https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/tintin-and-the-jews/
The journalist, one of the real figures on whom the cartoon Tintin was based, spent three days in the Lwow ghetto. What he saw overturns much that I thought I knew about the Holocaust. The Jews he observed in the pretty Polish city, now in Ukraine, were crammed into hell: “The life they live here is infernal. They all want to flee.”
The people:
The sons of Israel, walking vultures, wander day and night in the alleyways, as though searching for scraps. Their hands wrapped in pieces of cloth, black against the snow, heads hunched into their shoulders by the mallet of misery, thoughtful, idle, standing still for no reason, in the middle of squares like prophets without a voice and without listeners, they afforest this ghetto rather than animate it, with their tormented, cypress-like silhouettes.
The centre of the ghetto:
A market? A field of manure, yes! The rabbits, whose skins are on offer, appear to have been slaughtered with a machine gun. The furs are nothing more than a mass of hair.
Streets of misery:
On the first day, I had to rush out from one of these doghouses in order to overcome the nausea caused by the smell. For the same reason, I had to rush out on the second day and twice on the third day. The two Jews who accompanied me cried and, in the evening, they sat at my table but were unable to eat.
Here were families, their children “crying of cold and hunger and rotting on the foulest of dung heaps”. In one dark basement two small infants stand beside something:
The pallet seems to stir. We lower our candles. A woman is lying there. But in what is she lying? In wet shavings? In stable straw? I touch it; it is cold and sticky. What is covering the woman would have once been a quilt, but is now nothing more than a mush of feathers and cloth oozing damp like a wall. We notice two more heads in the mush, tiny tots, four months, fifteen months old. The oldest smiles at the flame, which we wave above them. The woman did not utter a word.
