If you can’t get to a Holocaust Museum, the Museum will come to you…

Sacramento is one of the few large cities in the world that does not have its own Holocaust Museum, but not to worry: a traveling exhibit called “The Courage to Remember” will be at California State University Sacramento until November 4, 2011.  It is one of three identical exhibits, based on the exhibit with the same name in the Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. These three exhibits will be traveling around California for a year, courtesy of the Foundation of California which received a grant from SNCF (French railway company). The exhibit, which has its own website, consists of 200 photos arranged on 42 panels.  The traveling exhibition was first made available to schools and libraries in California in 1991.

I went to see the exhibit at CSUS today.  Just as I expected, there were a few controversial photos in the exhibit.  

Elie Wiesel at Buchenwald: “I was there, but I wasn’t there.”

On June 5, 2009, Elie Wiesel accompanied President Barack Obama on a trip to the Memorial Site on the grounds of the former Buchenwald concentration camp.  Obama made a televised speech, standing in front of the Jedem Das Seine gate, which was in the open position.  Standing (unseen) behind him was Bertrand Hertz, one of the Buchenwald orphans who survived.

Early in his speech, Obama said this:

We saw the area known as Little Camp where Elie and Bertrand were sent as boys. In fact, at the place that commemorates this camp, there is a photograph in which we can see a 16-year-old Elie in one of the bunks along with the others. We saw the ovens of the crematorium, the guard towers, the barbed wire fences, the foundations of barracks that once held people in the most unimaginable conditions.

Following Obama’s speech, Elie Wiesel stepped up to the podium, and said this:

Mr. President, Chancellor Merkel, Bertrand, ladies and gentlemen. As I came here today it was actually a way of coming and visiting my father’s grave — but he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky. This has become in those years the largest cemetery of the Jewish people.  The day he died was one of the darkest in my life. He became sick, weak, and I was there. I was there when he suffered. I was there when he asked for help, for water. I was there to receive his last words. But I was not there when he called for me, although we were in the same block; he on the upper bed and I on the lower bed. He called my name, and I was too afraid to move. All of us were. And then he died. I was there, but I was not there.

What are we to make of this?  The reason that I dredged up this memory of Elie Wiesel’s words at Buchenwald is because the question of whether Elie was really an orphan at Buchenwald just won’t go away.  Now a new post, which questions Elie Wiesel’s claim to be a Buchenwald orphan, has just gone up on the Elie Wiesel Cons the World blog, which you can read here.

An ignominious end to Denis Avey’s fake story?

In a comment on my blog, a reader provided a link to an April 2011 article on the Mail Online about the book written by Denis Avey.  I noticed this sentence near the end of the article:

Professor Kenneth Waltzer, the director of the Jewish Studies Program at Michigan State University and a world authority on the Nazi concentration camps, is sceptical: ‘The pattern of sustained silence, despite interviews, and then the tumbling out of the story does indeed raise suspicions.”

Ken Waltzer is on the case?  I predict that the end is near. The Denis Avey book will soon be categorized as a novel, like another fake Holocaust story that Professor Waltzer exposed: the one about the little girl throwing apples over the fence of a concentration camp.

The Mail Online article ends with this sentence:

As none other than the late Ernst Lobethal wrote to the New York Times in February 1994: ‘I think it is important to point out inaccuracies, lest Holocaust revisionists do it for us.’

I was one of the first to “point out inaccuracies” in the Denis Avey story.  Does that make me a “revisionist”?  There should be a new term for people who call attention to Holocaust lies.  Revisionist is a pejorative term when used by Holocaustians.

I blogged about Avey’s book several times, both before and after I read the book.  I wrote a review of the book here.

Franz Hoessler, the Commander of the women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Franz Hoessler is shown in a British documentary film

The photo above is a still shot of Franz Hoessler (Hössler) who was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was abandoned on January 18, 1945.  From December 1943 to January 1945, Hoessler had been the Commander of the women’s camp at Birkenau, where he worked with Dr. Josef Mengele, who was the women’s doctor at Birkenau.

In the photo above, Franz Hoessler is standing in front of a truck loaded with corpses of prisoners who died from typhus at Bergen-Belsen after the camp was voluntarily turned over to the British on April 15, 1945 by Heinrich Himmler.  Hoessler was one of the 80 SS men and women on the staff at Belsen who volunteered to stay behind and assist the British.  Twenty of these SS staff members died after they were deliberately exposed to typhus.

Hoessler was one of twelve SS men and women, who were put on trial by the British in The Belsen Trial in 1945, and charged with crimes committed at both Belsen and Auschwitz. He was convicted of war crimes committed at Birkenau, including his alleged participation in the selection of prisoners to be gassed.

During the trial, Hoessler testified that he had been in charge of staffing the brothel, in the main Auschwitz camp, with volunteers from the women’s camp at Birkenau.  He testified that Dr. Mengele had examined the volunteers and selected those who were free from disease.  Franz Hoessler was hanged on December 13, 1945 for crimes committed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Stories of escape from the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau

This morning I read an article in a college newspaper about a traveling Holocaust exhibit that was recently shown at California State University Fresno.   Holocaust survivors were on hand to tell the students their personal stories.  Among the survivors, who attended the opening ceremony of the Courage to Remember exhibit from the Museum of Tolerance, were Anna Levin-Ware and her husband Robert Ware.   Photos of Anna, taken when she was a prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, were included in the exhibit.

Anna Levin was Polish, but her husband was Hungarian.  This quote from the college newspaper tells how Anna was saved from the gas chambers at Birkenau:

Later Levin-Ware shared how she was placed in a gas chamber, doors locked, ready to die. Then, suddenly, guards suddenly opened the doors and announced that any Hungarians were to leave, including her by marriage. To her surprise, they removed her from the chamber.

But to her horror, they left her father, mother, brother and baby sister in the gas chamber and could only listen as the sounds of panic slowly became silent, marking their deaths. Along with other parts of her story, she showed the audience a picture of her assembled before the Nazis of her camp when she was in her 20s.

Did something get lost in translation here?  Did this student reporter misunderstand Anna’s story?  It is well known that 400,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed in only ten weeks at Birkenau.  Yet Anna was saved when German guards opened the gas chamber doors (plural) and announced that the Hungarians would be saved, leaving Anna’s Polish relatives to their fate.  

Registration card for Lazar Wiesel at Buchenwald

A new post has just gone up on Carolyn Yeager’s website Elie Wiesel Cons the World.  This website (or blog) is devoted to the study of Elie Wiesel, the world’s most famous Holocaust survivor.  This latest post shows a photo of a Buchenwald registration card for Lazar Wiesel.  The Germans were famous for keeping detailed records during World War II.  Strangely, there is no Buchenwald registration card for Elie Wiesel, the most famous survivor of Buchenwald.  I previously blogged about this here. Maybe Lazar Wiesel was a relative of Elie Wiesel.  You’ll have to read Carolyn’s latest post to find out.

Two and a Half Men — the new season

I was very pleased with the first episode of Two and a Half Men in the new Season 9, which was on last Monday night.  It was much better than I was expecting.  The sitcom broke records with 27.8 million viewers, as people tuned in to see how the show would manage without Charlie Sheen, who was fired last season.  Ashton Kutcher played the part of a new character and he did quite well.  I was impressed with his good acting performance; he fit right in as though he had always been one of the characters on the show.   Kutcher did not replace Charlie’s character, Charlie Harper.  No one could ever replace Charlie Sheen, nor his character, Charlie Harper.

The best part about the new show is that there is a possibility that Charlie Harper could come back.  I’m not sure if the producers of the show realize that they have left a way open for the return of Charlie Harper.

The first show of the new season starts off with the funeral of Charlie Harper as his wife Rose tells the mourners about his death:  he fell off a train platform in Paris and was hit by a train.  This happened just after he had told Rose that he had been unfaithful.  It was strongly implied that Rose had pushed him off the platform.  His body was cut into hamburger meat.   A coffin was shown at his funeral, but his remains were not in the closed casket.  So how do we know that Charlie is really dead?  We don’t!  Rose is a known liar and as regular viewers of the show know, Rose cannot be trusted.  Maybe she pushed him, maybe he fell, or maybe Rose was lying.

Later in the show, Charlie’s brother Alan is carrying Charlie’s ashes in a large urn when the new character, Walden Schmidt, shows up at Charlie’s Malibu beach house where Alan and his son still live.  At that moment, Alan spills Charlie’s ashes inside the house and they are cleaned up (off camera) with a hand vacuum cleaner.  Presumably the hand vacuum cleaner is emptied into the trash and Charlie is now completely gone.  Gone but not forgotten!

Charlie Sheen has millions of fans and if he should return, it would bring even more viewers to the show.  It would be easy to have a plot twist in which it is revealed that Rose was lying about Charlie’s death.  Did someone really pick up all the tiny pieces of Charlie’s body after he was allegedly hit by a train?  Was a DNA test done to make sure that it was Charlie?  Did this really happen at all, or was Rose lying?

In the news today: dragging a man to death…Where have we heard this before?

I read in the news here that white supremacist Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed on Wednesday evening, Sept. 21st, for the dragging death of James Byrd, Jr., a black man from East Texas.  According to the news story, “Byrd, 49, was chained to the back of a pickup truck and pulled whip-like to his death along a bumpy asphalt road in one of the most grisly hate crime murders in recent Texas history.”

There were three white supremacists involved in the crime; Brewer is the first of them to be executed.  When I read about this, I wondered where these three men had gotten the idea of dragging someone to their death behind a truck.  I think that the fact that they were white supremacists gives us a clue.  As white supremacists, they were undoubtedly familiar with crimes committed against the Germans during World War II.  There is a famous story of a German SS soldier being dragged behind a truck by members of the French Resistance during World War II.

Otto Weidinger, the last commander of SS Panzergrenadier Regiment 4, Das Reich Division, wrote about the dragging incident in a small 62-page booklet entitled “Tulle and Oradour, a Franco-German Tragedy,” which he published in German in 1985.  I read the booklet when I did some research about Oradour sur Glane. In the booklet, Weidinger claims that Das Reich Division SS soldiers were victimized by local French Resistance fighters who committed unbelievable atrocities against them in the town of Tulle. He justifies the reprisal done by SS soldiers at Oradour-sur-Glane by claiming that the massacre was a legal reprisal against the villagers for violations of the Hague Convention by the French Resistance. He compares the killing of SS soldiers at Tulle to the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre.   

Sacramento Empty Shoe memorial for 9/11

There were 100 cities across America which had their own local memorial ceremony for the 10th anniversary of 9/11 on Sunday, September 11, 2011.  The 9/11 Memorial day in Sacramento, CA featured a field of Empty Shoes precisely arranged on the grounds of the State Fair Grounds. The empty shoes were in honor of the 2,977 people who died ten years ago on 9/11, including 2,349 civilians.  The field of empty shoes consisted of  new shoes, of all kinds, which were donated by people in the Sacramento area. The shoes were given to the Salvation Army when the Memorial was taken down.

Empty Shoe memorial at Cal Expo in Sacramento, CA

Young girl walks through the field of shoes in Sacramento

9/11 Memorial ceremonies…

On Sunday, September 11th, I watched the 9/11 Memorial ceremonies on Fox News all day.  Memories of 9/11 ten years ago came flooding back: On that day, I had gotten up at 6 a.m. as usual (9 a.m. Eastern time) and immediately turned on the TV set in my bedroom. I was horrified to see the South Tower at the World Trade Center with a gaping hole in it and black smoke pouring out. The tower had been hit by American Airlines Flight 11 at 8:46 a.m. Eastern time. I thought at first that the plane had hit the tower accidentally.

As I watched in horror, at 9:03 a.m. Eastern time, I saw the North Tower hit by Flight 175. A big red ball of fire appeared on the opposite side of the tower and I knew that this was a deliberate attack: World War III had started.  I expected that attacks in other cities would quickly follow.  I called my daughter, woke her up, and told her not to go out of the house because we were at war and anything could happen.

On that day in 2001, I watched the Fox News coverage the whole day; Rick Leventhal was reporting from the site of the attack.  Footage from his original coverage was replayed on Sunday 09.11.11.