In Europe

trains, the efficiency with which executions were carried out, the unthinkability of the number of victims: not dozens or even hundreds, but millions. The Holocaust was a very different phenomenon from those other, all too frequent antiSemitic atrocities in European history. It was, in addition to all the rest, a bureaucratic excess in which hundreds of thousands of Europeans calmly took part, simply because they attached greater importance to the order and regularity of their section, service, army unit or business department than to their individual conscience.
    In the
Observer
of 9 April, 1944, Sebastian Haffner published a lucid, nigh-prophetic portrait of Albert Speer. According to Haffner, Speer was the ‘embodiment of the revolution of managers’: not corrupt, gaudy or garish like the Nazis, but intelligent and courteous. He was the prototype of the kind of man who became increasingly important in this war:‘the pure technocrat, the classless, brilliant sort with no background, whose only goal is to make a career for himself.’ Precisely that lightness, that lack of reflection, allowed all young men of his ilk to continue operating ‘the horrifying machinery of our age’, right up until the end.
    In a certain sense the Holocaust can be seen as an expression of an almost religious fanaticism, and at the same time as a wilful blindness, a deep, collective moral lapse. This is not a popular explanation. It is, after all, much more disturbing than all the theories that grasp at antiSemitism and the evil of the German Nazi elite. It implies that a similar mass persecution, using the current technology, bureaucracies and systems of repression and manipulation, could take place again tomorrow in a different place and against a different group. The technocrats will remain. In Haffner's words: ‘This is their age. We shall be rid of the Hitlers and the Himmlers, but the Speers, whatever happens to them as individuals, shall be with us for a long time.’

Chapter THIRTY-THREE
Warsaw
    IN 1941, A VISITOR WROTE OF THE WARSAW GHETTO:
    The streets are so crowded that one can barely move ahead. Everyone walks about in rags and tatters. People often possess nothing but a shirt. There is noise and shouting everywhere. High, plaintive children's voices cut through it all. From the ‘Aryan’ side, curiosity seekers peer at the pitiful spectacle of the tattered crowd. The children are the ghetto's true breadwinners. When a German looks the other way for only a second, they slip handily to the Aryan side. The things they buy there, bread, potatoes and such, are hidden skilfully under their rags. The challenge then is to slip back in the same fashion.
    Thousands of shabby beggars elicit memories of famines in India. A half-starved mother tries to feed her child from a desiccated breast. An older child lies beside her, presumably dead. You see dying people lying spreadeagled in the middle of the street. Their legs are swollen, often frozen, their faces twisted in agony.
    Sometimes the sentries will stop a group of Jews and order them to undress and roll in the muck. They are often forced to dance as well. The sentries stand and watch, bent double with laughter.
    A few rather ramshackle houses, a section of tram rails, an ornament in a hallway, a potholed street a few hundred metres long is all that is left of the neighbourhood where this once happened. A grey neighbourhood of apartment buildings has been built where the old ghetto once stood. I find one section of the infamous wall with which the ghetto was sealedoff: behind a stinking courtyard, along a little street where dubious men use a gentle form of extortion to horn in on the municipal parking revenues, behind Elektroland, the Holiday Inn and a branch of the Nationale Nederlanden insurance company.
    Little children are playing between the apartment blocks, it is a warm day, the leaves of poplars sway above the children's heads, making dancing spots of sunlight. I ask directions from a young woman walking along with a little girl; they say they are each other's favourite niece and favourite aunt. They walk along with me for a while, then go skipping off, it looks as if they are floating with pleasure.
    The young woman turns and points around her.
    Yes, here was the Jewish ghetto.
    On 19 April, 1943, when most of the ghetto's residents had already been taken away, a final, desperate uprising took place. The Jewish organisation – there were even kibbutzim in the