, registrar, registrar, registrar, re-re-re-gis-gis-gis, trar-trar-trar. Esta é, então, a minha tarefa?!

Comecei a me esgueirar de um vagão para o outro. Espremia-me por entre a massa de espantalhos e estendendo as mãos implorava: lápis e papel, lápis e papel. O trem continuou rolando e as rodas do trem ecoando, la-pis e pa-pel, la-pis e pa-pel.

Nenhuma presença da policia, mas o medo dela pairava na falta de ar do trem. Proibido escrever. Apagar a memória. Apagar. A-pa-gar, memória, memória, me-mo-ri-a, me-mo-ri-a, a-pa-gar, ga-gar-gar-me-me-mó-mó-mó-ria-a-ri-a ri-a!

Os trapos humanos iam estendendo-me, sorrateiramente, uns tocos de lápis, uns pedaços de carvão, uns pedaços de papeis sujos, pedaços de cartolinas sebentas, postais velhos e amassados, retratos amarfanhados, quem sabe de entes queridos. Testamentos. Testemunhas. Eu? As rodas ecoavam. Você, você, você, você, você.

- Guarda menina, esconde bem!

- Tudo em silêncio, sem som. Eu lia seus lábios descarnados.

- Prometo, prometo, escondo, escondo. Pro-me-to, es-con-do, pro-me-to.

Trêmula, eu prosseguia. Balançava a cabeça em sinal de agradecimento, enfiando tudo na minha roupa de baixo, mais imunda que os papeis que recebera. Os tocos de lápis me espetavam, arranhando os meus seios que mal começaram a desabrochar. Desvairada, continuava para o próximo vagão. Tudo se repetia. Tudo em silêncio. Consciente do perigo. Pe-ri-go. Si-i-len-cio. Sh-shu-sh-sh-sh-s-s-s.

Lentamente o rolar das rodas foi diminuendo. Parou. É agora! É agora que eles vão subir! Vão me revistar! Eu estava pronta para o sacrifício como o Isaac no Monte Moriah. Mas e os outros? E os meus papeis?!

Deus de Abraão, de Isaac e Jacó, não permita que eles sejam incriminados pelo meu desatino. A minha prece por Deus foi ouvida e o milagre do Moriah se repetiu. Nada. Ninguém subiu. Silêncio tumular. Ninguém sabe o que ainda pode acontecer, melhor é eu voltar para o meu vagão.

Comecei a arrastar-me de quatro para o último vagão. Outro milagre. Num canto, bem no fim do vagão, no meio de todas as barbas brancas, reconheci a barba branca do meu avô. E aqueles olhos meigos, amendoados, sorrindo para mim, exatamente como lá em Tarkov, quando me metia estouvadamente, intrometendo-me entre a sua barba branca e a Guemarah.

- Vovô me dá cinco groshen para comprar balas, dá?

- Claro sheifale claro.

Eu era a única neta que ousava perturba-lo, quando ele estava perdido em seus estudos talmúdicos. Minha mãe enrubescia, com o meu comportamento moleque.

Suja, estufada, agarrei-me a ele e comecei a soluçar.

- Zeide, zeide, zeide.

- Sh sheifale sh.

- Quando isto acabar, eu, tudo vou contar! .

- Sim carneirinho, sim.

- Eu te amo muito zeide.

- Silêncio carneirinho, silêncio.

Súbito, comecei a ouvir novamente as rodas do trem, mas não sentia o menor movimento, o barulho das rodas tornava-se cada vez menos audível. Lápis e pa-pel, lá-pis e pa-pel-mor-te-m-o-r-t-e, m-o-r-t-t-e-e-e-e-e.

- Zeide, desligaram nosso vagão.

- Shmá Israel Adonai eloheinu adonai Echad.

Dei um berro vindo do útero. O esforço me acordou, eu estava sozinha numa confortável cama, em um hotel de cinco estrelas, em Copacabana. Meu único filho estava cantando no coro de uma igreja, em Santana.
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*Beyla Genauer é atriz e escritora. Publicou os livros de contos curtos Levantar Voo, Galo de Chagal e O Lobo, todos esgotados. É casada com o jornalista Nahum Sirotsky.