What is the meaning of the girl in the Red Coat in Schindler’s List?

The girl in the red coat in the movie Schindler’s List

Schindler’s List is now out on Blu-Ray and there is renewed interest in this fictional movie.  The photo above shows one of the scenes from the movie, which is loosely based on history.

In March 1941, the Jews in the area of Krakow, Poland had been put into a walled ghetto in Podgorze, a district of Krakow. This ghetto is depicted in the movie, Schindler’s List, but the actual scenes were filmed nearby in the old Jewish quarter called Kazimierz because there are modern buildings in Podgorze now, while Kazimierz was still in its original state in 1993.

Jews are being forced to move into the Podgorze ghetto

On March 13, 1943, a Saturday, the Podgorze ghetto in Krakow, Poland was officially closed and around 6,000 Jews who were able to work were sent to the Plaszow forced labor camp, while around 2,000 children and old people were sent to other camps, including Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, which was both a labor camp and a death camp.

The next stage of the Final Solution for the Krakow Jews was the liquidation of the Podgorze ghetto and the transportation of the remaining Jews to the forced labor camp at Plaszow on March 13 and 14, 1943. Before the liquidation of the ghetto, there were 2,000 prisoners at the Plaszow camp, all of them Jews. Afterwards, the camp population rose to 8,000. At this point, Plaszow was still not a concentration camp, but a penal labor camp under the jurisdiction of local SS men in the General Government, as the central section of occupied Poland was called by the Nazis. According to the novel Schindler’s Ark, it was because Plaszow was a labor camp, under local authority, that the random killing of prisoners by Amon Goeth did not command much attention among the top brass. The novel Schindler’s Ark explains that executions and floggings at all of the concentration camps had to be approved by the central administrative office in Berlin, but not at the labor camps.

Until the middle of 1943, all the prisoners at the Plaszow forced labor camp were Jews. In July 1943, a separate section was fenced off for Polish prisoners who were sent to the camp for breaking the laws of the German occupational government. Polish prisoners served their sentences and were then released from the prison. The Jews remained in the camp indefinitely. Many Jews were sent on to the Auschwitz concentration camp, only 60 kilometers southwest of Krakow.

The Schindler Jews at first lived in the Plaszow camp and walked 2.5 kilometers to and from Schindler’s enamelware factory each day. The factory was in an ordinary-looking, modern, but dreary building in Krakow. Then Schindler bribed Plaszow Commandant Amon Goeth to let his workers move into barracks which he built in the courtyard of the factory. Schindler himself lived in a nondescript gray apartment building close to his factory. When I visited Krakow in 1998, Schindler’s factory building was being used by an electronics factory called Toplar. It is now a Museum for tourists.

There were many small sub-camps, such as the Schindler factory, in the Nazi labor camp system, but none where the prisoners were so well treated. The Nazis provided food for the Schindler Jews, but Schindler spent the equivalent of $360,000 to provide extra food, which he bought on the black market, for his prisoners.

One day, Oskar Schindler was out riding his horse, along a bridal path on a hill overlooking the Podgorze ghetto, when he saw the girl in the red coat among the Jews being marched out of the ghetto, walking on their way to the Plaszow camp.

View of the ghetto from the hill where Oskar Schindler saw the girl in the red coat

In the photo above, you can see a red car, driving on Krakusa Street, where Oskar Schindler saw the girl in the red coat.

The photo below shows the bridal path along the edge of the hill overlooking Krakusa Street. This is where Schindler looked down from his horse and saw 7,000 Jews being marched out of the Podgorze ghetto, according to the novel, Schindler’s Ark. The bridal path was overgrown with trees when I took this photo in 1998.

The bridal path where Oskar Schindler was riding when he saw the girl in the red coat

The only non-Jewish inhabitant of the Podgorze ghetto was a master pharmacist named Tadeusz Pankiewicz. His Eagle Pharmacy was located at #18 on the cobble-stoned Plac Zgody which was the main square where selections took place and from where transports of Jews were sent to the Belzec death camp. I previously blogged here about how Amon Goeth took bribes from the Jews in exchange for not sending them to Belzec.

In 1993, the same year that the movie Schindler’s List was filmed, the Eagle Pharmacy building was turned into a National Memorial Museum. I visited the museum in 1998 and saw  displays which showed pictures of the roundup and deportation of the Jews of Krakow. There was also a photo of Amon Goeth on display.

In 1947, Tadeusz Pankiewicz published his memoirs called The Pharmacy in the Krakow Ghetto. It is an account of how his pharmacy became a meeting place for the Jews in the ghetto where they could get information from the underground press. Letters were sent from and received at the pharmacy. It was also a hiding place for Jews whom the Nazis were trying to arrest for violations of their laws. According to the novel Schindler’s Ark, the pharmacy was where messages were passed between the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB) and the partisans of the Polish People’s Army, the two main groups which fought the Nazis in guerrilla warfare during World War II. In the movie, Schindler’s List, there is no mention of how Jewish partisans resisted the Nazis and helped to defeat the Germans in World War II.

So what does all this have to do with the girl in the red coat?  In the novel, Schindler’s Ark, Oskar Schindler sees the body of the little girl in the red coat and at that point, he realizes that he should do something to save the Jews.  Prior to this, Schindler had only been concerned with making lots of money by using the labor of Jews from the Podgorze ghetto. Using the labor of non-Jewish workers in his factory would have been at a much higher cost.

Did all this really happen?  No, the girl in the red coat is symbolic, although she is based on a real girl in the ghetto, who was not killed.

The following quote is from an article in the Huffington Post about the movie Schindler’s List, which you can read in full here:

The name Oliwia Dabrowska holds little meaning to film buffs, but the 23-year-old’s first movie role was quite significant. Dabrowska played “Red Genia” or the “girl in the red coat” in Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.” [...]

Dabrowska’s “red coat girl” has been the subject of much discussion and interpretation since “Schindler’s List” was released in 1993. The character bore surface similarities to Holocaust survivor Roma Ligocka, who was known for her red coat in the Krakow Ghetto, and wrote a memoir about her experiences. (Unlike Ligocka, Dabrowska’s “red coat girl” died in “Schindler’s List.”) Spielberg himself has said the significance of the red coat, the only splash of color in the black-and-white film, has more to do with reminding viewers of the way citizens of the world allowed the Holocaust to happen:

[ Spielberg said this] “America and Russia and England all knew about the Holocaust when it was happening, and yet we did nothing about it. We didn’t assign any of our forces to stopping the march toward death, the inexorable march toward death. It was a large bloodstain, primary red color on everyone’s radar, but no one did anything about it. And that’s why I wanted to bring the color red in.”

This quote from Wikipedia also gives the same words spoken by Steven Spielberg:

While the film is shot primarily in black-and-white, red is used to distinguish a little girl in a coat (portrayed by Oliwia Dabrowska). Later in the film, the girl appears to be one of the dead Jewish people, recognizable only by the red coat she is still wearing. Although it was unintentional, this character is coincidentally very similar to Roma Ligocka, who was known in the Kraków Ghetto for her red coat. Ligocka, unlike her fictional counterpart, survived the Holocaust. After the film was released, she wrote and published her own story, The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir (2002, in translation).[18] The scene, however, was constructed on the memories of Zelig Burkhut, survivor of Plaszow (and other work camps). When interviewed by Spielberg before the film was made, Burkhut told of a young girl wearing a pink coat, no older than four, who was shot by a Nazi officer right before his eyes. When being interviewed by The Courier-Mail, he said “it is something that stays with you forever.”

According to Andy Patrizio of IGN, the girl in the red coat is used to indicate that Schindler has changed: “Spielberg put a twist on her [Ligocka's] story, turning her into one more pile on the cart of corpses to be incinerated. The look on Schindler’s face is unmistakable. Minutes earlier, he saw the ash and soot of burning corpses piling up on his car as just an annoyance.”[19] Andre Caron wondered whether it was done “to symbolize innocence, hope or the red blood of the Jewish people being sacrificed in the horror of the Holocaust?”[20] Spielberg himself has explained that he only followed the novel, and his interpretation was that

“America and Russia and England all knew about the Holocaust when it was happening, and yet we did nothing about it. We didn’t assign any of our forces to stopping the march toward death, the inexorable march toward death. It was a large bloodstain, primary red color on everyone’s radar, but no one did anything about it. And that’s why I wanted to bring the color red in.”[21]

This quote, about the girl in the red coat, is also from Wikipedia:

Schindler prepares to leave Kraków with his fortune. He finds himself unable to do so, however, and prevails upon Goeth to allow him to keep his workers so he can move them to a factory in his old home of Zwittau-Brinnlitz, away from the Final Solution. Goeth charges a massive bribe for each worker. Schindler and Stern assemble a list of workers to be kept off the trains to Auschwitz.

[...]   The train carrying the women is accidentally redirected to Auschwitz. Schindler bribes the camp commander, Rudolf Höß, with a cache of diamonds in exchange for releasing the women to Brinnlitz.

Contrary to what Wikipedia says, Schindler did NOT “prevail upon Goeth to allow him to keep his workers.”  By that point in the movie, Goeth had been arrested by the Nazis and he was awaiting trial in Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen’s court.  Goeth had disappeared from the movie and nothing more was said about him.

Schindler and Stern did NOT assemble a list of workers to be kept off the trains to Auschwitz.  Schindler’s famous list was a list of workers to be sent to the Gross Rosen concentration camp because Schindler was setting up a sub-camp of Gross Rosen near his old home town.

Rudolf Höß was NOT the “camp commander” at the time that Schindler bribed someone to release the women to Brinnlitz.

Rudolf Hoess is shown on the right in this photo from the Auschwitz Album

Dr. Josef Mengele, the man who selected Jews for the gas chamber at the Birkenau death camp, is shown in the center of the photo above. On his left is Richard Baer, the last commandant of the Auschwitz main camp and on his right is Rudolf Höß (aka Rudolf Hoess), who had been the first Commandant of the whole Auschwitz complex; he was given this assignment on May 1, 1940. Höß was relieved of his duties as the Commandant of the Auschwitz complex at the end of November 1943 and promoted to a position in the Economic Administration Head Office (WHVA) in Oranienburg.

On May 8, 1944, Höß was brought back to Auschwitz to be the Commander of the SS men at Auschwitz and to supervise the gassing of the Hungarian Jews. (According to Laurence Rees, in his book Auschwitz, a New History, Hoess was also given authority over the Commandants of the Auschwitz II and Auschwitz III camps when he came back in May 1944.)  Auschwitz II was Auschwitz-Birkenau, the death camp.

I believe that Spielberg is completely wrong in his claim that “America and Russia and England all knew about the Holocaust when it was happening, and yet we did nothing about it.”  What is today known as “the Holocaust” was mostly unknown until many years after World War II.

Update March 7, 2013:
I neglected to explain why Oskar Schindler REALLY made up a list of Jews to be saved from certain death.

Oskar Schindler’s real motive in saving a list of 1200 Jews was to save his own skin, not to save these 1200 Jews.  Schindler knew that he would be put on trial as a war criminal, after the war, because he was the commander of a sub-camp of the Plaszow camp. He knew that the Allies had already made up new crimes, under which the war criminals would be prosecuted after the war.

Schindler knew that the Allies had already made up new laws, such as the “common plan” principle, under which the war criminals would be prosecuted.  Under the “common plan” concept, anyone who had any connection to a concentration camp, in any capacity whatsoever, would be automatically guilty of a war crime.

By saving 1200 Jews in a new sub-camp of the Gross Rosen concentration camp, he would have a defense to the “common plan” principle. He would have 1200 Jews to put in a good word for him and save him.  That is exactly what happened: Schindler was not put on trial after the war, and the Jews that he had saved took care of him for the rest of his life.

Holocaust survivor was one of the few Jews to leave Auschwitz alive, thanks to Oskar Schindler

Niusia Horowitz was a prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp when she was a young girl. She was “hand-picked” for the gas chamber twice, but thanks to Oskar Schindler, she was saved because she had small fingers, perfect for polishing the inside of munition shells.  You can read her full story in The Sun online newspaper here.

This quote is from the article in The Sun:

As a 12-year-old, caged in the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp, she was twice hand-picked for the gas chamber.

Incredibly, both times she cheated death at the last minute after guards were bribed to spare her.

And Niusia became one of the few Jews ever to leave Auschwitz alive — thanks to heroic German industrialist Oskar Schindler.

The factory boss — whose selfless mission to save Jews inspired Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List — gave her a job at his fake munitions factory.

He then lied to convince Nazi bosses she was a key worker, despite her age, protecting her until the end of the war. Niusia, now 80, recalls: “An officer questioned whether I was really essential to the war effort. The answer was yes, because my hands were really small and I could polish inside munition shells where adult hands couldn’t reach.”

If you have seen the movie Schindler’s List, you may remember how Oskar Schindler went to Auschwitz and saved two young girls by telling the SS men that he needed someone to work in his factory who had small hands.  Niusia Horowitz was one of those young girls.

This quote is from the news article in The Sun:

Her story is so incredible that Spielberg wrote her character into his film and even let her appear in the final scene as herself.

[...]

Niusia’s hellish ordeal deepened in autumn 1944 when Schindler bribed German officials to let him move his operation to safer Brinnlitz, [ Brünnlitz] near Zwittau, his home town.

Each Jew was placed on “Schindler’s List” and transported by train to the town, where he had set up a bogus munitions factory.

All the male workers arrived safely, but a mix-up meant [train] carriages carrying young Niusia and around 300 other female Schindler Jews went to Auschwitz instead.

The movie Schindler’s List is based on a novel, entitled Schindler’s Ark, written by Thomas Keneally and first published in 1982.  The reason that the book is classified as a novel is because the book is LOOSELY BASED ON THE TRUTH; it is not purported  to be the Gospel truth. It is not true that the women on Schindler’s List had been sent to Auschwitz because of a “mix-up.” 

The real-life story is that the men on Schidler’s List were sent to the Gross Rosen concentration camp because Schindler’s new factory, a hundred miles from Gross Rosen, was being set up as a sub-camp of Gross Rosen.  On page 276 of Schindler’s Ark, the author wrote that “All Plaszow men would be sent to Gross Rosen.”  The Gross Rosen camp was a men’s camp.  There were no barracks for women at Gross Rosen, so all the Plaszow women had to be sent some place else.

The women on Schindler’s List had to be sent to some other camp until barracks for them could be built at Schindler’s new sub-camp.  The women were NOT sent to Auschwitz because of a mix-up; they were sent to Auschwitz to wait until barracks for them could be built at Schindler’s new sub camp of Gross Rosen.

The Horowitz family is mentioned in the book Schindler’s Ark on page 200 in this quote:

Among prisoners who knew, there was already competition to get into Emalia [Schindler's factory in Krakow]. Prisoner Dolek Horowitz, a purchasing officer inside the Plaszow camp, [located 10 miles from Krakow] knew that he would not be allowed to go to Schindler’s place himself. But he had a wife and two children. [...]

It was not only, and perhaps not mainly, Richard [his son] whom Dolek wanted to get into Schindler’s compound. [...] It was his ten-year-old daughter, Niusia, [....]

On page 291 of the book Schindler’s Ark, it is mentioned that the list was being made up by “the personnel clerk, Marcel Goldberg.”

From page 293 of Schindler’s Ark, we learn that Marcel Goldberg was taking bribes from prisoners who wanted on Schindler’s list of prisoners to be taken to his new factory in Brinnlitz  [Brünnlitz], Czechoslovakia.

This quote is from page 293 of Schindler’s Ark:

“For this list,” said Goldberg, a man of prodigious and accidental power, “it takes diamonds.”  [...] Dolek Horowitz also, who had earlier got his wife and children out to Emalia, now persuaded Goldberg to include him, his wife, his son, his young daughter [Niusia]. Horowitz had always worked in the central warehouse at Plaszow and had managed to put some small treasure way. Now it was paid to Marcel Goldberg [to get his family on Schindler's List].

In other words, Dolek Horowitz was stealing diamonds from the warehouse at the Plaszow camp. Amon Goeth, the Commandant of Plaszow had already been arrested for stealing from the Plaszow warehouse.  The arrest of Amon Goeth is not mentioned at all in the movie Schindler’s List.

This quote is from page 284 of Schindler’s Ark:

Amon was on leave in Vienna, staying with his father, the publisher, when the SS arrested him.

Oskar Schindler was also arrested by the German Gestapo, which is mentioned on page 312 of Schindler’s Ark.  Then on page 314 of the book, we find this quote:

The next day he [Schindler] was interrogated by a panel of SS investigators, one a judge of the SS court.

The unnamed judge of the SS court was Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, who had already put SS men in the Buchenwald camp on trial; you can read about Dr. Morgen on my website here.

Now for the most important quote, which is from page 318 of Schindler’s Ark:

What is certain is that Oskar now sent a young woman with a suitcase full of liquor, ham, and diamonds to make a deal with these functionaries [Rudolf Höss, Fritz Hartjenstein, and Franz Hössler, the man in charge of the women's camp].

[...]

Others claim that Oskar stayed away from Auschwitz himself as a matter of strategy and went to Oranienburg instead, and to the Armaments Inspectorate in Berlin, to put pressure on Hoess and his associates from that end.

The story as Stern would tell it years later in a public speech in Tel Aviv is as follows. After Oskar’s release from prison, Stern approached Schindler and —”under the pressure of some of my comrades”— begged Oskar to do something decisive about the women ensnared in Auschwitz. [...]

According to Stern, the secretary went [to Auschwitz]. When she did not return within two days, Schindler himself —in the company of the obscure Peltze— went to settle the matter.

The book Schindler’s Ark, which is a novel, goes on and on about what girl went to the camp to get the Schindler’s List women out of Auschwitz, and whom she slept with or didn’t sleep with, whether she volunteered to go or not, etc. etc.  Anything but the truth.  The truth is that Oskar Schindler’s secretary went to Auschwitz to make sure that Schindler’s women got on the right train out of the camp.

Regarding the scene where Oskar Schindler tells the SS at Auschwitz that he needs workers with small fingers, this quote begins on page 319:

…. Oskar pursued his usual line. There are irreplaceable skilled munitions workers [among the women on Schinlder's List]. I have trained them myself over a period of years. They represent skills that I cannot quickly replace.  The names I know, that is, are the names I know.

A moment said his tempter.  [...] I see an 11-year-old daughter of Regina Horowitz [listed].  Are you telling me that [...] an 11-year-old [is] a skilled munitions worker?  They polish the forty-five millimeter shells said Oskar.  They were selected for their long fingers, which can reach the interior of the shell in a way that is beyond most adults.

Such conversation took place in support of the girl who was a friend of the family took place, conducted by Oskar either in person, or by telephone.

According to the novel Schindler’s Ark, Schindler had previously claimed in 1943 that another girl, Anita Lampel, whose hands he had never seen, was needed in his factory in Krakow because she had long fingers. This quote is from Schindler’s Ark:

Anita Lampel was herself in Auschwitz now, but was grown tall and no longer needed the long-fingered ploy. So it was transferred to the benefit of the daughters of Mrs. Horowitz [Niusia] and Mrs. Rath.  [the daughter of Mrs. Rath was nine years old]

I could not find any mention in the book Schindler’s Ark about Niusia Horowitz being selected twice for the gas chamber at Auschwitz, and being saved twice by Oskar Schindler.

This quote is also from the article in The Sun:

Crucially, the Horowitzes secured Niusia a menial job in Schindler’s enamel factory, where word had spread that he protected Jews.

His wining and dining of Third Reich leaders meant they let him use captive Jews as cheap labour, sparing them from the killings and torture rife in the ghetto.

And Schindler — called Herr Direktor by his grateful Jewish workers — quickly took a shine to his youngest girl worker.

But that affection nearly cost him his life, as powerfully illustrated in Spielberg’s film.

Niusia was nominated by the factory Jews to present him with a birthday cake made by pressing together their bread rations as a token of gratitude.

 She recalls: “I remember him bending down and kissing me on the forehead. I had no idea it would get him into trouble. I was only young and didn’t understand.”

Schindler was arrested for kissing a Jew before being spared because of his high-ranking Nazi contacts. In March 1943, Niusia’s family were forced into the Plaszow concentration camp. Their factory jobs kept them safe — but Niusia witnessed executions that disturb her to this day.

However, the book Schindler’s Ark mentions on page 109 that Schindler “heartily kissed a girl named Kucharska.”  For this, he was arrested for breaking the provisions of the Race and Resettlement Act because Kucharska was Jewish.

There is no mention in the novel Schindler’s Ark that Schindler ever kissed Niusia.

I previously blogged about the movie Schindler’s List here and here.

youngest survivor on Schindler’s List has died at the age of 83

Leon Leyson, who was 13 years old when his name was put on Schindler’s List, has died in Los Angeles, CA at the age of 83.  You can read about the news of his death here.

This quote is from the news article about his death:

Because of Schindler’s interventions and after being ultimately placed on his list of workers which meant they were save from the death camps, Leon survived alongside his parents and an older brother and sister.

His other two brothers were killed.

“Five of us survived the war, this is the bottom line, out of everyone who was related to me in Poland. And we survived because we were on Schindler’s list,” Leon said during an interview in 2008 on NBC4.

On June 1, 2010, I blogged about Leon Leyson and Schindler’s List here.

I am re-posting part of my original blog post from 2010:

Scene from the movie Shindler’s List

Schindler did not personally make up the List of Jews for his factory, as it was portrayed in the movie. David Crowe wrote a book entitled Oskar Schindler, in which he revealed that the movie scene, shown in the photo above, is pure fiction.

According to Crowe, Oskar Schindler had no role in preparing the famous list, other than giving SS-Hauptscharführer Franz Josef Müller some general guidelines for the type of workers he wanted on the list. Amon Göth had been arrested by the SS on September 13, 1944 and was in prison in Breslau when the list was prepared, but this is not mentioned in the movie.  Göth just disappears in the movie and no one notices that he is gone. (Amon Göth was the Commandant of the Plaszow camp who shot prisoners from his balcony in the movie.)

David Crowe wrote that the person responsible for the preparation of Schindler’s List was Marcel Goldberg, a corrupt Jewish prisoner, who was a member of the Ordnungdienst, the Jewish police force in the camp. Goldberg was the assistant of SS-Hauptscharführer Franz Josef Müller, the SS man responsible for the transport lists. Only about one third of the Jews on the list had previously worked in Schindler’s factory in Krakow. The novel, Schindler’s Ark tells about how Goldberg accepted bribes from the prisoners who wanted to get on the list.

In his book Oskar Schindler, David Crowe wrote:

“… watch how Steven Spielberg traces the story of Marcel Goldberg, the real author of Schindler’s List, in his film. He begins in the early part of the film with Goldberg sitting near Leopold “Poldek” Page and other Jewish black marketeers in Krakow’s Marjacki Bazylika (church) as Oskar Schindler tries to interest them in doing business with a German. What follows throughout the rest of the film is the subtle tale of Goldberg’s gradual moral degeneration. Schindler, for example, gives Itzhak Stern first a lighter, then a cigarette case, and finally a watch to bribe Goldberg to send more Jews to his factory from Plaszow.”

Here is the true story of what actually happened:

After Germany conquered Poland in 1939,  Oskar Schindler purchased a factory in the city of Krakow, where he employed Jews from the Krakow ghetto.  When the Krakow ghetto was closed, all the Jews were sent to the nearby Plaszow labor camp which was just outside the city of Krakow.  Schindler got permission to turn his factory into a sub-camp of the Plaszow camp so that he could continue to employ Jews; he built barracks at his factory for the Jews who were then transferred from the Plaszow camp to his sub-camp. After the Plaszow labor camp became a concentration camp, Schindler’s  factory sub-camp was then under the authority of the WVHA, the economic office of the Nazi concentration camp system.

Oskar Schindler was making a fortune during the occupation of Poland during World War II.  Schindler was hiring Jews in his factory and paying lower wages than what he would have had to pay Polish workers.

By 1944, the Nazis were only allowing munitions factories to become sub-camps in their concentration camp system.  Schindler’s factory in Krakow had two parts; one part of his factory made enamel pots and pans for the German army, but he was also producing munitions for the German military.  The Nazis did not want to open a munitions factory that would be a sub-camp of Gross Rosen, so Schindler had to bribe them to allow him to open a munitions factory near his home town of Brünnlitz in what is now the Czech Republic.

When the Plaszow camp was closed in 1944, all the men were sent to the Gross Rosen concentration camp, including the Jews on Schindler’s List.  All the women had to go to Auschwitz temporarily until barracks could be built for them at Gross Rosen, which was a men’s camp. After the barracks were built at Schindler’s new sub-camp, the Jews on his List were sent there, including the women who were temporarily staying at Auschwitz.  In real life, Schindler sent his secretary to Auschwitz to make sure that his Jews got on the right train, but he didn’t go himself.

What if Schindler had just closed his munitions factory in Krakow and not bribed the Nazis to allow him to move it to Brunnlitz?  What would have happened to the prisoners on his famous list?  Would they have been sent immediately to the gas chambers?  No.  The men would have been sent to the Gross Rosen concentration camp which did not have gas chambers.  The women and children would have been sent to Auschwitz which was only 37 miles from Krakow, but they would not necessarily have been gassed.  There were numerous survivors of Auschwitz, including old women and little children.

The food for the prisoners in Oskar Schindler’s sub-camp was provided by the Nazis, but Schindler spent his own money to buy extra food and medicine for them.  His workers had a better chance of survival than they would have had in any other camp, but even then, some of his workers died of disease.  The Plaszow prisoners who did not get on Schindler’s List were not condemned to “certain death.”

This quote is from the news article about Leyson’s death:

When the Nazis ordered the remaining Jews of Krakow to be sent to Auschwitz., Schindler acted again paying huge bribes and using all of his influence to ensure as many as possible were relocated to outside [his] home town and thus away from the Final Solution.

Schindler also dramatically intervened when Leyson’s mother and sister were among 300 Schindler women accidentally re-routed to Auschwitz when they were meant to be led to safety.

They knew the gas chambers awaited them until they heard Schindler’s voice.

The information in the above quote is based on the story that is told in the movie Schindler’s List.  It is true that Schindler had to bribe the Nazis to allow him to set up a factory outside his home town in what is now the Czech Republic, but the reason that Schindler had to bribe the Nazis was not because the workers in his factory had been ordered to be sent to Auschwitz to be killed.  No, the prisoners in Schindler’s factory in Krakow had been scheduled to go to Gross Rosen, a concentration camp which did not have a gas chamber.  Schindler’s Jews had not been scheduled to be killed.

Gross Rosen was a men’s camp, and the female prisoners on Schindler’s List had to go to Auschwitz-Birkenau to wait until barracks at Schindler’s new factory could be built for them.  In the movie Schindler’s list, the women are shown in the shower room at Auschwitz and they are over-joyed to see water come out of the faucets, not gas.

People in 213 countries read my blog in 2012

WordPress has given me an annual report for 2012. My blog had 1,385,396 views in 2012, and 5,954 comments in 2012. Most of the readers of my blog were located in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, with Germany coming in fourth.  I wrote on several different subjects in 2012, but the most interest was in my blog posts about the Holocaust. This subject has world-wide interest, as indicated by the fact that people in 213 countries read my blog in 2012.

My most popular blog post, out of 849 posts that I have written since I started on February 5, 2010, is the one with the title Did Amon Goeth save more Jews than Oscar Schindler?.  WordPress made a suggestion that I should write more on this subject.

As a matter of fact, I have written more on the subject of Amon Goeth here and here.  Another blog post that has been read many times is the one with the title Inheritance,” a documentary about Monika Hertwig, the daughter of Amon Goeth which you can read here. My blog post about the documentary Inheritance is in the top five of my most read posts.

The subject of Amon Goeth has generated the most interest because every student in America has seen the movie Schindler’s List in the classroom. In the movie, Amon Goeth is demonized as the world’s most evil person, the monster who shot innocent Jewish prisoners from his balcony.  There are more people in the world, who believe this deception, than there are people who believe in God. There is nothing that can convince most people that this didn’t happen.  The belief in Amon Goeth as the devil is a basic tenet of the Holocaust religion.

The layout of the Plaszow camp, compared to the Schindler’s List movie set

It has come to my attention, after reading a comment on one of my blog posts, that there is a serious misconception, among today’s youth, about how the Plaszow camp actually looked and where the home of Commandant Amon Goeth was located.  Plaszow is the camp that is featured in the movie Schindler’s List.  Since Schindler’s List has been shown in American schools for years, young people think that everything in the film is the gospel truth and that the movie portrays accurate history.

Basically, the movie Shindler’s List is the story of the quintessential evil Nazi (Amon Goeth) and the one good Nazi (Oskar Schindler) who is the hero of the movie. The evil Nazi killed Jews for sport and the one good Nazi made a list of the Jews (Shindler’s List) that he was going to save from the gas chamber. In real life, both Amon Goeth and Oskar Schindler were notorious drunks and both were womanizers. They were the same age, the same height and build, and the same in their beliefs: they were both Nazis.

The Plaszow camp was located 10 kilometers outside the city of Krakow. The photo below shows an old photo of the Plaszow camp.

The Plaszow camp with the city of Krakow in the background

The movie set was built inside the Liban quarry, where prisoners from the Plaszow camp worked, although there were no barracks inside the quarry, and the prisoners did not live inside the quarry.

The Liban quarry, where Spielberg built the movie set for Schindler’s List

The movie set was built at this end of the Liban quarry

Scene from Schindler’s List shows Amon Goeth shooting at actors on the movie set inside the Liban quarry, which is not where the  Plaszow camp was located

Path built from tombstones was part of the movie set for Schindler’s List

The actual Plaszow camp was built near the site of two Jewish Cemeteries.  According to the fictional movie Schindler’s List, the Nazis used whole tombstones to build a path through the camp.  Spielberg reconstructed this alleged path inside the Liban quarry and it was left there for tourists to see.

Would the Nazis really have made roads or paths from whole tombstones?  I don’t think so.  They would have crushed the tombstones to make crushed granite.  The paths in the main Auschwitz camp are covered with crushed brick and decomposed granite, as shown in the photo below.

Close-up of the crushed brick and decomposed granite which covers the streets of the main Auschwitz camp

In the movie, Schindler’s List, it appears that the house, where Amon Goeth allegedly shot prisoners from the balcony, was only a few feet from the Plaszow camp.  In real life, the house with the balcony was very far from the camp and behind a hill.

When I visited the site of the former Plaszow camp in 1998, my private tour guide drove us up a hill, on a rutted one-lane dirt road, thinly covered with small white granite rocks. This was the site of two Jewish cemeteries before the Nazis built a labor camp.  Amon Goeth’s house, which had a balcony on the rear of the building, was near the site of the two Jewish cemeteries, which are now long gone.

The granite quarry, near where the Plaszow camp was built, was at that time owned by a Jew, but the Nazis confiscated the property, without compensation, for their labor camp. There was a Jewish mortuary chapel near the cemetery, which the Nazis converted into a stable.

The Plaszow camp was formerly located on this spot

Shown in the background of the photo above, up on a high plateau, is the back side of the large Holocaust monument, which faces the city of Krakow. On the right side of the photo, you can see some of the buildings of the city of Krakow in the distance.

It was on this plateau that mass executions took place, according to testimony in the trial of Amon Goeth in a Polish court in 1946. According to survivors of the Plaszow camp, 8,000 bodies were later dug up and burned on pyres in order to destroy the evidence. Goeth, who was charged with responsibility for these 8,000 deaths, was convicted and hanged.

According to my tour guide, some of the barracks of the Plaszow forced labor camp were located on the terraced terrain that you see in the foreground of the photo above; portions of the barrack foundations are still visible.

The construction of the Plaszow camp began in June 1942. A guidebook, which I purchased at the Eagle Pharmacy museum in Podgorze, the former Jewish ghetto in Krakow, says this:

“According to the Heydrich plan the Plaszow camp and its sub camps were meant to constitute a stage in the concentration of the Jews deported to the East. The camp was built on the area of two cemeteries at Jerozolimska and Abrahama street. The location of the camp — near the Plaszow railroad station — made the access to communication tracks relatively easy.”

The “Heydrich plan” was a reference to the conference which SS officer Reinhard Heydrich led on January 20, 1942 at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin. This is where plans were made for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

Today, it is not possible to walk around the former camp because the area is now a nature preserve.  The photograph below shows a sign which stands just to the left of where the photo above was taken; the sign says that this is a nature preserve because of the rare plants, native to the area, which are located here. Because this is a protected area, Spielberg could not build a movie set here. Besides, the monument would have shown in the background.

The location of the former Plaszow camp is now a nature preserve

German soldiers picking flowers at the former Plaszow camp

The story of Amon Goeth shooting prisoners at random from his balcony is one of those events that happened, but are not true (as Elie Wiesel famously said).

New movie about Obama coming out in July — from the producer of Schindler’s List

This quote is from an article which you can read in full here:

“2016 Obama’s America” is coming from Gerald Molen, the Academy Award-winning producer of “Schindler’s List,” whose new project is based on Dinesh D’Souza’s bestselling book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.” [...]

“….So I read Dinesh D’Souza’s book ‘The Roots of Obama’s Rage,’ and then Dinesh and I teamed up on this thing with some other great people and we just want to get the story out there out on what we feel America will look like in 2016 if, in fact, President Obama gets elected into a second term.”

Molen’s in-depth research on “Schindler’s List” also helped him decide to make “2016.” After all, people of goodwill must know history to avoid loss of liberty and further tragedy, and he had discovered that many history books reduced the Nazi holocaust to a merely paragraph, if they mentioned it at all.

Now, as Americans and billions of people around the world suffer many crises, Molen believes he shouldn’t neglect the opportunity to open the eyes of American voters.

As he put it: “At least ‘Schindler’s List’ kind of opened the floodgates and got the information out.”

It’s true, Schindler’s List opened the floodgates.  I saw the film in 1993, the year that it came out.  At that time, I knew nothing about the Holocaust.  I was confused by the film. There is a scene in Schindler’s List where a group of Jewish women are in the shower at Auschwitz, and water comes out.  The women were overjoyed because they thought that they were going to be gassed.

I was totally confused by the scene in the shower.  What was Spielberg trying to say?  That there were no gas chambers?  And the Jews were really given a shower when they arrived at Auschwitz, not gassed?

It was the movie Schindler’s List that prompted me to start studying the Holocaust.  I wrote about the movie Schindler’s List on my website here.

Spielberg is an Obama supporter.  According to the article, “Spielberg has given $100,000 to a pro-Obama political action committee, $35,800 to the Obama Victory Fund 2012 and, as Bloomberg Businessweek revealed, he advised the Obama re-election campaign to attack GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital.”

Now Molen “believes he shouldn’t neglect the opportunity to open the eyes of American voters.”

I am looking forward to seeing this movie and learning the secrets of Obama’s past.  I just hope that there are no scenes of Obama shooting people from a balcony at the White House, as in the Spielberg film Schindler’s List which has a scene where Amon Goeth is shooting prisoners from his “White House.”

Scene from Schindler’s List shows Amon Goeth shooting prisoners in the Plaszow camp from the balcony of his house

The main point that was hammered home in the film Schindler’s List is that there was absolutely no higher authority over the concentration camps.  The SS men who ran the camps could do anything they wanted, with absolutely no consequences.  They could beat the prisoners with 100 strokes from a whip, or they could shoot prisoners for sport.

The fact that Amon Goeth was arrested by Dr. Konrad Morgen who did a six-month investigation of him is not mentioned at all in the film.  Suddenly, Goeth is gone, and there is no mention of his absence in the film.

The idea that the concentration camps were not controlled by the Nazi government is what most Americans now believe, thanks to the film Schindler’s List.

Martha Gellhorn’s article about Dachau in Collier’s Weekly

Last night, I watched the movie Hemmingway and Gellhorn on HBO.  I was surprised that Martha Gellhorn’s famous coverage of the liberation of Dachau was not mentioned.  The New York Times named her article about Dachau in Collier’s Weekly on June 23, 1945 as one of the 10 Magazine Articles that Shook the World.

You can read the full story of the liberation of Dachau on my website here.

Ernest Hemmingway and Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn

This quote from the New York Times is about Gellhorn’s Dachau article:

Martha Gellhorn was one of the first female war correspondents and one of the first journalists to report from the concentration camp in Dachau, Germany after its liberation. “Behind the barbed wire and the electric fence the skeletons sat in the sun and searched themselves for lice,” she wrote. “They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky.’’ Her close observation, her attention to detail and her honest, subjective prose brought to life the unspeakable realities of Dachau for her readers. Eleanor Mills and Kira Cochrane, editors of the book Journalistas, say Gellhorn’s report “reawakens a sense of fresh horror in a way that a fifty-year-on commemoration of the now-familiar look of the camps can never do.”

Martha Gellhorn was way ahead of her time: she was a female war correspondent in a world where Women’s Liberation was as yet unknown, and she was a non-objective journalist in a world where news articles were expected to give both sides of any story.

This quote from Wikipedia explains how Gellhorn was a pioneer in the writing of the news in the style of today’s journalists:

Gellhorn remained a committed leftist throughout her life and was contemptuous of those who, like Rebecca West, became more conservative. She considered the ideal of journalistic objectivity “nonsense”, and used journalism to reflect her politics.[citation needed] Gellhorn was a prominent supporter of Israel and the Spanish Republic. For Gellhorn, Dachau had “changed everything”, and she became a life-long champion of Israel. She was a frequent visitor to Israel after 1949, and in the 1960s considered moving to Israel. An uncompromising opponent of fascism, Gellhorn had a more ambivalent attitude toward communism. While she is not known to have praised communism and Stalinism, she equally refused to criticize it.

In the movie Hemmingway and Gellhorn, the Gellhorn character says that she is “half Jewish.”

Martha Gellhorn was not at Dachau on April 29, 1945, the day that the camp was liberated.  She arrived there on May 7, 1945, the day that Germany surrendered to end World War II.

This quote from her article is from this website:

“In their joy to be free, and longing to see their friends who had come at last, many prisoners rushed to the fence and died electrocuted. There were those who died cheering, because that effort of happiness was more than their bodies could endure. There were those who died because now they had food, and they ate before they could be stopped, and it killed them. I do not know words to describe the men who have survived this horror for years, three years, five years, ten years, and whose minds are as clear and unafraid as the day they entered. I was in Dachau when the German armies surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. We sat in that room, in that accursed cemetery prison, and no one had anything more to say. Still, Dachau seemed to me the most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory. For surely this war was made to abolish Dachau, and all the other places like Dachau, and everything that Dachau stood for, and to abolish it for ever.”

These quotes, from this website, are from her article on the liberation of Dachau:

“Behind the barbed wire and electric fence, the skeletons sat in the sun and searched themselves for lice. They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky. We crossed the wide, crowded, dusty compound between the prison barracks and went to the hospital. In the hall sat more of the skeletons, and from them came the smell of disease and death. They watched us but did not move; no expression shows on a face that is only yellowish, stubbly skin, stretched across bone. What had been a man dragged himself into the doctor’s office; he was a Pole and he was about six feet tall and he weighed less than a hundred pounds and he wore a striped prison shirt, a pair of unlaced boots, and a blanket which he tried to hold around his legs. His eyes were large and strange and stood out from his face, and his jawbone seemed to be cutting through his skin. He had come to Dachau from Buchenwald on the last death transport. There were fifty boxcars of his dead travelling (sic) companions still on the siding outside the camp, and for the last three days the American Army had forced Dachau civilians to bury these dead.” [...]

“…This man had survived; he was found under a pile of dead. Now he stood on the bones that were his legs and talked and suddenly he wept. Everyone is dead, he said, and the face that was not a face twisted with pain or sorrow or horror. “No one is left. Everyone is dead. I cannot help myself. Here I am and I am finished and cannot help myself. Everyone is dead.” [...]

You can read the story of the Death Train and the man who survived, after he was found under a pile of dead, on my website here. (Scroll down to see photos of the man who was rescued.)

The website article about Gellhorn continues with this quote:

Martha goes on to describe how the Polish doctor, who had himself been a prisoner at the camp for nearly five years, told the man that he would be okay, that in three or four weeks he would be a young man again. Martha also describes how the doctor had had to stand by and watch what was happening in the camp knowing he could do nothing about it. The Polish doctor also explained to Martha that German doctors and scientists had experimented on the inmates. One experiment was to find out how high a flyer could go without oxygen. So, having put an inmate into a closed car they gradually withdrew all the oxygen. The Polish doctor explained to Martha that it was a slow death, about fifteen minutes, and a hard death and proved that no one could live above 36,000 feet without oxygen. Martha writes that the Polish doctor explained that the Germans did not kill too many inmates in this experiment, only about eight hundred or so. [...]

She visited over fifty German cities, all of them in ruins, and she talked to people who had no gas or electric or jobs or medicines or food but who had not been in the concentration camps and she felt no pity for them, not then, not ever.

You can read more quotes from Gellhorn’s Dachau article on this website:

In Dachau  she writes:

“We have all seen a great deal now; we have seen too many wars and too much violent dying; we have seen hospitals, bloody and messy as butcher shops; we have seen the dead like bundles lying on all the roads of half the earth. But nowhere was there anything like this. Nothing about war was ever as insanely wicked as these starved and outraged, naked nameless dead.Behind one pile of dead lay the clothed healthy bodies of the German soldiers who had been found in this camp… And for the first time anywhere one could look at a dead man with gladness.”

There were also:

“…the women who were moved to Dachau three weeks ago from their own concentration camps.  Their crime was that they were Jewish.  There was a lovely girl from Budapest, who was somehow still lovely, and the woman with mad eyes who had watched her sister walk into the gas chamber at Auschwitz and been held back and refused the right to die with her sister…the day the American Army arrived…There were those who died cheering, because the effort of happiness was more than their bodies could endure.  There were those who died because…they ate before they could be stopped, and it killed them.  I do not know words to describe men who have survived this horror for years…and whose minds are as clear and unafraid as the day they entered.”

Martha Gellhorn was at Dachau when she heard the news of the German surrender and  Dachau was to her “the most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory.  For surely war was made to abolish Dachau, and all other places like Dachau, and everything that Dachau stood for, and to abolish it forever.”

Today’s young people, who might be reading this, will have a hard time understanding why I am critical of Gellhorn’s reporting on the liberation of Dachau.  Today’s journalists are overwhelmingly left-leaning liberals who report only one side of the news.

In Gellhorn’s day, it was considered proper to report both sides of the news.  For example, Gellhorn could have mentioned the typhus epidemic that was raging in the camp, or that the water main had been broken by an Allied bomb hitting the camp and that there was no running water — and no electricity.  She could have mentioned the healthy inmates in the camp, or that America was also conducting experiments for the American Air Force.  One thing that Gellhorn absolutely should have mentioned is that Japanese-Americans and German-Americans were also interned in camps in America.

If Martha Gellhorn had written the truth about Dachau, she would be hated and reviled today as a “Holocaust denier.”

New film by Claude Lanzmann will feature Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish Elder at Theresienstadt

On May 20, 2012, I blogged about Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein, whose son, Dr. Wolf Murmelstein, wrote an essay about his father, entitled “The Last Unrighteous” — The Witness never heard.  A new movie about Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein by Claude Lanzmann, which will be released soon, will be entitled Last of the Unjust.

This quote is from an article about the film in today’s news:

Elsa Keslassy reports in Variety that Claude Lanzmann’s new film has a title—“Last of the Unjust”—and a lead producer, the new French company Synecdoche. The film, as I mentioned in my review of Lanzmann’s extraordinary autobiography, “The Patagonian Hare,” will be about Theresienstadt. According to Keslassy, it will “put a spotlight on Benjamin Murmelstein, an Austrian Jew who was appointed by Adolf Eichmann as head of the Jewish Council of Elders and rule over Theresienstadt.” Lanzmann will be filming, she says, in Israel, Austria, Poland, Czech Republic, and Italy.

Claude Lanzmann is the film maker who created Shoah, a film which features the testimony of numerous Holocaust survivors.  According to the news article, Lanzmann interviewed Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein in 1975, over the course of several days.  These were the most extensive interviews that Lanzmann did, but none of them were included in the completed film.  Why not?  I don’t know, but possibly, it is because Dr. Murmelstein was accused, but not convicted, of collaborating with the Nazis.

This part of the news article, which you can read in full here, caught my attention:

Among the heroes of “Shoah” (and “heroes” is just the right word; the movie has villains, too) are Filip Müller, who, as part of a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, took part in getting people into gas chambers and getting corpses out of them; and Abraham Bomba, one of the barbers in Treblinka, who cut the hair of Jews who were about to be murdered in gas chambers.

Filip Müller — a hero of the Holocaust?  I don’t think so.  I was very critical of Filip Müller in a blog post which you can read here.  I quoted the testimony of Abraham Bomba on my web site here.  Both Müller and Bomba are favorite targets of Holocaust revisionists because their outrageous claims tend to disprove the Holocaust.

In my humble opinion, I believe that the testimony of Dr. Murmelstein also tends to disprove the Holocaust.  I think that is why his original testimony for Shoah in 1975 ended up on the cutting room floor.

You can read an essay about Theresienstadt, written by Dr. Wolf Murmelstein, on my website here.  You can read the testimony by a child survivor of Theresienstadt here.

My review of The Artist

I would never have gone to see The Artist, if it had not won five academy awards including awards for best picture and best actor.  Who wants to see a French, black and white, silent film?  Not me!

The film is actually a silent film about the making of silent films.  A very interesting concept.

The Artist won the award for Best Original Music Score.  I usually don’t pay any attention to the musical score in a movie since I know nothing about music.  Since this is a silent movie, one can’t help but notice the music; I liked the music very much.

French actor Jean Dujardin won the award for best male actor.  What was so good about his performance?  I would say that he deserved the award because of his very subtle performance — he didn’t over play the part. His acting is not like the acting in the real silent movies; he didn’t do the typical mugging for the camera.  Instead, he plays the part of a very charming, old-time silent screen, “matinee idol” very well.  As I watched him on the screen, I kept thinking of the line:  “Oozing charm from every pore, he oiled his way across the floor.”

Dujardin also does some tap dancing in the movie.  He is no Fred Astaire but he did very well.

Dujardin’s part in the movie seems to be modeled on actor John Gilbert, who was a big star in silent films, but didn’t make the transition to talkies.

In the movie, the leading man, George Valentin, played by Jean Dujardin, falls in love with the leading woman, Peppy Miller, played by Bérénice Bejo. This actually happened when John Gilbert fell in love with Greta Garbo in a movie script, and also fell in love with her in real life.  Allegedly John Gilbert didn’t make it in the talkies because he had a high voice.  This is not part of the plot of The Artist.

There were many good performances in this picture, especially the part of Peppy Miller played by Bérénice Bejo.  John Goodman does a good job of playing a studio boss.  The dog named Uggy steals the show.

I went to see The Artist in an old-time movie theater which used to show silent movies.  The theater had the original seats from the 1920s and the theater looked like the theater that is shown in the movie.  The orchestra pit in this old theater is now used for seating of people in wheel chairs.

The Artist is not a completely silent movie. There is some sound and of course, there is music playing most of the time. During the sections where the film is completely silent, one could hear the rustle of popcorn bags and the clearing of throats.  About ten minutes into the movie, someone started snoring very loudly.  Mercifully, someone woke him up, but about 20 minutes later, he started snoring again and was escorted out of the theater.
In addition to the man who could not stay awake during this movie, there were two men who walked out while the movie was playing.  The entrance to the theater was in the front, so everyone could see the long walk out of the theater. Very disconcerting, to say the least.

Mark Bridges won an award for best costumes in The Artist.  The costumes were from the 1920s, of course.  I didn’t pay much attention to the costumes, but I liked the fact that a lot of old stuff from the 1920s was shown. There was an old Speed Graphic camera with a vintage flash gun.  Also, some old microphones and recording equipment, an old refrigerator, and a lot of old cars.  Everything was authentic 1920s, right down to the handle on a casement window.  Anyone who loves antiques will enjoy this movie.

I think that The Artist is a picture that will mainly appeal to older people.  Young people will probably not enjoy it and might even walk out, as two people did when I saw the movie.  Shame on them!

“In Darkness” a new Holocaust film opening soon at a theater near you

A new Holocaust film, directed by Agnieszka Holland, the woman who directed the film “Europa, Europa” back in 1990, opened in “select theaters” on Feb. 17th and will be shown in my city next week.  I am looking forward to seeing this film because I liked “Europa, Europa” so much that I saw it twice.

The new movie is about the Lvov Ghetto in what is now the city of Lviv in Ukraine. Before the joint invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, the city of Lvov was home to 120,000 Jews.  At that time, Lvov was located in territory that had formerly belonged to Germany before World War I; the German name for the city was Lemberg.

"In Darkness" shows Jewish children hiding in sewers in Lvov ghetto in Poland

The Nazis did not occupy the city of Lvov until after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and by that time, the number of Jews in the city had increased to 220,000, according to Wikipedia.  Between October 1939 and June 1941, Lvov had been in Soviet-occupied territory. The Lvov ghetto was set up by the Germans in November 1941 and liquidated in June 1943 when the Jews in the ghetto were sent to the Belzec death camp or the Janowska concentration camp.

One of my most popular blog posts was about how Amon Goeth saved Jews from the ghettos in the Lublin area by taking bribes from them in exchange for not sending them to Belzec.  I haven’t seen the new film about the Lvov ghetto, but I wonder if some of the Lvov Jews saved themselves by bribing the Germans who were in charge of sending them to either the Belzec extermination camp or the Janowska concentration camp.

I learned a lot from the film “Europa, Europa.”  I learned that some of the so-called rivers in Poland are so shallow that a person can easily wade across them.  Not like the real rivers in Missouri where I grew up (Missouri river and Mississippi river). I learned that many Jews escaped into the Soviet zone of Poland during the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 and that they waded across the Bug river which divided the two zones.  The Soviets invaded Poland on September 17, 1939.

I will write more about the Jews in Lvov after I see the new movie.  It has been nominated for an Oscar for the best foreign film this year.

Read more here about the Lvov ghetto at the USHMM website. The photo below, from the USHMM website, shows a German soldier watching as Ukrainian civilians drag a Jew down the street in the Lvov ghetto.

Ukrainian civilians drag a Jew in Lvov ghetto as German soldier looks on