I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenison.

This is episode 101.

Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today?

I promise I'll be on my best behavior.

I promise you.

It's going to be a struggle.

It'll be a battle, an internal battle, but I think I could win this battle.

So you have nothing worry about.

All right.

Here we go.

New chapter, chapter 21, during the Soviet-German War.

After Crystal Knock 1938, the German Jews lost their last illusions about the mortal danger they were

facing with hitler's campaign in poland the deadly storm headed east yet nobody expected

that the beginning of the soviet german war would move nazi politics to a new level toward total

physical extermination of Jews.

While they naturally expected all kinds of hardships from the German conquest,

Soviet Jews could not envision the indiscriminate mass killings of men and women of all ages.

One cannot foresee such things.

Thus, the terrible and inescapable fate befell those who remained in the German occupied territories without a chance to resist.

Lives ended abruptly, but before their death, they had to pass through either initial forced relocation to a Jewish ghetto or a forced labor camp or to gas vans or through digging one's own grave and stripping before execution.

The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia gives many names of the Russian Jews who fell victims of the Jewish catastrophe. It names of those who perished in Rostov, Smyroupil, Odessa, Minsk, Belostok,

Kanos, and Narva.

...