German Death/Concentration Camps in Poland

[valpomike]

Again, I say, those dam Germans. Let us never forget what they did to so many. Pray for there souls.

Mike

[valpomike]

I guess you can look past what your friends the Germans did to so many, but I can't. Even now the German people think they are better that the rest of the world. Your wife, or you, must be German, or maybe a son or daughter-in-law, but there must be a reason. It has not been that long, many are still alive who went through this in the camps. Mass killing, just because they were not German.
Most of the time, I think you have good judgement, but not when it comes to Germans. If you would only help me understand your thinking, and why you think this way, I might be able to understand also.

Mike

[tufta]

Jan 3, 2011 16:58:17 GMT 1 valpomike said:

I guess you can look past what your friends the Germans did to so many, but I can't. Even now the German people think they are better that the rest of the world. Your wife, or you, must be German, or maybe a son or daughter-in-law, but there must be a reason. It has not been that long, many are still alive who went through this in the camps. Mass killing, just because they were not German.
Most of the time, I think you have good judgement, but not when it comes to Germans. If you would only help me understand your thinking, and why you think this way, I might be able to understand also.

Mike

Yes Mike, I am German in disguise. So please refrain from silly generalisations.

I am also Russian is disguise, Mike. So include Russians in the refraining too.

[valpomike]

But I am 100% Polish-American, and I can't forget what they both did to my people. I lost many family members to both. And both still think they will some day take over the world. Both think they are better than the rest of the world. And from what I hear, both treat there people unfair.

Mike

[Bonobo]

Germany has contributed 60 million euros for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, to oversee the conservation and maintenance work at the site of the former Nazi German death camp.

An agreement to this effect has been signed at the German Embassy in Warsaw by the Director of the State Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Piotr Cywiński.

The Embassy’s press attache Konrad Lax has said that the money will be transferred in five equal annual instalments as of this year.

Mr Cywinski said that the German contribution amounts to fifty percent of a sum that is to constitute a fund from which the preservation of Auschwitz as a symbol of the Holocaust will be financed.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Fund was set up two years ago.
In addition to Germany, several other countries have pledged to contribute to the Fund. They include Britain, the United States, Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.

The site of the former Nazi German camp in southern Poland extends over an area of almost 200 hectares and comprises 155 buildings, most which are badly in need of repair. The conservation projects are also to cover the camp’s archives, documents and objects in the museum collection.

Over 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, perished at Auschwitz.

[valpomike]

They should do this and more.

Mike

[Bonobo]

I don't recommend going to Auschwitz unless you're prepared. When I visited with my aunt, I was very under prepared. We watched a video on the coach up there, which helped a little in my understanding of the camp itself. I hadn't done it in school so I wasn't entirely sound with what happened in WWII regarding the concentration camps.
I stepped off the bus into thick snow as it was a week before Christmas. Even in my four layers I was still freezing. Everything is very bleak in the first camp. Although the buildings are large red brick and very neatly arranged, everything seemed dead.
In Auschwitz, you can feel the silence. Nothing really moves. Even when my aunt would stumble in the snow or mutter something under her breath, I couldn't pay any attention. It was like something was stopping me from seeing this place in the 21st Century.
I'm seventeen with blonde hair and blue eyes. I'm not religious, I have no serious disorders and am pretty normal I suppose. My aunt is gay and very openly so. Standing next to her, realizing that I would never had been considered for a place like this where she would have been without question made me feel hideous.
Going to the Birkenau camp was actually a lot easier than Auschwitz. The landscape is so open and freeing that I couldn't quite get my head around the awful things that happened there.
To anyone going to visit the camps, I highly recommend taking a tour. It is a lot less stressful, you get every single piece of information you could possibly take in and they are very professional.
Also, I think it's best to go in the winter. A summer trip would be no where near as moving than standing beneath the entrance, freezing cold realizing that this was the last thing many people ever felt.

Auschwitz today:

[Bonobo]

‘Not spoons but rusty bits of metal’, says Auschwitz thief
28.06.2011 15:05
A 60-year-old man, revealed to be a leading local government official in Israel, has claimed that he did not steal historically significant cultural artefacts from the Auschwitz museum, southern Poland but merely “rusted old bits and pieces”.

Moti Posloshani, deputy mayor of the town of Herzliya near Tel Aviv, and his 57 year-old wife, were detained by customs officials at Krakow airport on Friday, after it was discovered that the couple had in their procession what prosecutors have described as “spoons and a pair of scissors” taken from the Auschwitz museum, the site of the notorious Nazi death camp in southern Poland during WW II.

Posloshani, a retired colonel in the Israeli army, claims however that the artefacts were merely “rusted bits and pieces” which had been “lying about in mud” on the site of former warehouses used by the Nazis to store the belongings of people sent to their deaths in the gas chambers.

It was reported at the weekend that the couple had accepted the charges of theft of “historically significant cultural artefacts” and given a two-year suspended prison sentence.

Posloshani has told a radio station in Israel that he had no idea what caused him to take the mementoes and “deeply regrets the act” - especially, as it is being associated with the theft two years ago of the Arbeit macht frei sign from the gateway to the infamous death camp, and would be a stigma very difficult to remove.

[Bonobo]

Poland’s President Bronislaw Komorowski and Austria’s Heinz Fischer honoured the memory of the victims of the World War II concentration camp of Mauthausen, Thursday.

President
www.thenews.pl/a7c0d73f-87e9-44ec-a98f-b7b9748c8346.file
President Bronislaw Komorowski meets with former inmates of the Mauthausen concentration camp, 14.07.2011. Photo: PAP/Jacek Turczyk

President Komorowski is on an official two-day visit in Austria. President Fischer invited the Polish head of state to tour the Nazi camp site because, as he said, his country needed to deal with the dark side of its own history, as Austria had made significant contribution to Nazi crimes.

The camp, together with its subsidiaries, was located near the city of Linz, and functioned between 1938 and 1945. It was one of the most notorious concentration camps in the Third Reich.

“Looking at the gentle Austrian landscape, it’s hard to believe that here was one of the hells on Europe,” President Komorowski reflected, adding that “this camp was one of the hells where Poles perished.”

President of Austria, Heinz Fischer, expressed his “humility, sadness and dismay” at “the boundless cruelty,” and “disdain for human life,” that had been demonstrated at the site.

Some 30-40,000 Poles are estimated to have perished at Mauthausen, primarily members of the intelligentsia.

The Polish contingent made up about a quarter of the camp’s 200,000 or so inmates.
A major wave of deportation came in 1939-40, when Poles were sent from the Silesia, Wielkopolska and Pomerania regions.

After the doomed Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis in 1944, a further wave was dispatched, dealing a further blow to Poland’s elite.

“It was hard. We had to work in the quarries in three shifts,” remembers former inmate, Henryk Czarnecki, who was part of the official presidential delegation this morning.

“500-550 people died in the camp daily,” he recalls. “People ate grass and bark from trees, anything. The desire was so strong that one didn’t look, just so long as one was able to put something into one’s stomach,” Czarnecki adds.

When the camp was liberated by the Americans, many of the inmates were no more than skeletons.

During his visit, President Komorowski was shown an exhibition chronicling the destruction of the Polish intelligentsia.

Noted Polish inmates at Mauthausen included Professor Wiktor Ormicki, a geographer, inventor Kazimierz Proszynski, architect and poet Stanislaw Staszewski and folklorist Karol Piegza.

[valpomike]

This again, is why I dislike the German's, for what they did. We must never forget.

Mike

[pjotr]

Bo, Mike,

I have been there in april 2004, I felt the same thing the person is saying in Bo's quote;
"In Auschwitz, you can feel the silence. Nothing really moves."

I read Primo Levi 'If This Is a Man' novel in Dutch translation and Tadeusz Borowski's Pożegnanie z Marią (Farewell to Maria, English title This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen). I read ofcourse the English version 'This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen'. But nothing is the same as being in Auschwitz, a place were 1 million people were murdered.

It was a heavy, somber and dreadful experiance to be in Auschwitz, the camp(s) I read and learned so much about. To much maybe. The Polish guide was an exellent guide, who kept learning about Auschwitz, from former prisoners who visited the camps, jews, Poles, Germans (Political prisoners, jews and others), Russians, Dutch, Hungarian and other people who had been imprissoned there and were 'lucky' to survive. The survivors were the minority.

The Polish guide showed the inhunanity of the camp system (the Nazi ideology, the SS mentality), the dehumanisation of fellow human beings, the systematic, industrial mass murder. And something what made a great impression on me next to the gass chambers, crematoria, the baracks, and the large seize of the camps, was the Gestapo prison, a small building next to the fence, with a very sinister, dark and evil purpose. Mainly Polish peasants and prisoners from outside Auschwitz were brought there, for various of reasons (resistance activities, helping escaping prisoners, or conflicts with Germans) interrogated, tortured and made to stand at the standing prison, a small place between the building wall and a smaller wall which was about 2 meter. The prisoners had to stand for days there, and I remembered feeling horrified, by the sense of understanding what that meant. Standing until you die, your legs break or you faint and will be a subject to further Gestapo torture. I knew about the horrors of Auschwitz, but this Gestapo prison house inside the camp showed that even inside that 'living hell' there were layers of evil.

The photographs of camp prisoners in their striped prison suits which hang in Auschwitz are mainly of Polish prisoners, because the Germans did not consider jews to be worthy to take images of. There were to many of them and they had to perish anyway.

Pieter

[Bonobo]

Netanyahu opens exhibition at Auschwitz Museum
13.06.2013 13:41
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened an exhibition at Block 27 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German death camp museum in southern Poland, Thursday morning.

The visit to the Auschwitz Museum comes on the second day of Netanyahu’s trip to Poland: on Wednesday he had talks with his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk.

The exhibition at the Auschwitz Museum is a multimedia look at the history of the death camp from 1940 to 1945, where over one million lost their lives at the hands of the Nazis.

The exhibits have been curated by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust institute and includes a 360-degree cinematic montage of Jewish life before the Holocaust and a Book of Names listing details of over 4 million Holocaust victims.

There is also a room devoted to the 1.5 million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust.

"It's an extremely new perception of an exhibition. It doesn't tell a story like in a history book. It's a very strong place for education, for conveying awareness of the Holocaust," Piotr Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum told the Israeli ynetnews.com.

The communist authorities opened an exhibition in Block 27 in the late 1970s but it was decided the upgrade the exhibits in 2005 after a visit to Auschwitz by the then prime minister of Israel Ariel Sharon.

The opening of the new exhibition comes a day before the anniversary on 14 June of the first mass transport of prisoners by occupying Nazi Germans to the newly opened Auschwitz death camp in 1940.

The transport, from a regular prison in Tarnów, southern Poland, consisted of 728 Poles, including some Jews – though the systematic round up and slaughter of Jews did not occur till two years later.

Polish prisoners were numbered from 31 to 758 – the numbers 1 to 30 were designated to German prisoners who had yet to arrive at the camp.

Prisoner number 31 was Stanisław Ryniak, who was the first Pole in Auschwitz.
- See more at: www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/138457,Netanyahu-opens-exhibition-at-Auschwitz-Museum#sthash.2YPtrtgy.dpuf

[Bonobo]

Treblinka escapee and Warsaw Uprising veteran dies
20.02.2016 18:43
Samuel Willenberg, who escaped from the Nazi German death camp of Treblinka in 1943 and later fought in the Warsaw Uprising, has died in Israel aged 93.
Samuel Willenberg. Photos: archival report, Polskie RadioSamuel Willenberg. Photos: archival report, Polskie Radio

Willenberg, who had been the last living survivor of the Treblinka Revolt, was shot in the leg while fleeing the death camp.

Of the 300 or so inmates that escaped, only about 100 survived the ensuing manhunt.

During the doomed 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi German occupiers, Willenberg fought both for the Home Army (AK), the official force loyal to Poland's government-in-exile, as well as the communist People's Army (AL).

After the war, he joined the Polish Army, but he emigrated to Israel in 1950, at the height of the Stalinist era.

Willenberg obtained a job as as the chief measurer for Israel's Housing Ministry. After his retirement he won recognition as a sculptor, echoing his father's talents. Prior to the war, Willenberg Senior had been in demand as a decorator of synagogues.

Samuel Willenberg made several visits to Poland in his later years. He was awarded the Virtuti Militari – Poland's highest military honour – in 2008.

His roots were in Częstochowa, southern Poland, where his father taught at a Jewish high school. His mother was an Orthodox Christian who converted to Judaism.

Willenberg is survived by his daughter and three grandchildren.
- See more at: www.thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/241609,Treblinka-escapee-and-Warsaw-Uprising-veteran-dies#sthash.6cKLkWAo.dpuf