German Death/Concentration Camps in Poland

[gigi]

Map of Nazi Concentration Camps:



Camps were an essential part of the Nazis' systematic oppression and mass murder of Jews, political adversaries, and others considered socially and racially undesirable. There were concentration camps, forced labor camps, extermination or death camps, transit camps, and prisoner-of-war camps. The living conditions of all camps were brutal.

Six death or extermination camps were constructed in Poland. These so-called death factories were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibór, Lublin (also called Majdanek), and Chelmno. The primary purpose of these camps was the methodical killing of millions of innocent people. The first, Chelmno, began operating in late 1941. The others began their operations in 1942.

I have never been to Auschwitz or any of the extermination camps, but in the mid 1990’s I went to Dachau. It was an experience that forever changed how I looked at the Holocaust.


Entrance to Dachau







Entrance gate with the German words “Arbeit macht frei” - Work will make you free.


The Dachau concentration camp, the first such camp in Germany, was opened on March 22, 1933 in a former gun powder factory. The first prisoners were 200 members of the Communist and Social Democrats political parties who were arrested after the Reischstag (German Congressional building) was deliberately set on fire on the night of February 27, 1933. Some of the first prisoners were members of the Congress, who were suspected of plotting to overthrow Hitler who had just taken office as the German Chancellor on January 30, 1933. They were at first held in Landsberg prison, which was the same prison where Hitler served time after his attempt to take over the government on November 9, 1923.

The Dachau concentration camp was opened with the arrival of the first prisoners on March 22nd, 1933. This was the beginning of a terror system in Dachau that cannot be compared with any other state persecution and penal system. In June 1933, Theodor Eicke was appointed commandant of the concentration camp. He developed an organizational plan and rules with detailed stipulations, which were later to become valid for all concentration camps. Also from Eicke came the division of the concentration camp into two areas, namely the prisoners' camp surrounded by a variety of security facilities and guard towers and the so-called camp command area with administrative buildings and barracks for the SS.

Later appointed to the position of Inspector for all Concentration Camps, Eicke established the Dachau concentration camp as the model for all other camps and as the murder school for the SS. The SS had affixed the motto "Work will make you free" to the camp gate. The motto reflected the Nazi propaganda meant to trivialize the concentration camp for outsiders as a "labor and re-education camp." The motto also characterized the cynical mentality of the SS, who implemented forced labor as a method of torture and as an extension of the terror of concentration life.

The first prisoners were political opponents of the regime, communists, social democrats, trade unionists, also occasionally members of conservative and liberal political parties. The first Jewish prisoners were also sent to the Dachau concentration camp because of their political opposition. In the following years new groups were deported to Dachau: these included Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, members of the Jehovah's Witness, and priests. In the wake of the November pogrom alone, the so-called Reichskristallnacht ("The Night of Broken Glass"), more than 10,000 Jews were sent to the Dachau concentration camp.

From 1938 onwards, the Nazi aggression that was now directed outwards against other European countries became mirrored in the prisoner society within the camp: after the Anschluß (annexation or connection) with Austria in the spring of 1938, Austrian prisoners were deported to Dachau, while in the same year prisoners from the Sudeten German areas followed, in March 1939 came Czech prisoners, and after the start of the war prisoners from Poland, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. The German prisoners eventually became a minority; the largest national group was formed by the Polish prisoners, followed by prisoners from the Soviet Union.

On a warm, sunny July day I boarded the tour bus with a handful of tourists from other countries and a large group of college-age German students. During the ride I tried to prepare myself for the day, knowing that it would be an emotional one. But there was no possible way that I could have prepared myself for the experience. I had read about the Holocaust, seen films about the Holocaust, but it is not the same as visiting a concentration camp site.

At the entrance gate I read the words forged into it and wondered if those who entered the camp truly believed them. Did the words give them hope, or did they sense the horror that awaited?

The first stop was the Dachau exhibition. Inside were heartbreaking prisoner photos and artifacts. There were also photos and information about those who had carried out such inhumane acts. I saw the admissions processing room - the shunt room - where prisoners surrendered their clothes, their personal possessions, their rights and their liberty. Even their individuality was exchanged - for a prisoner number. I walked the courtyard where many prisoners were shot - some for simply stepping off of the main path onto the bordering grass. I saw the camp prison where prisoners were tortured. I walked through a reconstructed barrack. Overcrowding was a huge problem in the barracks, which were designed for 6,000 but by 1944 held over 30,000.

The worst was the crematorium, in particular Baracke X. It was incredibly difficult to force myself to stay and view the disinfection chambers, the gas chamber, and the cremation ovens.

In April 1942, at the same time that the Jews were being sent to the death camps in the East, a new brick building called Baracke X was planned for the Dachau camp. It was designed to house a homicidal gas chamber, disguised as a shower room, and four cremation ovens. The new Baracke X also had four disinfection gas chambers designed to kill lice in clothing with the use of Zyklon-B, the same poison gas that was used to kill the Jews in the homicidal gas chambers at Majdanek and Auschwitz. The clothing was disinfected in all the Nazi camps in an attempt to prevent typhus which is spread by lice.

Construction on Baracke X began in July 1942, using the labor of the Catholic priests who were the only prisoners not forced to work in the factories at Dachau. The building was finished in 1943, but a sign that was put in the gas chamber in 1965 informed tourists that this room was a Gas Chamber disguised as a "shower room" - never used as a gas chamber. This implies that the room may have been used for something other than a gas chamber. By May 2003, the sign was gone and a poster on the wall of the undressing room next to the gas chamber said that the gas chamber could have been used to kill prisoners. Survivors have testified that the SS did murder individual prisoners and small groups here using poison gas.



Soldiers around the bodies of dead prisoners outside of Baracke X.


On April 29, 1945, Dachau became the second major Nazi concentration camp to be liberated by American troops, after Buchenwald was liberated on April 11, 1945. Overall, more than 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 states had been imprisoned in Dachau. During its 12-year history, Dachau had 206,206 registered arrivals and there were 31,951 certified deaths due to starvation, disease, exposure, forced labor, and execution - although the actual number of deaths was much higher.

The Official Report by the U.S. Seventh Army listed the following statistics for the Dachau main camp after the camp was liberated:
Poles: 9,200; Russians: 3,900; French: 3,700; Yugoslavs: 3,200; Jews: 2,100; Czechoslovaks: 1,500; Germans: 1,000. There was also a combined total of 1,000 Belgians, Hungarians, Italians, Austrians, Greeks, etc.



Polish prisoners celebrate their freedom from the Dachau camp.


There are many things that made Dachau so disturbing: the sheer number of people who were imprisoned, the suffering, the torture, the deaths. Even the seemingly ruthless organization that went into building the camp. But the worst is that it was human beings who did this to other human beings. Human beings who had such hatred and intolerance of fellow men that they would create for them a hell on earth.



On the International Monument at Dachau the words "Never Again" are written in Yiddish using Hebrew letters, as well being written in French, English, German and Russian. An urn with the ashes of the unknown concentration camp prisoner lies before it and recalls the fate of the thousands of people whose corpses were burnt in the crematorium. It was buried here in May 1967. The panel on the left narrow side of the monument notes further: "This monument was erected in honor of the tens of thousands of martyrs, who died here as victims of National Socialist tyranny and was dedicated on September 8, 1968 by the Comité International de Dachau."

At the end of the day we boarded the tour bus - a far more somber group than we had been when we left. I felt drained from the deep emotions I felt - sadness, grief, pity, shock, horror. I was not surprised by any of these feelings, in fact I welcomed them. Such feelings were what separated me from the monsters who did this. But as I sat down, what did surprise me was a sudden burst of anger. No, not even anger. Rage. Fury. In my head I was irrationally shouting to all of the Germans on the bus, “How could you let this happen? How could you do this to other human beings?“ And then I looked around the bus, into the eyes of several of the young German students. In their eyes I saw many of those same feelings of sadness and horror that had been in mine, as well as something else: shame. It suddenly dawned on me that they carried the burden of their country’s history, even though they were not responsible for it, nor did they in any way condone it. In a way, they are victims of the Holocaust too.

"Dachau can and shall be a lesson! Therefore we dare not be silent about it, although the memory of it is sad and grievous." Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, Auxiliary Bishop of Munich and former Dachau inmate, June 17, 1960.


Excepts and photos from the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, The Dachau Gas Chambers, edp.org, FCIT, scrapbook pages.com, Yad Vashem.

[gigi]

In December 2006, Rebecca Erbelding, a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened a letter from a former United States Army intelligence officer who said he wanted to donate photographs of Auschwitz he had found more than 60 years ago in Germany.

Ms. Erbelding was intrigued: Although Auschwitz may be the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, there are only a small number of known photos of the place before its liberation in 1945. Some time the next month, the museum received a package containing 16 cardboard pages, with photos pasted on both sides, and their significance quickly became apparent.

As Ms. Erbelding and other archivists reviewed the album, they realized they had a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of Auschwitz’s senior SS officers that was maintained by Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant. Rather than showing the men performing their death camp duties, the photos depicted, among other things, a horde of SS men singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordionist, Höcker lighting the camp’s Christmas tree, a cadre of young SS women frolicking and officers relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break.

In all there are 116 pictures, beginning with a photo from June 21, 1944, of Höcker and the commandant of the camp, Richard Baer, both in full SS regalia. The album also contains eight photos of Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for participating in the selections of arriving prisoners and bizarre and cruel medical experiments. These are the first authenticated pictures of Mengele at Auschwitz, officials at the Holocaust museum said.

The photos provide a stunning counterpoint to what up until now has been the only major source of preliberation Auschwitz photos, the so-called Auschwitz Album, a compilation of pictures taken by SS photographers in the spring of 1944 and discovered by a survivor in another camp. Those photos depict the arrival at the camp of a transport of Hungarian Jews, who at the time made up the last remaining sizable Jewish community in Europe. The Auschwitz Album, owned by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, depicts the railside selection process at Birkenau, the area where trains arrived at the camp, as SS men herded new prisoners into lines.

The comparisons between the albums are both poignant and obvious, as they juxtapose the comfortable daily lives of the guards with the horrific reality within the camp, where thousands were starving and 1.1 million died.

For example, one of the Höcker pictures, shot on July 22, 1944, shows a group of cheerful young women who worked as SS communications specialists eating bowls of fresh blueberries. One turns her bowl upside down and makes a mock frown because she has finished her portion.

On that day, said Judith Cohen, a historian at the Holocaust museum in Washington, 150 new prisoners arrived at the Birkenau site. Of that group, 21 men and 12 women were selected for work, the rest transported immediately to the gas chambers.

Those killings were part of the final frenetic efforts of the Nazis to eliminate the Jews of Europe and others deemed undesirable as the war neared its end. That summer the crematoriums broke down from overuse and some bodies had to be burned in open pits. A separate but small group of known preliberation photos were taken clandestinely of those burnings.

Auschwitz was abandoned and evacuated on Jan. 18, 1945, and liberated by Soviet forces on Jan. 27. Many of the Höcker photos were taken at Solahütte, an Alpine-style recreation lodge the SS used on the far reaches of the camp complex alongside the Sola River.

Source: The New York Times

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2007/09/18/arts/20070919_ALBUMSS_AUDIOSS.html

Link to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

www.ushmm.org/

[Bonobo]

Auschwitz museum appeals for international aidBy DPA
Aug 5, 2008

Warsaw - Poland's Auschwitz-Birkenau museum lacks money for urgent
conservation work at the former Nazi death camp and is appealing for
European Union aid, a spokesman said Tuesday.

Some 200 million zloty (96 million dollars) is needed to preserve
the site, which receives about 10 million zloty a year from Poland
and 600,000 zloty from international donors, spokesman Jarowslaw
Mensfelt told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Birkenau, site of the gas chambers where the Nazis killed most of
the camp's more than 1 million victims, needs work on conserving
brick and wooden barracks as well was chimneys.

Eleven stone barracks need renovation before the museum can open a
new exhibit in Auschwitz, and the camp's former kitchen also need
work to allow an exhibit of art by former prisoners and witnesses.

Additional storage space is needed to house historical items like
prisoners' suitcases and shoes.

'The European Union especially should take on a comprehensive
strategy towards this location,' museum director Piotr Cywinski told
the Dziennik Polski daily.

'Temporary, short-term programs ... will give nothing.'

Operated by the Nazis in occupied Poland from 1940 until its
liberation by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was the
largest German-run death camp during World War II.

The vast majority of victims were European Jews, most of them sent
to the gas chambers immediately after arrival.

Tens of thousands of non-Jewish Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of
war and others also died at Auschwitz, located near the southern
Polish town of Oswiecim.






Look at the site containing photos of Auschwitz death camp. In English and Polish.

www.turfoto.info/oswiecim.html

E.g.,



Crematorium


Living quarters






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Mar 18, 2009 20:46:32 GMT 1 valpomike said:

March 17th. marks the 67th anniversary of the arrival of first transports of Jews sent to the Nazi German death camp in Betzec.
On March 17th. 1942, a group of 1500 arrived from Lublin followed by a second transport fro Lwow in the former easter Polish borderland.
Half a million Jews found their death at the hands of the Nazis in Belzac till the camp's liberation by Soviet Red Army in 1944.
Let us never forget.
Mike

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belzec_extermination_camp

Killing methods

Wirth developed his own ideas on the basis of the experience he had gained in the "Euthanasia" program and decided to supply the fixed gas chamber with gas produced by the internal-combustion engine of a motorcar. Wirth rejected Zyklon B which was later used at Auschwitz. This gas was produced by private firms and its extensive use in Belzec might have aroused suspicion and led to problems of supply. He therefore preferred a system of extermination based on ordinary, universally available gasoline and diesel fuel. For economic and transport reasons, Wirth did not make use here of industrial bottled carbon monoxide as in T-4, but had the same gas supplied by a large engine (although witnesses differ as to its type, most probably it was a petrol engine), whose exhaust fumes, poisonous in an enclosed space, were led by a system of pipes into the gas chambers. For very small transports of Jews and Gypsies over a short distance, a minimized version of the gas van technology was used in Bełżec: T-4 man and first operator of the gas chambers, Lorenz Hackenholt, rebuilt an Opel-Blitz post office vehicle with the help of a local craftsman into a small gas van. A member of the staff testified that the Jewish office girls were murdered in this car on the very last day of Bełżec

Concealment of camp's purpose from victims

The wooden gas chambers were disguised as the barracks and showers of a labor camp, so that the victims would not realize the true purpose of the site, and the process was conducted as quickly as possible: people were forced to run from the trains to the gas chambers, leaving them no time to absorb where they were or to plan a revolt. Finally, a handful of Jews were selected to perform all the manual work involved with extermination (removing the bodies from the gas chambers, burying them, sorting and repairing the victims' clothing, etc.). The extermination process itself was conducted by Hackenholt, guards, and a Jewish aide. The Jewish Sonderkommandos were killed periodically and replaced by new arrivals, so that they would not organize in a revolt either.

Kurt Gerstein's testimony

SS Lt. Kurt Gerstein, who worked in the SS medical service, was ordered to deliver a shipment of Zyklon B to Bełżec. He was so shocked by what he saw that he immediately buried the canisters of poison gas, and confessed his experiences to a Swedish diplomat. He describes how he arrived at Bełżec on August 19 where he witnessed the unloading of 45 train cars stuffed with 6,700 Jews, many of whom were already dead, but the rest were marched naked to the gas chambers, where:

Unterscharführer Hackenholt was making great efforts to get the engine running. But it doesn't go. Captain Wirth comes up. I can see he is afraid because I am present at a disaster. Yes, I see it all and I wait. My stopwatch showed it all, 50 minutes, 70 minutes, and the diesel did not start. The people wait inside the gas chambers. In vain. They can be heard weeping, "like in the synagogue," says Professor Pfannenstiel, his eyes glued to a window in the wooden door. Furious, Captain Wirth lashes the Ukrainian assisting Hackenholt twelve, thirteen times, in the face. After 2 hours and 49 minutes—the stopwatch recorded it all—the diesel started. Up to that moment, the people shut up in those four crowded chambers were still alive, four times 750 persons in four times 45 cubic meters. Another 25 minutes elapsed. Many were already dead, that could be seen through the small window because an electric lamp inside lit up the chamber for a few moments. After 28 minutes, only a few were still alive. Finally, after 32 minutes, all were dead...Dentists hammered out gold teeth, bridges and crowns. In the midst of them stood Captain Wirth. He was in his element, and showing me a large can full of teeth, he said: "See for yourself the weight of that gold! It's only from yesterday and the day before. You can't imagine what we find every day—dollars, diamonds, gold. You'll see for yourself! "




www.holocaustresearchproject.net/ar/belzec.html

The first contact the deported Jews had with the SS occurred after they were offloaded at the reception yard. Bemused and frightened, anyone showing anguish or defiance was removed by the guards to the execution pit in Camp II, where the Jews were shot in the back of the neck with a small calibre pistol. The SS attempted to lull the deportees with calming words, Wirth or Jirmann welcomed incoming transports through a loud-speaker, saying: "This is Belzec. Your stay is temporary - you will move onto work camps where your skills are needed. There is work for everyone. Even you housewives are needed to feed your families and to keep the houses clean. First I must have your co-operation so that we can get you on your way quickly". There was often a ripple of applause and shouts of "Thank you Mr. Commander!" Then Wirth mentioned the crucial part of the deception: "We must have order and cleanliness. Before we feed you, you must all have a bath and have your clothes disinfected. It is necessary for women to have their hair cut". Wirth then passed on the gassing process to the duty NCOs.

Men were requested to remove their shoes and tie them together with pieces of string handed out by Jewish workers. The men, now separated, were marched off in blocks of 750, five abreast. Supervised by the SS, at various points they handed over clothing, personal property and money, until they stood completely naked at the entrance to the "Tube". In a well-rehearsed operation, the Ukrainians, armed with whips and bayonets, prodded and forced the men into the chambers and closed the doors. With a signal from the escorting Scharführer the gassing engine was started. After approximately 20 minutes, inspection through the peephole in the chamber door confirmed that the engine could be turned off. The SS had completed their part of the operation.

Now the Jewish Sonderkommando, led by Zugführer Moniek, took over and removed the bodies at the rear of the gas chambers. The doors were opened and the corpses were thrown out. Straps were fastened to the bodies in order to drag them to the trolleys in which they were to be ferried to the mass graves. Each corpse was searched for valuables and any gold teeth removed before the bodies were lowered into the pits. Another commando cleaned the gas chambers, whilst still others raked the sandy pathways to the building.

The women, having had their hair cut, together with the children, all awaiting their "bath", feared the worst. By now they were in the "Sluice" and their fate was sealed. If weeping and cursing took place, the Ukrainians stepped in to brutally chase the victims into the gas chambers. Once the Jews had been off-loaded from the wagons and were on their way to Camp II, those found dead on arrival at the camp from incoming transports were piled to one side. Sick, elderly, infirm or "troublesome" Jews were taken to the execution pit in Camp II and shot. All of these ghastly scenes were accompanied by the camp orchestra. Favourite songs of the SS were “Drei Lilien”, and a song to the melody of "Highlander Do You Have No regrets".












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Holocaust survivor shares account: Sobibor camp breakout freed 300By Natalie Ragusr
Adobe Press
3/28/09
Although they are at least three generations removed from the Holocaust, Nipomo and Arroyo Grande high school students Monday got a rare first-hand account of the horrors of life in a Nazi death camp.
Santa Barbara resident Thomas "Toivi" Blatt, 82, had an instrumental role in the 1943 revolt that allowed some 300 prisoners to make a successful break from Sobibor, an extermination camp situated in the Lublin district of Poland.
Blatt shared his story with the students as a way of fulfilling his vow to do his part to ensure the world never forgets the horrors of the Holocaust.
"I feel I have something to pay back for my survival," Blatt said.
Shortly before the inmates began the run for their lives, Blatt's friend, the revolt's instigator, Alexander "Sasha" Pechersky, had instructed anyone who might survive the uprising to "bear witness, (and) let the world know what has happened here."
Those words, Blatt said, have stayed with him ever since.
Born in Poland in 1927, Blatt was not quite 15 years old when Nazi soldiers captured him along with his entire family.
Upon their arrival at Sobibor, Blatt's parents and only sibling got sent to the gas chambers, while the Nazis assigned Blatt to perform hard labor.
In the six months he spent at Sobibor, Blatt witnessed frequent atrocities, ranging from beatings to a prisoner tortured by rats eating away at his body.
Eventually, Blatt became friends with Pechersky and others who began to hatch a mass-escape plan, which involved killing every Nazi soldier stationed at the camp and walking out the main gate.
Blatt was to distract the soldiers.
Ultimately, about half of Sobibor's 600 or so prisoners managed to fight their way out into the surrounding forest.
A 1987 British movie, "Escape from Sobibor," depicted the events surrounding the revolt and an actor portrayed Blatt in the film.
When asked what gave him and other inmates the courage to go through with the uprising, Blatt simply responded, "People want to live. It was instinct."
On Monday, Blatt stood on the stage in Nipomo's Forum theater facing an audience of nearly 100 high school juniors who appeared dumb struck as Blatt recounted his experiences at Sobibor.
Several students remarked that they connected with Blatt partly because he was not much younger than themselves when the Nazis captured him.
"We've heard about (the Holocaust) before, but hearing about it from a first-person (account) ... just made it so much more real," said Marisa Smith, 16. "It was a real eye opener."
Social Studies Department Chairman Mark Houchin said that's why he invited Blatt to speak.
"You can teach the Holocaust in class ... but when you actually meet a person who's lived the history, it makes it come alive," he said.
Michael Marquez, 17, said he learned an important lesson through Blatt's presentation.
"Don't let this ever happen again," he said.





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Auschwitz visit reduces PM's wife Sarah Brown to tears
hellomagazine. com
4/29/09
Normally known for her reserve the PM's wife Sarah Brown struggled to maintain her composure during a tour of the former Polish concentration camp at Auschwitz with her husband.
Holding a guide about the camp where over a million victims of the Nazis met their death she wiped away a tear as she watched Mr Brown sign the visitors' book.
"In this place of darkness, I reaffirm my belief that we all have a duty, each and every one of us, not to stand by but to stand up against discrimination and prejudice," wrote the British leader.
The couple had earlier walked along the railway tracks which once carried the wagons transporting holocaust victims to their fate, and stood in the lookout tower from which their jailers kept watch over inmates
An extensive site about Holocaust
www.holocaustresearchproject.org/toc.html


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Other Voices: Folklore of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ignores the facts
by By Emanuel Tanay | Ann Arbor
MLive.com
Sunday April 19, 2009
Sixty-six years ago today the so-called "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising" began.
I was in Warsaw on that day, a 15-year-old Jewish boy pretending to be a Christian to avoid getting killed. It was a beautiful spring day. Suddenly, there was a great deal of German military activity. We were told that the Jews of the Ghetto started shooting at the Germans. This news made me and my Polish friend, Stephan Jagodzinski, very sad. The outcome was foreseeable. We decided to leave Warsaw at once, anticipating that the Germans would increase the search for Jews living on false papers.
The urban prison camp, which is euphemistically call "The Warsaw Ghetto," in reality was an urban camp overflowing with starving, helpless victims. In the first year 100,000 Jews died of starvation. Thirty percent of Warsaw's inhabitants had to crowd into 2.4 percent of its space. The legal calories allotted to the Jews in 1941 was 184. Food supply essential to survival was entirely dependent upon smugglers who had to risk their lives to bring food into the ghetto. Leaving the ghetto was punishable by immediate execution.
The Jews in captivity were in no position to offer any significant resistance to the German military might. The question "why didn't the Jews resist?" reveals the absence of familiarity with the existential reality of the Jews in German captivity. The question should be asked "was resistance possible?" This question is rarely asked by the historians.
There are two versions of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; one told by the participants who survived it and the historical version that is a legend of heroic armed struggle that impeded the genocidal project and inflicted significant damage to the Germans and their Polish, Ukrainian and Lithuanian helpers. The motivation of the participants was a collective suicide. I rely upon the autobiographical work of Marek Edelman, one of the five leaders of the ZOB (Polish acronym for Jewish Defender Organization) . Arie Wilner, one of the founders of ZOB, said: "We do not wish to rescue lives. None of us will come out of it alive. We want to rescue human dignity."
The 200 young members of ZOB staged a defiant act, which we now call the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. They did not have the illusion that they could mount a substantial resistance. The ZOB leaders told us that they were seeking "beautiful death" (Marek Edelman) and "to rescue human dignity" (Arie Wilner). Another aim was "to die together" (Mordechaj Anielewicz).
By these criteria, ZOB members achieved their goal. However, these suicidal aspirations were not shared by the 60,000 Jews who were still alive the in Warsaw Ghetto on April 19, 1943. The majority of the Jews pursued the unlikely possibility of survival. Survival was a remote possibility but a beautiful death was a romantic vision.
In the words of the only living leader of ZOB, Dr. Edelman, it was a "matter of public dying... there were 220 of us in the ZOB). Can one call that an uprising? What mattered is not let them slaughter us when they came to get us. The choice of the manner of death was the issue ... everything that followed April 19, 1943 - was a longing for a beautiful death."
Contrary to the belief of Mordechai Anilewicz and his group, not all Jews of Warsaw were destined to die, nor did all die. The exact number of those who did survive is unknown. One thing is certain, that without the armed defiance initiated by ZOB, the number of survivors would have been higher.
The Warsaw monument in honor of his colleagues amazed Marek Edelman: "A straight standing man with a rifle in one hand and a grenade in the other raised high, on the belt he has a load of ammunition, on the side he has a officer's bag with maps. None of them look like that, we had no rifles, no maps, we were black and dirty but a monument has to be like that." Absolute hopelessness was the perspective of the 200 members of ZOB for the outcome of the German genocidal project.
The 60,000 Jews still alive on April 19 relied upon relative optimism. Armed resistance accelerated the genocidal process. I have admiration for the 200 brave young men and women of ZOB who had valid reasons to give up hope and chose a kamikaze mission, but I object to the misinterpretation of their purpose. I have even more admiration for those captives who hoped and struggled for survival.
Voltaire said: "We owe respect to the living; but to the dead we owe nothing but the truth." Every April 19 this admonition is ignored by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemorations. The celebratory speeches proclaim, "They died with honor." Did the others die without honor? Is there no honor in surviving?



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The story of Sobibor, the 'Dutch Auschwitz'
by NRC International in partnership with RNW
01-05-2009
There is little in Sobibor to remind one of the former extermination camp where 34,000 Dutch Jews died. That is going to change, thanks to help from the Netherlands.
Sobibor extermination campAnyone who didn't know better would think they are in a typical Polish hamlet, where clean washing flutters in the wind, farmers on old tractors rumble by and lumbermen lug tree trunks. But Stara Kolonia Sobibór is not typical, nor will it ever be.
During the Second World War this was the site of the German extermination camp Sobibor, where 170,000 Jews, more than 34,000 of them Dutch, were systematically murdered. It is a difficult place to reach, deep in the forests of Poland's eastern border area, and easy to forget. But that is going to change.
The Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia and Israel recently agreed on a major `renovation' aimed at opening up the former camp to the outside world and pulling it out of the shadow of the well-known Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in southern Poland.
Uprising
"We must do right by the victims of Sobibor, state secretary Jet Bussemaker said last week during a working visit to Poland. "The camp is unknown, even in the Netherlands, since virtually no one survived and lived to tell."
Unlike at Auschwitz, there is nothing to see at Sobibor. The Germans dismantled the camp in 1943 after an uprising in which 12 SS officers were killed and several hundred Jews managed to escape. 50 of them survived the war. The handful of houses that make up present day Stara Kolonia Sobibór, adjoining the forest, are from after the war, except for a striking green building with a view over the crumbling train platform where the transports arrived. That was the camp commander's house. Now a Polish family lives there.
Hill of ashes
Sobibor monumentAfter the war the Polish were at a loss as to what to do with the extermination camps the Germans had built on Polish soil. Auschwitz quickly became a state museum, but smaller camps like Sobibor were left to revert to nature. Poland was in ruins, there were other priorities.
And of course there was communism, with its own version of the historical truth. "The camp guards in Sobibor were Ukrainian," says Janusz Kloc, the local starosta (county leader). "But you could not say that out loud. Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union then, a friendly nation."
In the 1970s an austere monument was built, a `hill of ashes' at the place where the bodies from the gas chambers were burnt on grates in the open air. A plaque explains that "Soviet prisoners of war, Jews, Poles and gypsies" were murdered here. The fact that it was mainly Jews was kept silent. The Polish suffering could not be overshadowed by Jewish suffering.
"This really shouldn't be," Bussemaker says, pointing to the hill of ashes where she has just laid a wreath. "Somewhere here are all those ashes and we are just merrily treading on it." It is one of the issues she hopes to resolve with the renovation of the camp.
'Road to heaven'
A great deal has already changed since the fall of communism. There are new plaques, which do declare the victims to be Jews. And in 2003 a `reflection lane' was opened, where survivors can place stones with the names of murdered family members. The path roughly coincides with the route to the gas chambers, dubbed the Himmelfahrtstrasse (Road to Heaven) by the detainees.
Marek Bem, Director of the regional museum of Wlodawa, the nearby town in whose territory Sobibor falls, says: "The reflection lane is unique in our country. In Poland we often remember collectively, victims are anonymous. Here there is a story behind every name."
Jetje Manheim, herself a surviving relative, is happy with the renewed attention for the camp, but she is also concerned. The last thing she wants is for Sobibor to become like Belzec, a former extermination camp to the south, where a giant monument funded by American money was unveiled in 2004. "Holocaust architecture, " Manheim calls it.
"Belzec is overwhelming" , Manheim says. "You don't get the space for your own thoughts there. Sobibor is much more intimate." She does see room for improvement: the small museum in the hamlet does not have decent toilet facilities or heating. And the texts are in Polish. "But beyond that Sobibor can stay as it is."
Bem too hopes the good intentions of the various governments will not degenerate into architectural bombast. "This is the truth," he says, with a sweeping movement of his arm indicating the forest.

[Bonobo]

entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article5733408.ece

The author criticizes German attempts to put equality between Nazi crimes committed on European nations and their own suffering at the hand of allies.


From The Sunday Times
February 15, 2009
My clash with death-camp Hanna
In The Reader, Kate Winslet plays a Nazi guard. Tom Bower, who clashed with the woman behind the role, argues that the film abets a pernicious myth

Kate Winslet deserves endless prizes for her portrayal of Hanna Schmitz, the former concentration camp guard, in The Reader. Few recent movies have used such a gripping emotional narrative to raise profound questions about morality during and after the second world war. Normally war movies portray heroes and villains and give the audience the satisfaction at the end that the good guys won. The Reader does the opposite. There are no heroes, only dilemmas and excuses.

The dilemma is for the 15-year-old boy who falls in love with Schmitz, an older woman in a German provincial town in the late 1950s, unaware of her dreadful past. The excuses are for Schmitz, who just happens during the war to have transferred from a production line in a Siemens factory to employment on another production line to systematically eradicate millions of Europeans because of their race and religion.

Wrapped up among the excuses for Schmitz, the illiterate Auschwitz mass murderer, are the bigger excuses for the German people who were all victims of the Nazis, both during and after the war. What no one in Britain realises is that Schmitz’s character is partly drawn upon Hermine Braunsteiner, a real Nazi monster, whose life and trial are deftly sanitised to suit the author’s and film-maker’s purpose.

Sixty years after the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, and when nearly all the murderers are dead, the truth about Germany’s reintroduction of slavery and persecution into 20th-century Europe has become blurred by convenient myths. The worst, perpetuated by The Reader, is that the Schmitzes - the 135,000 Germans involved in mass murder - were fallible uneducated human beings whose fate could have been shared by any of us.

The question directed at the audience is whether any can be sure that he or she would not have done the same as Schmitz during the Nazi era by working in Auschwitz or any other extermination camp. Just how can we be certain of standing on the moral high ground? This pernicious question suits the modern German cultural elite and their uninformed sympathisers. As the postwar Germans quite rightly shrug off any sense of personal guilt, they have introduced “moral equivalence” into German culture.

The allies’ carpet bombing of Germany and especially Dresden, the barbaric behaviour of Soviet soldiers as they fought towards Berlin and the forced evacuation of millions of Germans from eastern Europe in 1945 are all nowadays cited by some Germans as placing their country on the same moral level as the allies.

The recently completed official German history of the war by the authoritative Military History Research Institute in Potsdam declares that most Germans during the war were aware of the extermination of the Jews and the vast majority believed the Jews deserved their fate. The allied bombing of German cities, according to the Potsdam study, is viewed as the same crime as the Nazi extermination camps.

Put simply, “moral equivalence” is the German extermination camp commander saying to the Jewish inmate: “You’ve got your problems and I have my problems.” The German’s problem is to obey his orders or else. So the murderer and the Jew are equal victims of the same orders. But “or else” is the mendaciously contrived dilemma in the film. What compulsion did Schmitz and the mass murderers endure to transform themselves from law-abiding citizens into sadistic executioners?

In The Reader that issue is posed during Schmitz’s trial. The scene is eerily realistic. In the public gallery the former lover watches Schmitz’s questioning by the judge. During the exchanges the boy, who has become a law student, grasps her secret. While they lay in bed years ago, Schmitz had demanded that he read long passages from literary books. Innocently, he had agreed - only realising during the trial that she had concealed her illiteracy.

The question for the judge is whether Schmitz wrote a report about the death by burning of female prisoners locked up for the night in a church hit by an allied bomb. (Note that an allied bomb has hit a holy church killing innocent women whom the Germans had spared - the Germans no longer ask why the women were in the church in the first place.) Clearly, the illiterate Schmitz could not have written the report but, suffering lifetime shame about her secret, she prefers to admit to her guilt and take the punishment rather than suffer the embarrassment.

To conceal the same dilemma, at Siemens she apparently volunteered to become an Auschwitz guard. The portrayal of the transition from factory to mass murderer as seamless - Siemens one day, Auschwitz the next - justifies the notion of Schmitz as victim, a convenient fantasy for Germany’s new soothsayers. “What would you have done?” she asks the judge, who is made to look discomfited when posed the test of “moral equivalence”.

All those issues are bogus, raised by some Germans to avoid the fundamental discovery described by the Potsdam history: that in 1945 most Germans felt no guilt but only regret for their personal losses and the country’s humiliating surrender. The Germans’ inability to mourn for the victims of the Nazis reflected their overwhelming self-pity.

To suggest that Schmitz, a sadistic thug, would employ an incompetent lawyer and accept long imprisonment to hide the shame of her illiteracy deliberately distorts the murderer’s character. By humanising the murderer’s dilemma - should I admit to illiteracy and escape long punishment? - the film deceives the audience.

West Germany after 1945 became a sanctuary for Nazi war criminals. Initially, the British Army employed just 12 men to hunt them down. Instead of being punished, the murderers were reinstated in their war-time jobs - in the police, schools, courts, hospitals, industry and government - with the help of the British and American occupiers. Thousands of the worst criminals - scientists who had conducted human experiments or employed slave labourers to build rockets, the intelligence officers who had tortured resistance fighters - were arrested and then employed by the allies.

Similar protection was rarely the fate of the Nazis’ foot soldiers, like Schmitz. She is the fall guy - used to do the dirty work during the war and to serve as the pawn in Germany’s conscience afterwards. Swept up in the initial dragnet, the foot soldiers were imprisoned but soon released and returned to their communities to resume working in factories or, like Schmitz,as a tram conductor. Former mass murderers became law-abiding citizens, carefully avoiding even a parking ticket. They were protected by the shared guilt of most of their neighbours, whose common regret was about Germany’s defeat, not the crimes. Only much later, when the West German conscience required it, was there the occasional show trial such as Schmitz’s - again the fall guy.

One consequence of that failure to root out the Nazi virus from West German society has been the gradual humanisation of Hitler. Just as the memory of Napoleon’s terror was forgotten once his contemporary victims had died - today he is judged by his love life, his legal code and his remarkable military successes - Hitler is also becoming a subject of fascination rather than total vilification. His humanisation, like Napoleon’s, will take generations, but the recent interest in his library and dress code are the first signs of the inevitable. The Reader is another creep in that direction.

David Hare, the film’s screen-writer, has written: “The reason The Reader made such a strong impression and became such a success throughout the world was because it genuinely did open a new field of inquiry.” The Reader, he continued, is a “far-reaching exploration of the painful and difficult process we all now know under the name of truth and reconciliation”. Only recently, Hare argued, could the subject be discussed, because for a long time after the war the Jewish victims were reluctant to describe their plight.

In reality, after 1945 few Germans talked about the Holocaust or pursued the murderers because of their own guilt. Before and during the war, the allies had in effect side-stepped the Nazis’ atrocities and after the war there were other priorities. The Germans cared even less about their victims, especially the survivors. The film shies away from that uncomfortable truth.

Germany’s reputation was helped when war crimes trials restarted in the late 1950s. Fritz Bauer, a prosecutor based in Frankfurt, rebelled against the country’s institutionalised blind eye to murder. He led the first prosecution of former Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt. The realisation that the accused were receiving state pensions for their service in Auschwitz shattered a convenient myth about removing the Nazi stain from German society.

In 1960, Bauer’s genius identified the location in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, the planner of the “final solution”, leading to his historic trial in Israel. That, combined with Simon Wiesenthal’s book, The Murderers Among Us, led the mood in Germany to change temporarily. The failure to deNazify Germany began to disturb German society.

In 1968, amid the outburst of the students’ revolt and the birth of groups such as the Baader-Meinhof gang, intent on murdering former Nazi politicians and industrialists, there was widespread revulsion among the young about the war criminals in their midst. Not only camp guards but also those at the highest levels of Germany’s political and financial elite were protected. Discomfited by Bauer’s success, other prosecutors began investigating Nazi war crimes.

In 1978, as a BBC television producer, I set off on the trail of Nazi murderers. I started filming outside Düsseldorf’s courthouse. Coming towards me, dressed in summer clothes, was a blonde, middle-aged hausfrau. “That’s her,” I said to the cameraman. Before he had time to focus his lens, a handbag crashed over his head and Hermine Braunsteiner’s eyes flared. The shock of the woman’s attack still lingers.

Ten minutes after she had swept through the doors, I was sitting in the courtroom hearing testimony about her inhumanity in Majdanek, a German extermination camp in Poland. Braunsteiner was a guard whose cruelty was infamous. But with obvious lack of interest, she was doing a newspaper crossword. Looking up, she said to the judge, “What do you want from me?”

Ever since The Reader opened, attempts have been made to identify the real Schmitz. Bernhard Schlink, who wrote the 1995 novel behind the film, rightly insists she was invented but I have little doubt that Braunsteiner’s trial, along with those of 15 other defendants accused of murder at Majdanek, was a pertinent influence. Starting in 1975 and lasting nearly six years, the trial stigmatised German justice as prejudiced and galvanised sympathy for the defendants for their “ordeal” 30 years after the alleged crime.

Braunsteiner’s story was similar to Schmitz’s. Born in Vienna in 1919, the daughter of a butcher, she was recruited to work in 1938 at the Heinkel factory in Berlin. Soon after, she was recruited for training as an SS guard with the promise of better pay. After training, Braunsteiner progressed from the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany to Majdanek. Survivors testifying in Düsseldorf recalled her wild rages, stamping and whipping women to death.

She was nicknamed “the stomping mare” because of her fatal tantrums. One witness testified how she “seized children by their hair and threw them on trucks heading to the gas chambers”.

At the end of the war she returned to Vienna, where she was convicted in 1949 for brutality to inmates at Ravensbrück but released in 1950. Aged 31, working as a waitress and a hotel receptionist, she was still good-looking and seductive. Her prize was Russell Ryan, an American air force mechanic serving in Germany. They married and set up home in Queens, New York.

By all accounts, Ryan remained enthralled by his wife and unaware of her past until, in 1964, an American journalist acting on a tip-off from Wiesenthal, confronted Hermine Ryan on her doorstep. She immediately confessed to being Braunsteiner.

“My wife, sir, wouldn’t hurt a fly,” protested Ryan. “There’s no more decent person on this earth. She told me this was a duty she had to perform. She didn’t volunteer, she was conscripted.”

Repatriating her to stand trial in Düsseldorf took nine years. No woman had previously featured in a similar war crimes trial prosecuted by the German government, especially involving Majdanek. Her middle-class lifestyle in New York conflicted with the testimony of her brutality.

The easy transition from the Heinkel production line to an extermination camp and then to domesticity in New York suggested to the apologists that Braunsteiner, like Schmitz, had no choice, becoming - as Braunsteiner insisted she was - an accidental cog in the murder machine, unable to escape.

But the court judged her to have been a committed and fanatical devotee of Nazism, ambitiously seeking promotion by murdering Jews. On conviction she received two life sentences. Released as a sick woman in 1996 she died in 1999.

In the courthouse it was impossible to equate the middle-aged woman with a uniformed sadist smashing a child’s skull against the wall. But over the next 20 years I interviewed dozens of Nazi murderers in Germany and South America. Although all had different ranks, backgrounds and intellects, they all offered the same disarming pose of innocent obedience to orders, ignorance or helplessness about the fate of the Jews and other persecuted races and, uniformly, none uttered genuine remorse.

From Düsseldorf I drove south to a small town near Frankfurt. Ernst Heinrichsohn, a lawyer and the mayor, had been an SS officer central to the deportation of 76,000 French Jews to concentration camps in eastern Europe. Pleading ignorance, he said he had visited the camps but had emerged unaware of anything wrong.

“I sent the children to Auschwitz,” he told me, “and letters came back saying that they had arrived safely and were well.”

Near Innsbruck I met Karl Wolf, the SS general who accompanied Himmler to Auschwitz, who told me that the murders were a “regrettable part of Nazi ideology”. In north Germany I met Arthur Rudolph, the production manager of V2 rockets, manufactured by slaves in an underground factory near Nordhausen. Hanged inmates were left swinging on ropes for days after their execution to deter others from disobedience. “There was no alternative,” he told me with patent sincerity.

In Brazil I met Gustav Wagner, the deputy commandant of Sobibor, an extermination camp where 250,000 were gassed. Wagner’s trait was personally to murder about six people before breakfast. He liked to shoot a father and son with a single bullet through their heads.

Like Heinrichsohn, Braunsteiner, “Schmitz” and all Nazi murderers, Wagner lacked remorse. Like the others he had been selected by the SS because of his devotion to Nazism and a complete lack of conscience. Like all the concentration camp guards he was groomed to prove his commitment before being sent to the “front line”.

This induction into the murder machine after the initial interviews was carefully controlled and monitored by those responsible for the final solution. Repeatedly, Wagner was tested in successive murderous scenarios. Spotted as an idealistic Nazi, he was first sent to a hospital where insane children were murdered and demonstrated his approval of euthanasia. Next he was sent to a minor camp where inmates were treated brutally. After personally participating in a few murders, he graduated to a bigger camp and only then was considered reliable as a mass murderer in Sobibor. No one who failed this test was punished.

Braunsteiner would have undergone similar grooming and, in reality, so would Schmitz. Both chose to obey orders and become murderers. Quite rightly, both were punished. So, despite its flaws, The Reader has at least resurrected the debate about personal responsibility in a tyranny.

[Bonobo]

Auschwitz note leads to survivor
By Laurence Peter and Marianne Landzettel
BBC News

Albert Veissid, Auschwitz survivor
A prisoner number was tattooed on Albert Veissid's arm in Auschwitz




Auschwitz survivor Albert Veissid does not know who put his name on a list that remained hidden inside a bottle for more than 60 years.

Builders working near the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp found the bottle recently. It had been left in a cement wall by inmates.

"I'm surprised by all of this," the 84-year-old told BBC News from his home in a village in the south of France.


Mr Veissid, a French Jew, was arrested by French police in Lyon in August 1943 and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Nazi Germany murdered more than one million people, most of them Jews.

Since Monday, Polish and French journalists have contacted Mr Veissid, wanting to hear his story.

He only learnt about the message in a bottle when his grand-daughter told him what builders had found at the site in southern Poland.

The bottle had been left in the cement of a bunker near the Auschwitz camp. The note is dated 9 September, 1944.
Note written by Auschwitz prisoners (Copyright: Barbara Sienko, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum)
The note stayed hidden for more than 60 years

The construction team to which Mr Veissid was assigned worked outside the concentration camp, in buildings used by the German SS as living quarters and for storage.

In one warehouse the prisoners had to fortify the walls in a section which was to serve the Germans as an air-raid shelter.

"I worked in the bunker, and the Christian Poles worked above me," he said.

At least one other member of the group survived the camp, an Auschwitz museum official said.

The building the Nazis used for storage today belongs to a school. Recently when builders started to lay bare the brickwork under the thick layers of old cement they discovered the bottle.

'Very lucky'

"I wouldn't have survived if I hadn't worked in that construction team at Auschwitz," said Mr Veissid. "I was very lucky. I was friendly with the Poles and they gave me some of their soup. And what they stole from the Germans I hid in the bunker - jam and other food."

But Mr Veissid has no idea who added his name and camp identification number to the Polish names on the note.

Mr Veissid's Holocaust journey began with a French police raid in August 1943. "The police rounded up quite a few young Jews that day," he recalled. "They handed me over to the Germans, who sent me to a labour camp in Provence. There the Gestapo came to find me and on 30 May 1944 I was sent to Auschwitz."

"The rest of my family hid from the Nazis - my father stayed in a cinema, my brother lived under a bridge and my mother and sisters found refuge with local peasants."

On 18 January 1945, days before the Soviet army reached Auschwitz, Albert Veissid was sent on a death march to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.

Later he was again moved to a smaller camp, about 80km (50 miles) away, where he was finally liberated.

Visits to Auschwitz

Mr Veissid returned to France suffering from tuberculosis and it took him four years to recover. Then he set up a small business in Marseille, selling clothes.

"Now I live in a pretty little Provencal village with my wife. I have a son aged 53, and a daughter aged 48," he told the BBC.

Over the years he has stayed in touch with other survivors and every year he goes back to visit Auschwitz. This year he went with a group of schoolchildren - to keep the memories alive for the next generation.

www.tvn24.pl/12690,1597826,0,1,ta-kartka-z-auschwitz-miala-byc-po-nich-sladem,wiadomosc.html





Message in a bottle from Auschwitz prisoner found

thelocal.de

28 Apr 09 17

One of the Auschwitz prisoners who left a message in a bottle found recently near the Nazi death camp has likely been located living in France, memorial spokesperson Jarek Mensfelt told The Local on Tuesday.
Click here to find out more!Just a few days ago, workers in the Polish city of Oswiecim found the bottle encased in a cement wall they were tearing down at a former Nazi bomb shelter now used as a vocational school, Mensfeldt said.

"In 1944 there were camp prisoners constructing a bomb shelter for the soldiers and they must have placed the bottle in the wall as they were pouring concrete," he said.

The letter may have been hastily scribbled on a piece of a cement bag.

Seven prisoners, among them six Poles and a Frenchman aged 18 to 20-years-old, signed the letter and included their camp identification numbers. Other contents of the letter have not yet been released.

Based on this information, Mensfelt said Auschwitz-Birkenau historians were able to determine that two of the Polish men had survived, but their whereabouts were unknown.

But on Tuesday, Mensfelt spoke with the granddaughter of the French prisoner, Albert Veissid, who just celebrated his 85th birthday in Marseilles, France.

"A man in northern Poland read the newspaper story and found him via Google," Mensfelt told The Local. "He called and it appears to be the right person. The former prisoner's granddaughter, whom I spoke with, is also on Facebook and so far it all sounds credible."

According to Mensfelt, finding concentration camp survivors can be extremely difficult, so the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum put out a personal appeal for anyone with possible knowledge of those who wrote the letter to contact them.

"The man who found the family in Marseilles simply took a personal interest in the story, got lucky, and found them," he said.

Former prisoner Veissid told French news agency AFP that he doesn't remember the bottle, "yet it's absolutely my name on the message and my registration number: 12063. I can't forget that number becasue it's on my arm."

The letter will be officially handed over to the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum on May 6.

Another concentration camp message in a bottle from a former Sachsenhausen prisoner was found in 2003.

Nazi Germany established twin concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau on the outskirts of Oswiecim in 1940. It grew into the Nazis' largest death camp, where more than one million Jews, Roma and prisoners of war from across Europe were murdered.

Polish media has listed the other prisoners, in order of registration number, name and hometown as: 121313 Bronislaw Jankowiak (Poznán), 130208 Stanislaw Dubla (Laskowice), 131491 Jan Jasik (Radoma), 145664 Waclaw Sobczak (Konina), 151090 Karol Czekalski (Lodz), and 157582 Waldemar Bialobrzeski (Ostroleka).

************ ********* ********* ********* **

One of Auschwitz bottle messengers found

thenews.pl

28.04.2009

Agence France Presse has tracked down Albert Veissid, one of the Auschwitz prisoners who 65 years ago left a message in a bottle in the wall of a school in Oswiecim , southern Poland .

A Frenchman, Albert Veissid has just turned 85 and lives in a village near Marseille. He confirmed he was an Auschwitz prisoner but did not remember hiding a bottle with a letter in one of the pavilions that belonged to the death camp and later became a school.

The bottle with a letter was found by workers who were demolishing what is now a vocational school. The letter was written in 1944 by camp prisoners constructing a bomb shelter for the soldiers. It was scribbled on a piece of rough paper probably ripped from a cement bag.

Seven prisoners: six Poles and a Frenchman aged 18 to 20-years-old signed the letter and included their identification numbers. One of them was Albert Veissid.

[Bonobo]

Poland sends prisoners to Auschwitz
Poland is to send prisoners to Auschwitz in the hope that a visit to Nazi Germany's most infamous death camp will turn them into model citizens.

By Matthew Day in Warsaw
telegraph.co. uk
04 May 2009

A spokesman from the Auschwitz museum said they had agreed to a request from the authorities in southern Poland for prisoners to visit the camp as "an element of their rehabilitation programme".
The convicts will get a guided tour of the camp, in which an estimated 1. 5 million people perished, and attend a course on Auschwitz's history and the crimes the Third Reich perpetrated against millions of people across Europe.
"It's going to be shock therapy for them," said Major Luiza Salapa from the prison service, explaining that by learning in graphic detail about the horrors of the camp the convicts might move away from the criminal behaviour that brought them to prison.
"They'll learn that a terrible system was created through the acceptance of violence and oppression."
Materials given to prison guards extol the visits saying that they should help "shape the prisoners' moral outlook towards the community and stop them displaying contempt and intolerance. "
In particular the authorities would like prisoners to learn about the fate of the gipsies, which Hitler's regime targeted for annihilation.
With a reasonable presence in southern Poland, gipsies are often the focus of discrimination and suffer occasional racist abuse and attacks.
But some prison experts have questioned the value of the visits, suggesting that even the horrors of the Holocaust may make little impression on hardened criminals.

[Bonobo]

Comics series to tell history of Auschwitz
Polish Radio
19.05.2009

The first-ever historical comics about the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz entitled Love in the Shadow of the Holocaust about the prisoners Mala Zimetbaum and Edward Galinski has been published.

Bartosz Bartyzel, from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, explains that the comics are about their bond, their attempted and unsuccessful escape and their tragic deaths in the camp.

The comics portray the complex relationship between ordinary prisoners, functional prisoners and SS members. The story is written by Michal Galek and illustrated by Marcin Nowakowski.

Love in the Shadow of the Holocaust is the first in a series of comics to be produced under the title `Episodes from Auschwitz.'

"They are being made in cooperation with historians who […] specialize in the Holocaust, the military and the Second World War. Those writing and illustrating the comics are also working closely with those who experienced the history – especially with former prisoners of Auschwitz," stated Bartyzel.

The project's intention is to provide educational material for teachers that is engaging and informative. The comics will all be available on the `Episodes from Auschwitz' in eight languages including Polish, English and German.

Kazimierz Smolenia, an Auschwitz survivor, maintains that while there are many ways to preserve and present history, comics give one a chance to interest a broader audience in history and awaken curiosity.

"I think that this is a good idea. Besides, presenting history in any form is good as long as it generates curiosity," Smolenia stated.

Galinski, a Polish political prisoner, and Zimetbaum, a young Jewish woman deported to Auschwitz from Antwerp, Belgium, are the stories main protagonists who fell in love in the camp. The couple escaped from the concentration camp on 24 June 1944 but were found and put in solitary confinement in Block 11.

A survivor of Block 11, fellow-prisoner Boleslaw Staron, recalls that every evening, after roll-call, Galinski would sing a song in Italian so that Zimetbaum would know that he was still alive.

Zimetbaum was sentenced to death for the escape attempt. Galinski's exact fate is unknown, though he was most likely brought to Auschwitz II Birkenau and shot.

[Bonobo]

Death camp has been trivialized
BY DANIEL SHOER
MiamiHerald. com
6/6/09

KRAKOW, Poland -- Near this majestic medieval city are the ruins of Auschwitz, the world's largest cemetery, a witness to the degradation mankind is capable of. To me, some of whose ancestors probably were annihilated in its gas chambers, the mere name of that extermination camp had always caused shivers, confusion, resentment. I had to pull myself together emotionally to travel there.

Perhaps because of my expectations -- and those of anyone else with sensitivity -- I anticipated that the experience would make me feel the tragedy in an unknown dimension. Surely, it would cut deeper than the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach and any other remembrance museum I might ever had visited in the United States, Germany and Israel.

To the contrary, I experienced the most crushing disappointment of my recent trip to Poland and the Holy Land. The graveless graveyard had been turned into a Disney-like tourist attraction; it had been spruced up and trivialized with little maps, even souvenirs.

Hordes of visitors snapped pictures of each other, smiling, inside the crematoria. Others munched on potato chips and swigged soda as they strolled through the gas chambers. Their chattering shattered the desired silence, and there was no one to ensure that the solemnity of the place be respected.

The redeeming aspect of the visit, however, is that millions of people can verify by touring Auschwitz that the Nazi Holocaust is not a harebrained invention. That's an anti-Semitic claim that is heard frequently now, just when the sands of time are running out for the survivors.

I understand that, because of my background, I may be more susceptible than most visitors. But who can feel contemplative in the place where more than a million people died if the person to your side shoves you away so he can enter first?

Painful to admit, the Holocaust has been rendered banal and commercial in Poland, and Auschwitz is the saddest manifestation of that phenomenon.

That doesn't mean that there aren't other sites that faithfully retain the spirit of suffering, like Majdanek, another infamous concentration camp outside Lublin. There, I could easily identify with the prisoners as I visited barracks that contained literally thousands of shoes that walked toward death while the whole world looked away.

Auschwitz disturbed me because it has been converted into something artificial (some tours even combine a visit to the camp with a tour of the salt mines). It particularly disturbed me because of the contents of the exhibit, which offers a general description of the place's history but omits personal stories of the victims. That is where the soul of the Holocaust lies, a remembrance that we need to immortalize.

The Auschwitz State Museum has retained the format originally created by the communist government, which left no room for religious diversity and strictly forbade any mention of the Holocaust. For example, there are individual halls for countries where victims originated -- like Hungary, 437,000 of whose citizens died there -- but no mention that they were also Jews.

Returning to this former capital of Poland, I visited Kazimierz, the once-vibrant Jewish quarter, which still preserves some of its old buildings.

I stayed there several days. As I walked down its picturesque streets, people asked me for directions and spoke to me in Polish. Because I've always felt like a wandering Jew, I was suddenly invaded by a feeling of belonging. I realized that not in vain did I walk on the land of my ancestors.

[Bonobo]

Discovery of list of names at Auschwitz prompts debate
6/5/09

NEW YORK (JTA) – The discovery in an Auschwitz bunker of a list with the names of 17 British soldiers has prompted a debate among historians.

The document was unearthed during routine preservation work at the concentration camp, according to the British Daily Mail.

One group of historians believes the names belong to Jewish prisoners of war sent to the camp; another claims the 17 men comprised a British SS division that fought alongside the Nazis in World War II.

"They were clearly the names of English soldiers, we presume prisoners of war, but we want to try and find out more about them and want British help to do so," Polish historian Dominik Synowic told the Austrian Times. "The surnames include Osborne, Lawrence and Gardiner, and beside eight of the 17 names is a tick."

According to the Daily Mail, Polish authorities have requested access to British military archives in the hope that those records will shed some light on the Auschwitz list.


----------------------------------------
EU donates millions to preserve Auschwitz
6/4/09

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The European Union will give euro4.2 million ($5.9 million) to help preserve Auschwitz, the former Nazi death camp which more than six decades after the World War II is in a state of serious disrepair.

Rafal Pioro, who heads Auschwitz's conservation department, said the EU recently promised 19 million zlotys (about euro4.2 million) to fund badly needed repairs on the camp's structures.

Museum officials and others are struggling to preserve Auschwitz, a vast complex of barbed wire, gas chambers, barracks and watchtowers, that stands as historical evidence and as a symbol of Nazi evil. The site gets about 1 million visitors per year.

"(The grant) is significant and will let us get started on our complex work on the camp," Pioro said Thursday.

But he estimated the total preservation project will cost about 200 million zlotys (euro45 million, $64 million). Work is scheduled to begin this August.

More than 1 million people, mostly Jews, died in the gas chambers or through forced labor, disease or starvation at the camp, which the Nazis built after occupying Poland. The camp was liberated in January 1945 by Soviet troops.

Officials at Auschwitz also announced Thursday they have reached a settlement with the son of a Holocaust victim over a suitcase that had belonged to his father before he was murdered in the camp.

Michel Levi-Leleu had demanded the return of the suitcase, which bears a tag with his father's name and former address: "86 Boul, Villette, Paris Pierre Levi." The Auschwitz museum, however, argued that the suitcase was a key part of its collection and belongs there.

The suitcase was lent to the Shoah Memorial Museum in Paris in 2005, and the settlement involves leaving it there on permanent loan. In exchange, Levi-Leleu has renounced his family's claim to the suitcase, Auschwitz said.

[Bonobo]

Personal items found at Auschwitz
AFP
6/2/09

WARSAW: Hundreds of personal items likely to have belonged to Hungarian Jews who perished at the Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland have been uncovered at the site, experts said yesterday.

"Several hundred objects, including some with inscriptions in Hungarian, have been found during conservation work near Crematorium Number Three," one of locations where the Nazis burned their victims' corpses, said Jaroslaw Mensfelt, spokesman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial museum.

"There are spectacles, medication, jewels, broken bottles and plates, the kind of personal items the prisoners were allowed to take with them," Mensfelt said.

Jews sent to the death camp were permitted to carry personal items as part of the Nazis' plan to trick them into believing they were being resettled.

The illusion was maintained until the end, as the deportees were sent to what they were told were shower blocks but were in fact the camp's notorious gas chambers.

"These items are particularly moving," said Igor Bartosik, director of the museum's collections, in a statement.

"They carry the most direct kind of mark: their owners kept hold of them until the last moments of their life," he said.

The Hungarian-language inscriptions are a clear sign that the items' owners arrived at the camp in 1944, when the Holocaust intensified.

Although Hungary was a World War II ally of Germany, it held back from helping the Nazis in their plan to exterminate Europe's Jews.

[Bonobo]

Polish Catholic survivors recall day Auschwitz began
Author

By Frank Milewski

Canada Free Press

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Brooklyn, N.Y. … June 14th was observed as Flag Day in America. In Poland, the date was remembered as the day in 1940 that Hitler and his Nazis opened the gate of
Auschwitz to receive the first inmates – 728 Polish prisoners they transported from Tarnow, Poland.
Rev. Janusz Lipski (far right) of St. Hedwig's Church in Floral Park and Chaplain of the Long Island Chapter of the Polish American Congress joined three former Auschwitz prisoners to mark the infamous anniversary.
Shown with him are (from left to right) Andrew Garczynski; Michael Preisler and Walter Kolodziejek who participated in a special commemoration held at the Polish American
Congress.
Mr. Kolodziejek was one of the earliest prisoners condemned to Auschwitz arriving there in August, 1940, just two months after the first transport of Poles. Mr. Preisler came in October, 1941 and Mr. Garczynski in 1943.
Mr. Kolodziejek was also one of the first prisoners to be used by Auschwitz doctors for human experiments.
By the time Auschwitz was liberated in 1945, Jews represented the largest group murdered there. Polish Christians were the second largest.
It was ironic that, just a week earlier, a Holocaust Memorial Park in Brooklyn honoring only Jews added five more groups as the other victims of the Holocaust: homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, political prisoners and Gypsies. Polish Catholics were disregarded.
That came as no surprise to Michael Preisler who helped form the Holocaust Documentation Committee of the Polish American Congress because of repeated refusals to acknowledge the Polish and Catholic victims.
"Unfortunately, there's an ugly anti-Polish and anti-Catholic bias that keeps on showing up among a lot of Holocaust writers and people in the media. They twist the Holocaust
as a way to express their prejudice," he said.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Paintings ordered by Mengele remain in Auschwitz

thenews.pl

17.06.2009



The Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp Museum will not return paintings of Romani prisoners to Czech painter Dina Gottlieb.

The International Oswiecim Council unanimously decided that water-colours of Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners of Romani origin, painted by Czech Jew Dina Gottlieb-Babbitt will remain in the Museum.
"We cannot return original paintings to Mrs Gottlieb-Babbitt and keep the copies as it would violate the authenticity and integrity of the Memorial," reads the official statement.
The Museum's stance is shared by Romani who survived the Holocaust and European Romani organizations.

Dina Gottlieb painted Romani prisoners for the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, who supervised the selection of Auschwitz prisoners and performed experiments on them, for which he gained the nickname `Angel of Death'. Mengele needed the paintings as a documentation of his pseudo-scientific research. He claimed photographs did not depict properly racial features of the Romani, such as their complexion.
Mengele chose Gottlieb to paint the portraits after she had painted scenes from Disney cartoons on the walls of a camp barrack for children.
A dozen Romani prisoners depicted by Gottlieb were later shot dead. Their portraits are a genuine testimony to Nazi crime.

The paintings also saved Gottlieb's life. In 1944, 22 out of 4,000 Czech Jews who were to be exterminated, were pardoned, among them Dina Gottlieb. She survived because she did not manage to finish her works on time.
Some of the water-colours remained intact. In January 1945, three days after Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was liberated, a teenage boy from the nearby town of Oswiecim came to the camp to collect Ewa, a Jewish orphan, who his family wanted to adopt. One of the prisoners was so touched by this gesture that he gave him six water-colours signed "Dinah 1944".
In 1963, Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum bought the water-colours from Ewa and in 1977 another one from a prisoner at the camp. Six years later the Museum managed to contact Dina Gottlieb-Babbitt, who then lived in the US. She visited Auschwitz and told the story of her life in the camp as well as her experience of painting the Romani.
Now her works constitute a part of a permanent exhibition on the Romani martyrdom in Auschwitz.

[Bonobo]

Polish comic books to raise Holocaust awareness among youth
Expatica
8/14/09


expatica.com/upload/ComicsAuschwitzHEAD.jpg
The illustrations in the series, called "Episodes from Auschwitz," do not spare readers from "the nightmarish depravity of Auschwitz."
A Nazi death camp may not seem a fit topic for comic books but a new series with real-life stories from Auschwitz has come out in Poland -- in Polish and English -- to teach youngsters about the Holocaust.

The drawings, at times as raw as the reality, are offset by the humanity of real, historically documented prisoners -- and jailers -- like the doomed, young lovers in the first adventure, "Love in the Shadow of Death."

The creators Beata Klos and Jacek Lech said they mulled over the idea for years and the format -- 40-page, soft-cover comic books -- was deliberate.
"We think the history of the death camps isn't sufficiently taught to the younger generations and rarely in a way that would draw their interest," said Klos.

The illustrations in the series, called "Episodes from Auschwitz," do not spare readers from what their website calls "the nightmarish depravity of Auschwitz."

A proviso recommends the comics not be read by those under 16.

A legendary story


Cover of "Sacrifice" Episode 3 Writer: Michal Galek Artist: Lukasz PollerMore than one million, mostly European Jews perished in Auschwitz -- in the notorious=2 0gas chambers or worked to death as slave labourers -- during the German Nazi occupation of Poland, and the first book shows piles of naked corpses and sadistic camp guards.

One page has dramatic frames of the heroine on the ground, kicked and beaten with a pole by uniformed guards before being hauled off to a death whose details were never known.

The book says it's a story that "became legendary in the camp," that of Edward Galinski, nicknamed Edek, a non-Jewish Pole and one of the first prisoners sent to Auschwitz in 1940, and Mala Zimetaum, a Polish Jew arrested in Belgium in 1942.

Mala's knowledge of languages saved her from the gas chambers and got her a "good" job, allowing her to help others.

A third figure, Nazi SS officer Edward Lubusch, an ethnic German who grew up in Poland, helped the couple escape on June 24, 1944 but they were caught 12 days later and executed -- she only 26, he 21.

Based on facts

"These three people behaved in such noble manner!" said Auschwitz historian Adam Cyra, who acted as a consultant along with camp survivor Kazimierz Smolen.

"The publishers did well to learn from eye-witnesses who survived," said Smolen in comments on an independent website.
[!break!]
Defiant to the end, Mala slashed her arms and gave her executioner a bloody slap. "Mala did it her own way," the blurb reads.

So did Edek. Standing at the gallows before other prisoners forced to watch, he thrust his own head into the noose and jumped -- shocking the hangmen who forced his body back onto the platform. "At the end Edek surprised them once again," a blurb reads, when he shouted something -- "perhaps it was 'Long live Poland' or the beginning of our national anthem."

A frame shows prisoners removing their striped caps in respect, further irking angry guards.

"They probably started to regret that it was a public execution," reads a blurb.

Engaging the young

The work, with a print run of 2,000 copies in each language, was published in May, and has been applauded by both the official Auschwitz museum and Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich.

A second comic, on Polish anti-Nazi resistance fighter Witold Pilecki, is due out in August and a third in September, Klos said.

"The entire story is based on completely authentic facts (...) a lot of testimony from former prisoners," said Auschwitz museum director Piotr Cywinski. "This is exactly why we agreed to distribute it. Seventy percent of our visitors are youngsters but it's difficult to get them interested (in Auschwitz) using thick history books."

AFP PHOTO / Janek SKARZYNSKI

In this picture taken on 5 June 2009 Young people read a comic book about Auschwitz in Warsaw

American Rabbi Schudrich said "the important thing is it engages young people as this is a problem in an age where it is often that you don't catch young people in the first few seconds in the world of instant everything."

He hailed the work's "educational" message in not only helping teenagers to understand what the Nazi genocide against the Jews meant but in showing that the Nazis were also targeting others, including non-Jewish Poles, gypsies and political opponents.

"Many people don't realise that more or less as many non-Jewish Poles were murdered as were Jewish, it's the percentages that were different: it was 90 percent of Polish Jewry and 10 percent of the general Polish population," the rabbi said.

The Nazis ran Auschwitz-Birkenau, near the southern Polish town of Oswiecim, from 1940 until it was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945, three months before Nazi Germany was defeated by the Allies.

It was among the most notorious facilities in Adolf Hitler's plan of genocide against European Jews, six million of whom perished at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.

[valpomike]

Can you buy these printed in English, and if so where? I would love my children and grandchildren to see and read them. If they do not print in English, they should.

Mike

[deedee]

I just found out from my lost long cousins. Her brother visited Poland last years and he really did took lot of pictures. He had lot of surprised to see our ancestors's name on Memorial Monuments which had all people who were killed by Nazi. He was so sick about it and show to his sister and other families. One day she called me to meet her at Downtown. I was very surprised to know my namesake people were killed by Nazi. Now I am wondering if they are my relatives. We have no informations about my dad's histories.

I saw the picture of Memorial Monuments and there were someone we know and there was pictures of them too. I don't understand if we are German & Polish nationality being killed by their Country German. I don't know and don't understand why. I think my ancestors were Jews or Catholic. Why were they killed? I only know their villages used to be German settlers for thousand years.


I think you are talking about Vaksmunt Valley, this is where my father's ancestors came from. This is really German Settlers living that area for thousand years. It is amazing that German Nazi killed their natives people. I hope you get it. This village was ruled by Austria & Hungarian years back. Austria and German are same langauge.

Can you tell me more about concentration camp? Listing of people who died.

[Bonobo]

Ceramic rack from crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp unearthed
10/15/09

WARSAW (AFP)---A ceramic rack from a crematorium at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp has been found during maintenance work at the site, a museum spokesman said Wednesday.

"The ceramic rack was buried in the ground among the ruins of one of the former crematoria," Bartosz Bartyzel, spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum at Oswiecim, southern Poland.
"It is an object directly linked to the horror of the Holocaust," he said. adding that bodies would have been placed on the rack before being incinerated.
The ceramic rack showed signs of heavy use and of having been exposed to extremely high temperatures, as well as damage from when retreating Nazi forces attempted to destroy the crematoria in January 1945 before the arrival of the Soviet Red Army.
The museum previously had one such crematorium rack.
Between 1940 and 1945 Nazi Germany killed some 1.1 million people at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in what was then Nazi-occupied Poland.

[Bonobo]

Nazis used sex slaves to boost concentration camp production - book
By Jonathan Gould
Reuters
October 16, 2009

FRANKFURT - The Nazis forced women into prostitution in a system of concentration camp bordellos designed to boost productivity among fellow prisoners during Second World War, a new book shows.

Adolf Hitler's security chief Heinrich Himmler set up the bordellos and established a bonus system that camp prisoners could use to buy privileges, such as cigarettes, or sex.

"Himmler had a great belief in men's sexual power. He thought that by using bordellos you could force men to work harder," said Robert Sommer, author of "Das KZ-Bordell" or the concentration camp bordellos, at the Frankfurt book fair.

The first such bordello was established at the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1942 and the programme was then expanded to 10 camps including major ones such as Buchenwald, Dachau, Ravensbrueck, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz.

The last was set up in 1945, just months before the war ended, to service the camp at Mittelbau-Dora, where V2 rockets were built.

"Himmler believed to the end that this system would work, which did not correspond to reality," said Sommer, whose research for the book, in some 70 different archives lasted nearly a decade.

Sommer was able to interview some men who used the bordellos but no women sex workers.

Most witnesses to World War Two era crimes have now died, though a trial of suspected concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk, who is facing charges of helping to kill 27,900 Jews during the war, is due to start late next month.

The SS guards at the camps were not allowed to use the bordellos under the Nazis' strict race laws, nor were Jews or Russian prisoners of war, Sommer said.

"A German prisoner could only go to a German woman. A Polish prisoner could only go to a Slavic woman," he told Reuters at the annual book fair.

"These camps were at the end of society and yet the control was total," he said.

Sommer's research showed that about 200 women were used as sex workers in the camps, the majority of them German, but also some Poles, Ukrainians and one Dutch woman.

They included political prisoners and women the Nazis termed "asocial," such as beggars, the unemployed or alcoholics, he said.

The SS recruited the women from hard labour work details, where the women realised they would not live long if they continued.

"The SS told the women they would be released after half a year if they signed up to work in the bordellos. Of course, the SS didn't keep that promise," Sommer said.

"Once the female prisoners became aware of the lie, the SS began to forceably select them," he added.

Like all other aspects of life at the concentration camps, the routine at the bordellos was strictly regulated.

Talking between the man and woman was forbidden, prisoners were required to use the missionary position and had to keep their shoes off the bed.

Liaisons were limited to 10 minutes and surveyed by SS guards through a peephole in the door, Sommer said.

The bordellos also proved ineffective as an incentive.

Most concentration camp prisoners suffered from permanent hunger and only about 1 percent at most made use of the bordellos, Sommer said.

These mainly included camp overseers or "kapos," prisoners involved in the camp administration, cooks or those working in offices.

"I don't think it was generally a desire for sex that drove men to use the bordellos. Some just hadn't seen a woman in 10 years."

Sommer said he had found only one case of a woman trying to claim compensation for the forced prostitution after the war.

That claim was turned down by a German court.

[Bonobo]

Thieves steal Auschwitz sign
18.12.2009 09:01
Police are looking for thieves who stole the iron "Arbeit macht frei" (work makes you free) slogan from the gates at Auschwitz last night.
The inscription was made by prisoner 1010 Jan Liwacz at the camp during WW II at a locksmith’s work yard.

Police spokesman Dariusz Nowak says officers and dogs are at the site looking for clues this morning. He says that at around 03.00 CET, someone scaled the gates and unscrewed the historic inscription that greeted each prisoner as they was were taken into the camp for the first time.

President Lech Kaczynski is also appalled by the crime, says Presidential Minister Pawel Wypych: “This crime has been committed by a completely insane person. Auschwitz is priceless. This act merits strong condemnation,” he said this morning.

Andrzej Przewoznik, from the Council for Protecting the Memory of Struggle and Martyrdom in Warsaw s appalled by the theft. "It seems that even a symbolic place like the Auschwitz memorial site, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed, is not free of acts of vandalism,” he said.

"The theory that it was the scrap collectors is plausible, but rather unlikely,” says police spokesman Dariusz Nowak. “It looks as though it had been a premeditated theft as someone had to enter the premises presumably dragging a ladder along and undue screws, which, in such severe weather conditions is not an easy task. Moreover, trails picked up by the police dog show the sign was pulled through a hole in the camp's wall and was later most likely loaded up on a vehicle."

A copy of the inscription, which was made in 2006 during maintenance work on the gates has replaced the stolen sign.
(pg/ab)



===============================================
Germany pledges 60 million for Auschwitz upkeep
17.12.2009 11:12

Germany is to allocate 60 million euros for the maintenance of the Auschwitz death camp museum in southern Poland.

The decision was taken on Wednesday by Chancellor Angela Merkel and regional leaders in Germany.

Regional governments will provide 30 million euro for the upkeep of the Auschwitz museum, said Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia, Juergen Ruettgers.

The Auschwitz museum has estimated that it needs around 120 million euros for maintenance and modernization of the former Nazi death camp.

Until now, the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum has been maintained mainly from funds from Poland’s state budget and its own revenue. Foreign aid in 2008 accounted for approximately just five percent of its total budget.

In January 2009, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation was created with the task of raising funds for the maintenance of 200 hectares of land, 155 buildings, and hundreds of thousands of objects, archives and documents kept at the museum. (pg)

[Bonobo]

The man who smuggled himself into Auschwitz
More than a million people died in Auschwitz
By Rob Broomby
BBC News
When millions would have done anything to get out, one remarkable British soldier smuggled himself into Auschwitz to witness the horror so he could tell others the truth.

Denis Avey is a remarkable man by any measure. A courageous and determined soldier in World War II, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a camp connected to the Germans' largest concentration camp, Auschwitz.

But his actions while in the camp - which he has never spoken about until now - are truly extraordinary. When millions would have done anything to get out, Mr Avey repeatedly smuggled himself into the camp.

Denis Avey: "They knew they'd only last five months"

Now 91 and living in Derbyshire, he says he wanted to witness what was going on inside and find out the truth about the gas chambers, so he could tell others. He knows he took "a hell of a chance".

"When you think about it in today's environment it is ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous," he says.

"You wouldn't think anyone would think or do that, but that is how I was. I had red hair and a temperament to match. Nothing would stop me."

He arranged to swap for one night at a time with a Jewish inmate he had come to trust. He exchanged his uniform for the filthy, stripy garments the man had to wear. For the Auschwitz inmate it meant valuable food and rest in the British camp, while for Denis it was a chance to gather facts on the inside.

Evil

He describes Auschwitz as "hell on earth" and says he would lie awake at night listening to the ramblings and screams of prisoners.

"It was pretty ghastly at night, you got this terrible stench," he says.

He talked to Jewish prisoners but says they rarely spoke of their previous life, instead they were focused on the hell they were living and the work they were forced to do in factories outside the camp.


"There were nearly three million human beings worked to death in different factories," says Mr Avey. "They knew at that rate they'd last about five months.

"They very seldom talk about their civil life. They only talked about the situation, the punishments they were getting, the work they were made to do."

He says he would ask where people he'd met previously had gone and he would be told they'd "gone up the chimney".

"It was so impersonal. Auschwitz was evil, everything about it was wrong."

He also witnessed the brutality meted out to the prisoners, saying people were shot daily. He was determined to help, especially when he met Jewish prisoner Ernst Lobethall.

'Bloody marvellous'

Mr Lobethall told him he had a sister Susana who had escaped to England as a child, on the eve of war. Back in his own camp, Mr Avey contacted her via a coded letter to his mother.

He arranged for cigarettes, chocolate and a letter from Susana to be sent to him and smuggled them to his friend. Cigarettes were more valuable than gold in the camp and he hoped he would be able to trade them for favours to ease his plight - and he was right.

Advertisement
Auschwitz prisoner's sister meets man who helped save him

Mr Lobethall traded two packs of Players cigarettes in return for getting his shoes resoled. It helped save his life when thousands perished or were murdered on the notorious death marches out of the camps in winter in 1945.

Mr Avey briefly met Susana Lobethall in 1945, when he came home from the war. He was fresh from the camp and was traumatised by what he'd witnessed and endured.

At the time both of them thought Ernst was dead. He'd actually survived, thanks - in part - to the smuggled cigarettes. But she lost touch with Mr Avey and was never able to tell him the good news.

The BBC has now reunited the pair after tracing Susana, who is now Susana Timms and lives in the Midlands. Mr Avey was told his friend moved to America after the war, where he had children and lived a long and happy life. The old soldier says the news is "bloody marvellous".

'Ginger'

Sadly, the emotional reunion came too late for Ernst - later Ernie - who died never even knowing the real name of the soldier who he says helped him survive Auschwitz.

But before he died Mr Lobethall recorded his survival story on video for the Shoah Foundation, which video the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. In it he spoke of his friendship with a British soldier in Auschwitz who he simply called "Ginger". It was Denis.


Ernest Lobethall moved to the US
He also recalled how the cigarettes, chocolate and a letter from his sister in England were smuggled to him in the midst of war.

"It was like being given the Rockefeller Centre," he says in the video.

Mr Avey traded places twice and slept overnight in Auschwitz. He tried a third time but he was almost caught and the plan was aborted.

He suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when he came back from the war and has only recently been able to speak about what he did and what he saw.

He admits some may find it hard to believe and acknowledges it was "foolhardy".
"But that is how I was," he simply says


newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/46816000/jpg/_46816133_ernstyoung.226.jpg

================================================





Auschwitz children’s stories collection published
26.01.2010 13:06

The Auschwitz Museum has published a reprint of a collection of stories for children, compiled by prisoners at the death camp in World War 2.

The stories - Bajki z Auschwitz - were printed illegally by Polish prisoners working in the offices of Nazi architects preparing plans for extension of the camp. According to former camp inmates, about 50 copies of the little book were created, using stolen paper and paints, and printed clandestinely.

The finished books were smuggled out of the camp. Most of the stories were written or translated by Stanisław Bęć.

The book contains six stories altogether: "The adventures of the little black chick" which is probably the first ever children’s story written in Auschwitz; “The story of the Hare, the Fox and the Cockerel” translated from the Czech; “Every Living Thing” describes insects, birds and animals found in fields, gardens and homes – also based on a Czech original; “The Wasps’ Wedding” which is the only story that has survived without its illustrations; “The Selfish Giant” a rhymed version of the story by Oscar Wilde and “The Tales of the Learned Cat” a copy of which the Museum received in 1999.

This is the first book for children by the Auschwitz Museum Press, which since its creation in 1957 has published more than 400 titles of a total 8 million copies, including historical books, memoirs, albums, catalogues and guides in 20 language versions.

Proceeds from the sale of the book of stories for children are particularly to go towards preserving items documenting the fate of children at the death camp, and the so-called childrens’ barracks at Birkenau.

[Bonobo]

Auschwitz death train anniversary
14.06.2010 12:49

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the first rail convoy of prisoners to the Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz.

Train arrived from the southern town of Tarnów and numbered 728 political prisoners, mostly Poles. 239 of them who miraculously survived the war.

A special memorial train, retracing the 140-kilometre route of seventy years ago, arrived at Auschwitz earlier today for commemoration ceremonies. Among those travelling on the train were Kazimierz Zając, one of the handful of survivors of the first transport, former Auschwitz prisoner Jerzy Ulatowski and around 500 pupils from Tarnów schools. They attended an open-air mass was celebrated close to the Death Wall at the camp site.

A total of 1.1 million people perished at Auschwitz. One million were Jews from Poland and many European countries, Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and some 15, 000 people of other nationalities.

[valpomike]

Let us never forget what went on here, and all, pray it never happens again, anywhere.

Mike

[Bonobo]

Anger follows British Holocaust denier historian’s tour of Poland
21.09.2010 12:06

Anti-racist groups protested British historian David Irving’s arrival in Poland yesterday, at the start of a tour he has organized for what he describes as “true history buffs”.

The tour will take in the Treblinka death camp site, the area of the WW II Warsaw Ghetto and Hitler’s Bunker in north east Poland.

It is not known precisely where Irving currently is but media reports suggest he is staying somewhere in the Krakow area in the south of the country.

In a letter addressed to Poland’s National Institute of Remembrance (IPN) – a historical and legal body which investigates Nazi and communist-era crimes - a group calling itself Otwarta Rzeczpospolita (Open Republic) says it wants to launch a case in the courts against Irving, who they say has sought to minimise Holocaust crimes, particularly in his 1977 book Hitler’s War.

"Let's not wait for the moment when Mr David Irving commits a new crime on in Poland,” says the letter from Open Republic.

In 2006, Irving was imprisoned in Austria for Holocaust denial. Under a law passed in 1998, Irving potentially risks either a fine or up to three years imprisonment in Poland if charges were to be successfully brought against him.

“Irving’s visit to places where Jews were murdered is a scandal,” editor of the Nigdy Więcej (Never Again) magazine Marcin Kornak told Polish Radio. Last week Nigdy Więcej demanded Irving not be let into the country.

“Auschwitz is a reconstruction”

Before coming to Poland, Irving told the Daily Mail (UK) that his tour party was for “real history buffs”, and that Polish authorities had turned the Auschwitz Nazi death camp site into a “Disney-style” tourist trap and a “money making machine”.

This week, in an interview with the Polish version of Newsweek magazine, Irving claims he is distressed that Poland is making money from misery.

“I [compared Auschwitz to Disneyland] because I resent the making of money from a concentration camp. I resent selling hot dogs in places where people suffered,” he said, referring to a hot dog stand which is outside the gates to the museum.

He also said that the current Auschwitz museum site is a fake. “The [current] gas chambers were built by Poles after World War II. Germans blew up all the chambers, so what we see now in Auschwitz are not genuine but reconstructions.”

When asked about the extent of the Holocaust and the numbers killed in Poland during WW II, Irving told the magazine: “If you want to know what happened to Polish Jews then go look in Israel.”

Bankrupt

Whereas once Irving lived in the ultra-posh Mayfair area of London and drove a Rolls Royce, he was declared bankrupt in 2002 after losing a libel trial against Penguin books and author Deborah Lipstadt, who accused him of persistently and deliberately misinterpreting and twisting historical evidence to minimise Hitler's culpability for the Holocaust.

Irving, who finds it difficult to find a publisher for his books these days, has been reduced to making annual fund raising tours of the United States, where he is feted by white supremacists and the like. The tour of Poland, which he is charging 9,000 zloty (2,500 euros) a time, is another potential revenue stream for the cash-strapped Holocaust denier.

[Bonobo]

Auschwitz opera at Warsaw grand theatre
08.10.2010 11:13

The Passenger, an opera on the Auschwitz theme by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, is premiered tonight at the National Opera – Grand Theatre in Warsaw. It is a joint production with the Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria, the English National Opera and Teatro Real in Madrid.

The libretto of the opera, by Alexander Medvedev, is based on a short story by the Polish writer, former German concentration camp prisoner, Zofia Posmysz. The staging is by David Poutney, the prominent British director and Artistic Director of the Bregenzer Festspiele, where the work was first presented earlier this year.

The Passenger was composed in 1968. It is set on an ocean liner en route from Europe to South America in the late 1950s and in the Auschwitz camp in 1943 and 1944.

One of the passengers on board is Lisa, the wife of a German diplomat on his way to Brazil. It turns out that Lisa was formerly an SS warden in Auschwitz. To her horror one of the fellow passengers is the spitting image of Marta, a Polish prisoner at the camp whom Lisa had tried to befriend while she was a warden there.

Born into a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1919, Weinberg spent the first two decades of his life in Poland. In 1939, he fled from the Nazis eastwards, eventually settling in Moscow, where he lived till his death in 1996, at the age of 77. His music is currently undergoing a revival.

In later seasons, The Passenger is to be presented in London, Madrid, Berlin and New York.

[Bonobo]

From a Jewish paper:


Story of Auschwitz strangely incomplete

Avi Benlolo President and CEO of Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies

The glaring difference between Berlin’s depiction of the Holocaust and that of Auschwitz in Poland is in the details of how the story is being told.

Berlin’s museums and memorials challenge visitors to understand the rise of the Third Reich and the horrific anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust and its end game — the killing of millions of Jews and other “undesirables” in slaughter houses like the Auschwitz concentration camp.

At Auschwitz, however, the start and finish of the Holocaust was Auschwitz. Visitors to this notorious camp must dig deep for an explanation of why Auschwitz became the world’s largest cemetery.

Auschwitz I — where political prisoners and labourers were held and medical experiments conducted, now houses a “museum” visited by an astounding 1.3 million people a year.

The exhibits, largely unsophisticated, remain relatively unchanged since the Communist era in Poland. At that time, reference to the murder of 900,000 Jews out of 1,000,000 people killed at Auschwitz was virtually nonexistent.

The Communists did not distinguish between the victims — despite the fact that 90 per cent were murdered specifically because they were Jewish.

Twenty years after the fall of communism in the country, one wonders if the Poles still hold on to that view.

For example, of the hundreds of pictures of victims (all Polish political prisoners) lining the walls of one of the exhibit barracks, only one Jewish name can be easily identified. The pictures have been hanging there since the 1950s, reflective of the political history the Communists wanted to project.

The disproportionality of remembrance in this case is quite apparent and the political implications — stretching onward to this day, cloud historical understanding.

How do thousands of Poles visiting Auschwitz yearly understand the horror that unfolded here? What is the history they are told? If there is no significant mention of Hitler, the rise of Nazism and the Nuremberg Laws, are they aware that Auschwitz was the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem”?

One answer can be found at the “shooting wall” where Polish political and military leaders were executed. It has become a symbolic place of Polish nationalism. Its importance (over other spots in the camp) is quantified by the piles of flowers lining its walls and the Polish flag flying high above.

And what of Jewish history in Poland, where nearly 3 million Jews resided prior to World War II and less than 1,000 reside today?

Only a short drive away, Krakow was once a central hub of Jewish life; it is now virtually “Judenrein” (free of Jews). Most of these men, women and children ended up at Auschwitz. Their story remains untold.

Auschwitz is hallowed ground.

The curators and leadership of its museum and sites have a sacred responsibility to ensure substantive context about the rise and fall of Nazism does not continue to be ignored. Greater attention must be given to the truth about Auschwitz — that it was mainly a Jewish death camp.

Germany gets it.

Now it’s time for Poland to face reality.

[valpomike]

Again I say, those dam Germans. First they kill so many, than they lie. Next they will say, that those in the camps were treated nice, but many still killed themselfs.

Mike

[Bonobo]

Nov 12, 2010 23:31:36 GMT 1 valpomike said:

Next they will say, that those in the camps were treated nice, but many still killed themselfs.
Mike

The most common diagnosis that the family of a diseased inmate received from German administration was: heart attack. In reality, it was a bullet or gas chamber.

[pjotr]

In the West is often the opposite. We know that the Holocaust was directed against the jews. But do many pulils, students and citizens of our nations know that the Holocaust was also directed against Polish intelligentsia (from 1939 on the German Nazi's wanted to eliminate the Polish intellectuals; teachers, professors, journalists, writers, poets, artists and scientists), Polish clergy and Poles who stood in their way? That the Holocaust was also directed against Slav people (do people remember the Russians, Poles and other slavs in the concentration camps? My Babcia did, she was in Mauthausen). Yes the first target were the jews, they had no chance. They were the main target. But after them came the Gypsies, Jehova Witnesses (who openly resisted the Nazi's. They had to by their conviction), the homosexuals, the leftwing people (socialists and communists), and conservative oponents of the Nazi regime (too).

The Muder of Polish children in Auschwitz

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Czeslawa-Kwoka.jpg
Czesława Kwoka (August 15,1928 - March 12, 1943)

Czesława Kwoka -prisoner 26947 in Auschwitz (August 15,1928 - March 12, 1943) was born in Wolka Zlojecka, a small village in Poland. She was deported to KL Auschwitz (1940-1945) from Zamość as prisoner 26947, on December 13, 1942. She died at the age of 14 on March 12, 1943.

Her mother Katarzyna Kwoka was also in the same transport (number 26946). On February 18, 1943, her death was registered at KL Auschwitz. Both Czesława Kwoka and her mother Katarzyna were Roman Catholic.

Czesława Kwoka appeared in an article of the National Geographic Magazine in 1995.

Murder of Zamość children in Auschwitz

At Auschwitz 200 to 300 Polish children from the Zamość area were murdered by Germans by phenol injections. The child was placed on a stool, occasionally blindfolded with a piece of a towel. The person performing the execution then placed one of his hands on the back of the child's neck and another behind the shoulder blade. As the child's chest was thrust out a long needle was injected into the chest with a toxic dose of phenol. The children usually died in minutes. A witness described the process as deadly efficient:

As a rule not even a moan would be heard. And they did not wait until the doomed person really died. During his agony, he was taken from both sides under the armpits and thrown into a pile of corpses in another room.... And the next victim took his place on the stool

To trick the children that were to be murdered into obedience Germans promised them that they will work at a brickyard. However another group of children, young boys by the age of 8 to 12, managed to warn their fellow child inmates by calling for help when they were being killed by Germans:

"Mamo! Mamo!" ("Mother! Mother!"), the dying screams of the youngsters, were heard by several inmates and made an indelible haunting impression on them.

Some of the children were also murdered in Auschwitz gas chambers.

Before the German invaded Poland, Hitler announced, "The destruction of Poland is our primary task." He also commanded, "Kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need." Hitler's head of secret police, Heinrich Himmler, promised that "all Poles will disappear from the world."
Poland lost six million citizens or about one-fifth of its population: three million of the dead were Polish Christians, predominantly Catholic, and the other three million were Polish Jews.

CZESŁAWA KWOKA - POLE, 14 YEARS OLD.
IN AUSCHWITZ SINCE 13 DECEMBER 1942, DIED 12 MARCH 1943.

CZESŁAWA KWOKA- POLKA, 14 LAT.
W KL AUSCHWITZ OD 13.12.1942 R., ZGINĘŁA 12.03.1943 R.

[pjotr]

Heinrich Himmler Speech - Jewish Extermination Orders



P.S. - In the beginning of his speech to the SS-officers Himmler mentioned June 30, and he ment the Night of the Long Knives (German: Nacht der langen Messer or "Operation Hummingbird", or, more commonly used in Germany "Röhm-Putsch" was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany between June 30 and July 2, 1934, when the Nazi regime carried out a series of political executions. Most of those killed were members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary Brownshirts. The Killers were SS and Gestapo men.

[pjotr]

Nov 12, 2010 22:27:38 GMT 1 Bonobo said:

From a Jewish paper:


Story of Auschwitz strangely incomplete

Avi Benlolo President and CEO of Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies

The glaring difference between Berlin’s depiction of the Holocaust and that of Auschwitz in Poland is in the details of how the story is being told.

Berlin’s museums and memorials challenge visitors to understand the rise of the Third Reich and the horrific anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust and its end game — the killing of millions of Jews and other “undesirables” in slaughter houses like the Auschwitz concentration camp.

At Auschwitz, however, the start and finish of the Holocaust was Auschwitz. Visitors to this notorious camp must dig deep for an explanation of why Auschwitz became the world’s largest cemetery.

Auschwitz I — where political prisoners and labourers were held and medical experiments conducted, now houses a “museum” visited by an astounding 1.3 million people a year.

The exhibits, largely unsophisticated, remain relatively unchanged since the Communist era in Poland. At that time, reference to the murder of 900,000 Jews out of 1,000,000 people killed at Auschwitz was virtually nonexistent.

The Communists did not distinguish between the victims — despite the fact that 90 per cent were murdered specifically because they were Jewish.

Twenty years after the fall of communism in the country, one wonders if the Poles still hold on to that view.

For example, of the hundreds of pictures of victims (all Polish political prisoners) lining the walls of one of the exhibit barracks, only one Jewish name can be easily identified. The pictures have been hanging there since the 1950s, reflective of the political history the Communists wanted to project.

The disproportionality of remembrance in this case is quite apparent and the political implications — stretching onward to this day, cloud historical understanding.

How do thousands of Poles visiting Auschwitz yearly understand the horror that unfolded here? What is the history they are told? If there is no significant mention of Hitler, the rise of Nazism and the Nuremberg Laws, are they aware that Auschwitz was the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem”?

One answer can be found at the “shooting wall” where Polish political and military leaders were executed. It has become a symbolic place of Polish nationalism. Its importance (over other spots in the camp) is quantified by the piles of flowers lining its walls and the Polish flag flying high above.

And what of Jewish history in Poland, where nearly 3 million Jews resided prior to World War II and less than 1,000 reside today?

Only a short drive away, Krakow was once a central hub of Jewish life; it is now virtually “Judenrein” (free of Jews). Most of these men, women and children ended up at Auschwitz. Their story remains untold.

Auschwitz is hallowed ground.

The curators and leadership of its museum and sites have a sacred responsibility to ensure substantive context about the rise and fall of Nazism does not continue to be ignored. Greater attention must be given to the truth about Auschwitz — that it was mainly a Jewish death camp.

Germany gets it.

Now it’s time for Poland to face reality.

Bonobo,

There is a reason that there are only or mainly images of "Polish prisoners" in the Auschwitz Museum. The Nazi's did not took images of Jewish prisoners, because there were to many of them and they were not interested in taking images of them. The Poles, who were non-jews were worth while of being taking images, because they were aryans. Slav Untermenschen, but stil, non-jewish aryans, and worthy slaves for the German war industry. This is what the Polish guide at Auschwitz told me. And he was a very well informed man, who had a lot of Jewish, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Russian and other informers (former camp prisoners, historians and Holocaust researchers from America, Poland and other countries).
The guide was very tough, unsentimental and great in his job, in describing the Nazi logic, the Industrial destruction, the production figures, the torture methods, the surviving time or time given to an average inmate, the inhumanity, the large scale, the systematic approach, the machinery of the camp and etc.


Primo Levi

His exact disriptions, rationalism and realism matched with the books I read.
Primo Levi's book "If This Is a Man" describing his 11 months—from February 21, 1944 until liberation on January 27, 1945—in the German concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland, during the Second World War. The book is described as a memoir, but it goes beyond mere recollection by seeking to consider in narrative form the human condition in all its extremes.

( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_Levi / pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_Levi )

Tadeusz Borowski



The second book about Auschwitz, which made a big impression on me was the book about Auschwitz "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" (The original title in the Polish language was Pożegnanie z Marią (Farewell to Maria)) Tadeusz Borowski. Like Levi's book it left a great impression and you could even say a mark behind in me. It is in the same time a terrible and exellent book.
Why terrible? Because of the cynicism and nihilism of the camp life described in it, the dehumanization of prisoners, inhumane camp guards, capo's and prisoners themselves. I had never read a book like that before and in my opinion it is one of the best books about the second world war I ever read. Borowski and Levi were eye witnesses of Auschwitz and both men were never cured of Auschwitz. The death camp had left deep scares on their souls and tormented their minds. Borowski commited suicide when he witnessed that the concentration camp mentality had survived and was part of the New Stalinist opressive regime in Poland.


( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Borowski / pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Borowski_%28poeta%29 )

[pjotr]

And these were the movies about the Holocaust which left a great impression on me:






My mother told me that the atmosphere of the movie was so good and realistic that she recognised the Warsaw of the Second world war in it, the Warsaw she knew from 1939 until 1944, when she lived there in Mokotow.

Both my father and my mother have the same memories of the German soldiers of the Wehrmacht and SS. The SS soldiers that lived near my mothers appartment always laughed and had great joy. And they were always singing. The joyful victorious occupiers. That is what I often saw or see, the joy the Nazi's have in harassing, humiliating, torturing and murdering their victims. They must have had a way to opress their emotions or humanity. These SS soldiers wanted to give oranges or sweets to Polish kids, to my mother, but my babcia prohibited my mother and aunt to take any of it. My grandmother told my mother and my aunt (her sister) that the sweets and fruits of the SS men were poisoned. They weren't. That was the ambivalence of it. It were hardened, ideological trained Nazi soldiers, but in the Polish kids they saw their own German kids, nieces, nephews or younger cousins.

To make the confusion larger, you had good SS men, officers and soldiers, who were opposed to the Holocaust and used the SS uniform to do acts of resistance or real Nazi SS people, who confronted with the Nazi extermination terror in the East, changed their minds and followed their inner human soul. These were exeptions ofcourse. A tiny minority, but they were in Poland, in the Netherlands and in other countries. From the other hand there were ordinairy Wehrmacht soldiers and officers who were worse than many SS men. Wehrmach war criminals. And next to that you had ofcourse Dutch, Polish and other traitors. People who are weak, and went for greed, short term materialistic gain, or had a sadistic pleasure in the pain, suffering and power they had over compatriots or minorities as jews and gypsies. This last group ofcourse was a (tiny) minority of the majority of Poles and Dutch who did not collaborate. But they were there. The Blue Police in Poland and the Dutch police and NSB (Dutch Nazi party) in the Netherlands.

Pieter

[Bonobo]

Archaeologists Discover Treasures of Holocaust Victims in Poland

Holocaust survivors working in conjunction with an Israeli archaeologist in Lublin, Poland have found jewelry and other artifacts that were apparently hastily buried by prisoners at the Majdanek death camp.

Majdanek is one of the most complete WWII concentration camps still in existence. Despite the large expanse of land, it smells heavily of the pitch and tar on the buildings that once held Polish Jews and captured Soviet soldiers. It’s the smell of death. From the small museum to the giant pile of ash and bone recovered from the no-longer working ovens, the camp is filled with the ghosts of its dark history. Now, an excavation taking place at the former death camp is writing a new chapter in Holocaust history.

Four Holocaust survivors have unearthed jewelry, coins and other heirlooms which were buried by hand, hidden by desperate camp prisoners over 60 years ago. The four survivors who took part in the archaeological dig traveled from Australia for the making of a documentary about the Majdanek death camp.

The survivors brought forth amazingly clear memories, including pointing out a place where more than 2000 prisoners were forced to stand for more than a day before Nazi officials herded most of them into the gas chambers. It was during that day that the prisoners most likely buried the treasures. An Israeli archaeologist coordinated the initial three-day dig and hopes to resume digging next month.

"An archaeological dig allowed us to find, around 35 centimetres below the surface, some 50 objects: rings, wedding rings, watches, earrings, and coins, including a 10 dollar coin minted in 1894," Majdanek Museum Director Edward Balawajder said in an interview with foreign news agencies.

An interview with Abraham Lewent, a former prisoner at Majdanek, describes his experience when his family was taken from the Warsaw ghetto and delivered to the camp.

"Where we're going, we don't know," he said in an archival interview conducted by the United States Holocaust Museum. "They put us on trains. I was together with my father, and with this man, and his wife, or his sister, was it? And they took us to Majdanek. Majdanek was a camp near Lublin, and over there was five fields. That means every field had eight or nine hundred people and it was barracks and there's nothing to do."

Lewent was among many Jews forced into hard labor at the camp.

"The only thing you were Majdanek you did, you sit sometimes all day long, and sometimes they took you out to work and a half of them never came back," he recalls. "They make you sit all day long and breaking up from big stones to make little stones, or digging holes, digging ditches, and covering the ditches up. That was the work. That's what you call, uh, a camp what actually is annihilation...they annihilate people, actually."

More than 360,000 people were murdered at Majdanek by the Nazi regime between 1941 and 1944. More than half were Jews. Jews from Poland made up nearly half of the over 6 million Jews exterminated during World War II. Overall, Nazis conducted a campaign of slaughter that saw the deaths of more than 11 million people.

Balawajder called the find significant not just because of the value of the items found, but as additional evidence of the Holocaust that can be preserved for future generations. Some of the found items, including a gold wedding band, are being shipped to various memorials around the world including Yad Vashem in Israel, the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust Center in Melbourne, Australia.