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the children were deported from the camp. . . . The second half's turn came two days later. "The day before their deportation, the children were searched, like everyone else. Boys and girls of two and three years old came with their small parcels into the search-hut, where the inspectors of the Police for Jewish Questions carefully went through the luggage and sent them out with their belongings unwrapped. . . . The tiny brooches, ear-rings and small bracelets worn by the little girls were all confiscated by the inspectors of the Police for Jewish Questions. One day, a small girl of ten came out of the hut, her ear bleeding—the searcher had torn off the ear-ring which she, in her terror, had not been able to unfasten quickly enough. And in the second half of August 1942 the crematoria of Auschwitz incinerated, at the same time as their nurses, the four thousand children— who had been wrenched from their mothers." There were mothers who knew exactly where these convoys were heading and who had the supreme courage to hurl their children out of the window rather than to surrender them to the Germans. This infamy provoked a keen reaction on the part of the population of Paris and some of them did all they could to rescue a few of the victims from the murderers. But neither the heart of Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris, nor that of the Holy Father was touched by the ghastly holocaust. Pius XII, the Pope who was reigning so gloriously, took great care not to condemn this new "Massacre of the Innocents". And with very good reason. . . . Indeed, let us for a moment study the Dannecker document. This clearly shows that these arrests were subject to the decision of the Vichy Government. Now, we have already seen that this government took no decision in the matter without the consent of the Roman Curia. Must we stress the obvious conclusion ?12 *
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But it was in eastern Europe that the anti-Jewish crusade was especially rife; it was of unprecedented extent and its atrocity verged 12
For the reader's information, here are a few quotations defining the Roman Church's established doctrine on this subject: "Sword, sword, leave your sheath—sharpen yourself and shine, ready to kill and to slaughter" (the heretics), Arnould, Abbot of Citeaux, Pontifical Legate. "Not only ran heretics be excommunicated, but they can be justly killed", Saint Thomas of Aquinas, the angelic doctor. "It is right to kill heretics", Pius V. "The Church can condemn heretics to death, for their sole rights are on sufferance", Franz Wernz, Jesuit General, from 1906 to 1915.