LEST SOME FORGET

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 479, 27 August 1948, Page 20

LEST SOME FORGET

RAVENSBRUCK. By Denise Dufournier. Allen & Unwin. REVOLT AGAINST HITLER. The Personal Account of Fabian von, Schlabrendorft. Eyre & Spottiswoode. T is no doubt good for us, and for our children, that authentic echoes of the Nazi. terror should continue to be recorded. Most of us have short memories, and books like these, which are reeords of actual experience, and not vulgar attempts to exploit horror, will. help. to prevent us from lapsing again into the frame of mind so many of us had before Belsen. In the most horrible way, too, each of these books corroborates the other. The first, translated from the French, is a woman’s account of the suffering of dazed and dying women jn circumstances of such horror that it is difficult. already. to believe that they existed. They did; .and whether Mme. Dufournier over .or under dramatizes her own experiences, the over-all picture can no longer be questioned. But if anyone did feel like questioning it, he would find his scepticism disappearing as he read the second of these booksan account by one of the survivors of the revolt against Hitler in 1944. For this is Nazism on the higher levels, and the more sharply the scene changes the more it is the same scene, with the same actors, and the same methods and policy. The story of the revolt itself is as absorbing as any thriller of fiction, and when it fails, the methods by which Himmler attempted. to make other revolts less likely differ only in detail from the methods employed by Hitler's thugs everywhere. The brutality to which the conspirators were subjected is sickening even afterall the other horrors with which Hitlerism made the world familiar. But what ‘makes it more disgusting than anything else is the calm and lofty courage of some of those condemned to: torture and death._ Here is a note written by one of the younger conspirators, with his hands shackled, a few minutes before his execution: "Dear Mother, now I have overcome the last tremor of unrest that shakes the treetop before it crashes. And thus I have reached the goal of mankind. For we can and ought to know how to endure consciously what the inanimate plant suffers. Goodbye. They are coming to fetch me. A thousand kisses. Your son." It is well to remember .that the Nazis did not debase all their fellow Germans.