The Nazi plan to blow up Jews in a cave in Austria….as told by Dario Gabbai

This morning I was reading about Dario Gabbai, one of the surviving Sonderkommando Jews at Auschwitz, who was marched out of the camp in January 1945 and eventually ended up in a sub-camp of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.  Several years ago Gabbai gave a talk to students which you can read about here.

Gabbai was a Greek Jew who was transported on a train to Auschwitz-Birkenau in March 1944.  At Birkenau, he was assigned to the Sonderkommando squad which removed the bodies from the gas chambers and carried them to the ovens to be burned.  His suffering as a Sonderkommando ended in January 1945 when he was sent on a “death march” out of the Auschwitz camp to the German border and then taken by train to Austria, where he probably ended up at either the Gusen I or Gusen II sub-camp of Mauthausen.

This quote is from the article about Gabbai’s talk to the students:  (I have highlighted the important points in bold faced type.)

To try and hide the horrors of what they had done, the Germans tried to destroy any evidence.

Weighing 67 pounds and in weather 23 degrees below zero, Gabbai and the others were led on a walk to Austria. He claims he stayed alive by thinking of his town. The plan was to get them all into a cave and kill them in an explosion, but the Germans abandoned them in fear of being caught by the liberation troops.

Dario Gabbai is one of the Holocaust survivors who is featured in Steven Speilberg’s documentary “The Last Days.”

This quote (the words of Gabbai) is from the book entitled “The Last Days” which tells the stories of the survivors who are featured in the documentary film with the same name:

When the Red Army was approaching, the Germans marched us to Austria; of the thousands who were on the march, only a few hundred survived, including ninety-six Sonderkommando.  There was one good morning when we woke up to an unexpected silence — all the Germans had gone and the Americans came a few hours later.  That was on May 6, 1945 and I weighed just sixty-seven pounds.

According to Holocaust historians, it was the custom to kill the Jews in the Sonderkommando squads periodically and replace them with new workers.  But for some unknown reason, the Nazis allowed the last 100 Sonderkommando Jews to live.  Their plan was to take them to a cave in Austria and blow them up.

Spielberg’s documentary “The Last Days”

Steven Spielberg’s Oscar winning documentary entitled “The Last Days” is under attack by the website holocaustdenier.com.  You can read here the questions that the webmaster Eric Hunt has raised about the stories told by the Hungarian Holocaust survivors in the film. Four of the Hungarians featured in the film survived Auschwitz and one was a survivor of Dachau.

The film opens with the story of Bill Basch, who survived ONE WHOLE WEEK of imprisonment in the Dachau camp.  When the film was first released in 1999, I purchased the book entitled “The Last Days” which tells the stories of the survivors in the film in great detail.  According to the book, Basch was captured while he was working in connection with Raoul Wallenberg in Hungary.  His work for Wallenberg consisted of printing and delivering the passports that Wallenberg gave to the Jews to save them from being sent to a concentration camp. But Basch was actually working with an organization of young boys who duplicated the passports and secretly handed the forged papers out to others.   

“How I escaped from the gas chamber” and other lies told by Irene Zisblatt

Last night I watched a new documentary entitled “The Last Days of the Big Lie” which you can see on the Internet here.  The title is a spoof of Steven Spielberg’s Academy award winning documentary entitled “The Last Days.”

Irene Zisblatt is prominently featured in the new documentary as she tells the story of how she escaped from a gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Remarkably, Irene tells her story without showing any emotion.  If I had narrowly escaped from a gas chamber, I would not be able to tell the story without crying like John Boehner.   Irene shows no hatred of the people who persecuted her, nor does she even blame them; she exhibits no emotion at all.

For 50 years, Irene kept quiet about her time in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but in 1994, after Steven Spielberg’s movie “Schindler’s List” came out, she decided to tell her story. In 1995, she was interviewed for 3 hours by Jennifer Resnick while her testimony was videotaped for Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. Part of this interview is shown in the new documentary.

As a result of her Shoah interview, Irene was chosen as one of five Hungarian survivors to be featured in Spielberg’s documentary, “The Last Days,” which was released in 1998. A book, also entitled “The Last Days,” was published in 1999.  I saw the movie and also bought the book.

Irene Zisblatt points to the spot where her tattoo was removed by Dr. Mengele

The photo above shows Irene Zisblatt in 2009, as she addresses students from Fairland High School, telling them about what happened to her at Birkenau and other Nazi camps. She is pointing to the spot under her arm where her tattoo was removed in an experiment done by Dr. Josef Mengele.  Other survivors of the Holocaust had numbers tattooed on their left forearm, but not Irene.  She was tattooed under her arm, like the SS men who were tattooed with their blood type.  Mengele himself did not have an SS blood type tattoo, so why was he concerned with ways to remove a tattoo?

Irene Zisblatt wrote a book, published in 2008, entitled “The Fifth Diamond.” The title refers to a necklace with four diamonds, set into a pendant, that she wears around her neck when she speaks to American school children about the Holocaust. As a survivor, Irene is the Fifth Diamond.

In the documentary “The Last Days,” Irene tells about how her mother gave her the diamonds before the family was sent to the Auschwitz death camp. She managed to keep them through all the time that she was in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and on a death march out of another camp, by swallowing them before being searched, excreting them, cleaning them and then swallowing them again. She said in her Shoah interview that she sometimes cleaned her diamonds “in the soup we were going to get.”

In the documentary, we hear Irene tell about why her mother gave her the diamonds.  Her mother told Irene that she might need them to bribe someone for bread so that she would not starve to death.  Apparently Irene never went hungry in the camp and she was able to keep all of her diamonds.  How were the rest of the family members planning to survive if Irene had all the diamonds?  Irene does not explain this.

Irene was from the small resort town of Polena in the Carpathian mountains; when Irene was a child, Polena was in Hungary. There were 62 Jewish families in the town; her father owned a business, but they had no electricity in their house, according to Irene. This was not unusual in those days; many towns in Eastern Europe had no running water and no electricity.  Irene now lives in a nice house in Florida, where her interview for the Shoah Foundation was filmed.

After Germany invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, Irene and her family were put into the Miskolc ghetto. Irene was 13 years old when she was put on a train from the Miskolc ghetto to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp during the deportation of the Hungarian Jews in May 1944. She says that she was immediately separated from her family and she was the only one of her 40 family members to survive the gas chambers.

According to her story in the book entitled “The Last Days,” Irene’s father was born in 1908, so he was 36 years old in 1944, young enough to be selected for work at Birkenau. In the selections upon arrival at Birkenau, everyone older than 45 or younger than 15 was sent immediately to the gas chamber. Irene says that her entire family was gassed in Gas Chamber #2 on the day that they arrived, including her parents who were of working age. Remarkably, Irene was not gassed, along with the rest of her family members, even though she was only 13 years old at that time.

Jews getting off a train at Birkenau in 1944

The photo above is from the Auschwitz Album, a series of photographs taken by the Germans in May 1944.  In the background, one can see the chimney of Krema II on the left side.  Krema III is shown on the right side, about one inch from the edge of the photo.  Krema III is also shown in the photo below. Note the ten-foot-high fence around the building and the railroad tracks just outside the fence.  In her Shoah interview, Irene Zisblatt claimed that she was thrown over the fence around Krema III and into an open railroad car.

Crematorium III (Krema III) at Birkeanau, 1944

Fence inside Birkenau divides sections of the camp

The photo above was taken by me in 2005; it shows how the fence posts curve over and barbed wire is strung over the top of the posts.

In her story of her escape from the gas chamber, Irene says that when she was taken to the gas chamber, the room was full and she got stuck in the door.  An SS man had to fling her out of the doorway in order to shut the door.  She hid in the rafters until a young boy came to rescue her.  He wrapped her in a blanket and threw her over the fence around Crematorium III, into an open railroad car that was waiting on the tracks.  The train was bound for the Neuengamme camp where prisoners were being sent to work in a factory.

There are no open railroad cars shown in the photos taken in 1944 at Birkenau, but there were open cars on the “Death Train” at Dachau, which are shown in the photo below.

Open railroad cars on the “Death Train” at Dachau

Irene says that she was around 4 feet tall and weighed 60 lbs. at the time that she was thrown over the 10 ft. fence into a railroad car.  This would have been quite a feat, but not necessarily impossible.

Could Irene’s story of her escape from the gas chamber possibly be true?  I don’t think so, and here’s why:  When prisoners were taken to the gas chamber at Birkenau, they entered through the undressing room, where they took off their clothes.  Irene says that she was naked when she got stuck in the gas chamber door, but she does not mention that she entered through the undressing room.  If there were too many prisoners taken to the gas chamber that day, Irene would have been stuck in the door into the undressing room, not in the gas chamber door.  The photo below shows a model of the gas chambers at Birkenau.

Model of Krema II at Birkenau

In the photo above, the undressing room is on the left and the gas chamber is on the right.  The photo at the bottom of the picture shows the cremation ovens that were on the ground floor. The Sonderkommando prisoners, who carried the bodies out of the gas chamber for burning, lived in the attic space above the ovens.

In her video taped Shoah interview, Zisblatt told about being selected for an inspection by Ilse Koch who was looking for “unblemished skin” in order to make leather lampshades. Ilse Koch was the infamous wife of Karl Otto Koch, the Commandant of Buchenwald. Zisblatt and several other girls were allegedly sent on a train to the Maidanek camp in Lublin where Ilse Koch was expected to arrive, but she never made it.

So what’s wrong with this story?  Ilse Koch wanted tattooed skin for her lampshades, not the unblemished skin of a teenaged girl.  There were plenty of criminals at Buchenwald who had tats, and she didn’t need to go all the way to Poland to find subjects for her lampshades.

Irene pronounced the name Koch like a native German speaker; she also referred to the Majdanek camp as Maidanek, the German name.

You can hear more of Zisblatt’s incredible lies here.

“The Last Days,” a documentary by Steven Spielberg

“The Last Days” is a documentary, made by Steven Spielberg and released in 1998; the film won an Academy Award in 1999. A book about the documentary was published in 1999, with the same title.  In 1998, I was just starting to study the Holocaust and I loved the documentary, which I assumed was the gospel truth.  I bought two copies of the book, one to read, and one to preserve in pristine condition in my home library.  The book is great; it has lots of good photos of the Holocaust. As I began to study the Holocaust, I gradually learned that the documentary and the book entitled “The Last Days” are both fictional.  That doesn’t mean that “The Last Days” should be withdrawn because it is a fraud, but it should be reclassified as fiction and advertised as fiction.