The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War

TO MY DAUGHTER RUJANA

He worked by the barbed wire and heard awful screams.

His field was there?

Yes, right up close. It wasn’t forbidden to work there.

So he worked, he farmed there?

Yes. Where the camp is now was partly his field. It was off limits, but they heard everything.

It didn’t bother him to work so near those screams?

At first it was unbearable. Then you got used to it.

Dialogue with a villager from present-day Treblinka about living close to the concentration camp at the time of extermination of the Jews (from Shoah – the Complete Text of the Film by Claude Lanzmann, Pantheon Books)