What really happened to the Hungarian Jews?

One of the regular readers of my blog wrote this in a comment:

But, they [the Hungarian Jews] had to be registered in the camps that received them because the camp commanders had to account for that labor force.

So, someone, give me a list of camps where these Jews were sent [after they arrived at Auschwitz-Birkean].

My photo of the gate into the Dachau camp

Dachau was one of the camps to which Jews were sent from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

I have explained many times that Auschwitz-Birkenau was a TRANSIT camp, as well as a concentration camp, where Jews were imprisoned.

The story of Iby Knill, a Jewish woman who was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, explains it. According to Iby Knill, “The shower unit and the gas chamber looked the same. They had been built that way, so we never knew if we were to be gassed or just showered.”

In her lectures to students, about the Holocaust, Iby Knill frequently talks about the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, whose experiments in the name of medical science have earned him the nick name, Angel of Death.  Iby tells students that “We lined up and he [Dr. Mengele] would walk in front of us, picking out the weakest. Their fate was the gas chambers.”

Iby Knill also tells students about the cramped, inhuman conditions at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the incredible hunger and thirst, and worst of all, the scraps of gray, latherless soap made from human ashes, and the constant fear of extermination in the gas chamber.

According to her story, Iby was able to leave the Auscwitz-Birkenau death camp by volunteering to go to the Lippstadt labour camp, a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, where she worked in the hospital unit. On Easter Sunday, 1945, while on a death march to the main Buchenwald camp, she was freed by Allied Forces.

Lily Ebert is another Holocaust survivor whose story is frequently told.

The following information about Lily Ebert is from an article by Ross Lydall in the London Evening Standard on January 26, 2010:

At the age of 14, Lily Ebert was taken from the Hungarian town of Bonybad to Birkenau in a packed cattle car, along with her mother, brother and three sisters. Lily was registered upon arrival in July 1944 and tattooed with the number A-10572, even though she was below the age of 15 and could have been sent directly to the gas chamber.  After about four months at Birkenau, Lily and her three sisters were transferred to an ammunition factory near Leipzig, Germany, which was a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

According to records kept by the Germans at the Dachau concentration camp, between June 18, 1944 and March 9, 1945, a total of 28,838 Hungarian Jews were sent from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Dachau and then transferred to Landsberg am Lech to work on construction of underground factories in the eleven Kaufering sub-camps of Dachau.

Nerin E. Gun was a Turkish journalist, who was imprisoned at Dachau in 1944. His job was to take down the names and vital information from Hungarian Jewish women who were supposedly on their way to be gassed in the Dachau gas chamber.

In his book entitled The Day of the Americans, published in 1966, Gun wrote the following regarding his work at Dachau:

I belonged to the team of prisoners in charge of sorting the pitiful herds of Hungarian Jewesses who were being directed to the gas chambers. My role was an insignificant one: I asked questions in Hungarian and entered the answers in German in a huge ledger. The administration of the camp was meticulous. It wanted a record of the name, address, weight, age, profession, school certificates, and so on, of all these women who in a few minutes were to be turned into corpses. I was not allowed in the crematorium, but I knew from the others what went on in there.

Some of the Jews at Dachau, who had been selected for slave labor, were sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and its sub-camps where they worked in German aircraft factories.

Other Jews at Dachau were sent to the Stutthof camp near Danzig, according to Martin Gilbert, who wrote the following about this in his book entitled Holocaust:

Begin quote:

Some of the Jews who were selected, at Dachau, for slave labor, were sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and its sub-camps where they worked in German aircraft factories.

End quote

Others were sent, from Dachau, to the Stutthof camp near Danzig, according to Martin Gilbert, who wrote the following in his book entitled Holocaust:

Begin quote

On June 17 Veesenmayer telegraphed to Berlin that 340,142 Hungarian Jews had now been deported. A few were relatively fortunate to be selected for the barracks, or even moved out altogether to factories and camps in Germany. On June 19 some 500 Jews, and on June 22 a thousand, were sent to work in factories in the Munich area.

[…] Ten days later, the first Jews, 2500 women, were deported from Birkenau to Stutthof concentration camp. From Stutthof, they were sent to several hundred factories in the Baltic region. But most Jews sent to Birkenau continued to be gassed.

End quote

I also wrote about the new born babies at Dachau, whose mothers were Hungarian Jews, on this blog post:  https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/new-born-babies-at-dachau/

German war criminal was stationed on “the path to the gas chamber” at Auschwitz

The following quote is from a news article which you can read in full at http://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-trial-idUSKCN0W109K

Begin quote:

A 95-year-old former Nazi SS paramedic at the Auschwitz death camp, accused of being an accomplice to the murder of thousands, is to stand trial in Germany on Monday, one in a series of such recent cases.

Hubert Zafke was serving as a medic in the SS at the biggest death camp in occupied Poland where he was deployed in 1943. During the trial, he will be faced with the accounts of at least two witnesses.

Prosecutors in the northern German city of Schwerin say that Zafke, in his function as a medic, supported the slaughter at Auschwitz, where over 1.2 million people, most of them Jews, were killed.

Zafke was responsible for treating SS members in case of sickness, not any of the inmates, but prosecutors say he was stationed directly on the path leading to the gas chambers.

End quote

My early morning photo of the SS hospital at Auschwitz and the road that went past it

If Zafke was treating SS members at Auschwitz for sickness, that means that he was stationed at the hospital for SS men at the Auschwitz main camp, which is shown in my 1998 photo above.

Unfortunately, the road to the gas chamber, in the Auschwitz main camp, went right past the hospital where Zafke worked.  Zafke must have known what was going on, and he could have run out of the hospital and stopped the gassing of the Jews, but he didn’t.  So he is a criminal, for sure, and deserves to spend his last years in prison.

My 1998 photo above shows the road to the gas chamber [at the bottom of the photo]

My 1998 photo shows the entrance to gas chamber which was near the SS hospital

The following quote is at the end of the news article cited above:

Begin quote:

Zafke’s charges focus on a month-long period between August and September 1944, when 14 deportation trains from Poland, Slovenia, Greece, Germany and the Netherlands arrived at the camp.

One carried Anne Frank, the German-born Jewish writer, whose “Diary of a young girl” became one of the most widely known witness accounts of the Holocaust, documenting her life in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

Anne Frank and her sister Margot were eventually transferred westwards to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died shortly before its liberation in April 1945.

Zafke has already been charged abroad for his role at Auschwitz. In 1946, a Polish court sentenced him to four years in prison. Afterwards, Zafke returned to Germany, where he worked as an agricultural salesman.

End quote

Did you catch that? Zafke was working at the hospital in the main Auschwitz camp on the the day that Anne Frank arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, which was several miles down the road.

Zafke should have known that Anne Frank was arriving, and he should have had the common decency to run over to the Birkenau camp and say to Dr. Mengele: “What in the hell are you doing?  That young girl is Anne Frank, who will be famous some day. You have to save her!”

 

94-year-old Reinhold Henning is on trial for being a member of the Totenkopf [Death’s Head] division of the SS at Auschwitz

Reinhold Henning hangs his head in shame at his trial

Death’s Head emblem worn by soldiers like Reinhold Henning is shown in the photo above.

You can read about the current trial of Reinhold Henning in this news article:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3466931/Auschwitz-guard-trial-helping-170-000-murders-hell-possible-says-survivor-born-inside-Nazi-death-camp.html#ixzz41PA8APdB

The following quote is from the news article:

Begin quote:

Angela Orosz Richt-Bein, 71, was born in Auschwitz before Christmas 1944

A Holocaust survivor [Angela Orosz Richt-Bein] who was born inside the Auschwitz concentration camp has said former SS guard Reinhold Hanning [Henning] ‘made hell possible’ during his trial for his alleged complicity in 170,000 killings.

Hanning, 94, was addressed by 71-year-old Angela Orosz Richt-Bein at the court in Detmold [Germany].

Angela Orosz Richt-Bein shows photo of her parents wedding in the courtroom where Reinold Henning is on trial

[Angela said] “People like you, Mr Hanning, made the hell of Auschwitz possible. People who looked on and assisted without asking questions,’ she said, according to the Guardian.
Facing her former guard in the courtroom, the Holocaust survivor said: ‘You know what happened to all the people, you enabled their murder. Tell us! Tell us!’

[…]

The defendant, who sat in a wheelchair, declined to respond to Richt-Bein’s appeal. His lawyer said there would be [a] statement on behalf of her [his] client before Easter.

Hanning [Henning] was a member of the Totenkopf, Death’s Head division of the S.S at Auschwitz. [Oh well, if that is the case, he should spend the rest of his life in prison.]

A retired dairy farmer, the 94-year-old admitted that he had served in the Auschwitz I part of the camp but denied having spent any time working at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau section, where most of those who lost their lives were slaughtered [like pigs].

Last year, Oskar Groening, 94, known as the ‘bookkeeper of Auschwitz’ was sentenced to four years’ prison for his role in the murders of 300,000 Jews at Auschwitz in the late summer of 1944.

The defendant himself [Groening] recognised his ‘moral responsibility’ even as he denied ever killing anyone.

End quote

My thoughts about the movie entitled “Son of Saul”

If there is anyone in the world who has not heard about the movie entitled “Son of Saul,” you can read about it on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Saul

I wrote about this movie in a previous blog post at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2015/05/22/how-europe-killed-itself-committed-suicide-is-the-theme-of-a-new-film-by-laslo-nemes/

I finally had a chance to see this movie yesterday, and I was APPALLED, as Simon Cowell used to say when he was a judge on the American Idol TV show several years ago.

The movie was playing at a large theater complex which has several theaters.  I assumed that this show would be playing in the largest theater and that I would have to arrive early in order to get a good seat.

I arrived early, but there was no indication, at the theater, that this movie was playing that day.  According to the online information about this theater, the first showing would be at 11 a.m. At a quarter to 11, there was no sign of a movie, so I decided to have something to eat at a nearby restaurant.  An hour later, I went back to the theater and found that the movie would be starting soon.

I had gotten there just in time, but to my surprise, the movie was playing in a small theater which had no access for the disabled.  I can barely walk, and I had to take my life in my hands to walk into a darkened theater which had no hand rails to hold on to. Most of the people in the audience were senior citizens. Young people would have no chance of understanding this movie.

Finally the movie started — and the picture on the screen was out of focus.  When I used to go to the movies, back in the old days, this would happen very often.  The people in the theater would stomp their feet and shout at the man in the booth who was in charge of showing the film.  I was expecting this to happen, but no one in the audience said a word.

Finally, the picture came into focus, and the first thing that I saw was the main character breathing heavily.  This went on for a long time until everyone in the audience was sick of it.  I interpreted all this to mean that the film maker wanted everyone in the audience to know that this is a Jewish film, and if you don’t like it, get out now, you unworthy goyim!

The following quote, about the film is from Wikipedia:

Son of Saul (Hungarian: Saul fia) is a 2015 Hungarian drama film directed by László Nemes and co-written by Nemes and Clara Royer. It is set in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, and follows a day-and-a-half in the life of Saul Ausländer (played by Géza Röhrig), a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando.^[5]

The members of the Sonderkommando were Jews who served for 3 months, and were then allegedly killed.  Only the last batch of Sonderkommando Jews was marched out of the camp, so that these men could tell their stories to future generations.

The main character in the movie has a red X on the back of his shirt and that is what we see throughout more than half the movie. The actor, who plays the part, is a handsome man, and I assumed that the film maker did not want to show too much of him because this is supposed to be a horror movie.

There are no handsome German characters in the film, except for one man, and all of the Germans speak in a harsh voice.  There are virtually no female characters in the film.

 

When we finally get to the scene where the rabbi performs the Jewish ritual for the dead, this lasts for only a few seconds.

The whole theme of the movie is this:  Germans are bad and Jews are good. The Germans killed the Jews for no reason and now the whole world has to suffer by watching movies like this.

Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp gets no respect from tourists

Garbage on the road outside the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site

My photo of the outside of the outside of the Auschwitz-Birkeanu camp in 2005

The photo above shows what the gatehouse originally looked like.

The original gate house was later remodeled with additions on each side of the gate, including a new pedestrian gate. The photo above, taken outside the camp, shows the pedestrian gate which is on the left-hand side, as you face the gate house on the outside of the camp.

I am not sure about this, but I don’t think that cars were allowed to drive on the road up to the Auschwitz-Birkenu camp in 2005, when I last visited the memorial site.

My 2005 photo taken inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp

My photo above shows the gate house which is the main entrance into the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, also known as the Auschwitz II concentration camp.

Beginning around the middle of May 1944, freight trains that were 40 to 50 cars long rolled through this gate, day and night, bringing thousands of Hungarian Jews to be gassed in the four Birkenau gas chambers. The prisoners called this gate the “Gate of Death.”

The gate house, which is shown in the photos above, was built in 1943, long after the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was first opened.

The first inmates, who were Soviet Prisoners of War, arrived at Auschitz-Birkenau on October 7, 1941. At first, the gate shown in the photo above was for trucks and pedestrians.

Railroad tracks were not laid through the gate until the Spring of 1944, just before transports of Hungarian Jews began to arrive. According to the Auschwitz Museum, 434,351 of these Hungarian Jews were not registered at Birkenau; instead, they were gassed immediately upon arrival. At the height of the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, during a 10 week period, up to 12,000 Jews were gassed and burned each day, according to the True Believer version of the Holocaust.

Both sides of the Auschwitz-Birkenau gate house are identical. When Stephen Spielberg made the movie, Schindler’s List, he filmed scenes of actors exiting from a train which was outside the camp, but it looked as if the train were inside the camp.

The gate house at Auschwitz-Birkeanu is located three kilometers, or about two miles, from the main Auschwitz camp, known as Auschwitz I.

To get to the Birkenau camp from the main camp, turn right after exiting from the parking lot at the main camp. The road curves to the left and goes over the railroad overpass where Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler stood on March 1, 1941 when he selected the village of Birkenau to be the location of a new addition to the Auschwitz camp. At that time, the invasion of the Soviet Union and the alleged plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe was only months away.

From the overpass, the road leads directly to the famous Gate of Death shown in the photos above. The railroad spur line that goes through the gate house begins on the left side of the gate, about a quarter of a mile away, and curves around until it forms a straight line in front of the gate. Trains coming from the west entered the Birkenau camp from tracks on the left side of the gate, as you are facing it, and did not pass the railroad station in the town of Auschwitz.

Trains coming from the opposite direction passed the train station in Auschwitz and then entered the camp on the spur line. The train tracks end only a few yards from two of the gas chambers inside the Birkenau camp.

In the old days, the town of Auschwitz was a major railroad hub, with many train tracks coming into it, and there was a large marshaling yard near the Auschwitz station. Standing on the railroad overpass in 1941, Himmler realized that Birkenau was an ideal location for transporting people by rail from all over Europe, although the plans for exterminating the Jews were not finalized until the Nazis were confident that they would win their war against the Soviet Union.

Irving Roth still out speaking to school children but can’t keep his story straight

Today I am commenting on a news article about Holocaust survivor Irving Roth, who is still out speaking to school children about his ordeal in the Nazi concentration camps.

I previously blogged about Irving Roth at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2015/12/01/irving-roth-still-educating-american-children-about-the-holocaust/

The following quote is from the news article:

Roth experienced first-hand the horrors that most of us have only read about in textbooks. He recounted being separated from his family, only to watch his grandparents, aunt and cousin be led to the gas chambers. Through the holes in the ceilings, Roth watched as Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide infamous for its use in camps like Auschwitz and Dachau, kill his family and hundreds of others. Meanwhile, he was ushered away to Auschwitz with his brother, where he had to perform manual labor while being starved.

In the above quote, it sounds as if Irving Roth were allowed to watch as gas pellets were thrown through the holes in the ceiling of the gas chamber [in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp] when what the writer obviously meant was that Irving Roth was allowed to watch while the Zyklon-B gas was poured into the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp through holes in the ceiling.

My 1998 photo of the holes in the roof of the gas chamber in the Auschwitz main camp

Irving Roth was a prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, not at the main Auschwitz camp. Was he taken to the main camp so that he could watch the gassing procedure?  Did the Nazis allow him to live so that he could come to America after the war and educate children about the Holohoax?

This quote is also from the news article:

At the age of ten, Irving Roth was in a war with the world that he was not capable of fighting, and at the age of fourteen, he was taken from his family, packed inside a cattle-car with hundreds of people and forced to fight for his life in Auschwitz Death Camp.

So little Irving was 14 years old when he was taken to the “Auschwitz Death Camp.”  As we all know, children under the age of 15 were sent immediately to the gas chamber. But not Irving Ross; he was saved so that he could tell his story to little children 70 years later.

What effect does this have on these children?  Are they being taught to hate the German people?  Yes, I think that Irving Ross is teaching hatred.

This quote is also from the news article:

Most people that entered Auschwitz died there. Each night while entering the showers, the prisoners were inspected by a doctor, who decided whether or not each of the prisoners were allowed to continue on living.

“If you walked bent over, obviously you shouldn’t live,” Roth said. “If you’re dragging your foot, obviously you shouldn’t live. My brother and I survived that.”

Did you catch that?  The prisoners at Auschwitz were given a shower “each night” during a time when most people in America did not have a shower in their bathroom; most people, in the 1940ies, took a Saturday night bath. The water was not changed after each person’s bath — the whole family bathed in the same water which had been heated on a wood-burning stove.

My personal opinion is that Irving Roth was never in a concentration camp.  I think that he has made up his stupid stories in order to educate young children in the Holohoax.

The young boy on the far left has been identified as Stephan Ross, who was liberated from the Dachau camp. Were there two young boys named Ross who were involved in the Holohoax?

 

 

Monuments at Treblinka prevent digging for evidence

Stones with names of towns and villages, where the victims came from, are seen on the grounds of the former German Nazi Death Camp Treblinka (AP Photo/Alik Keplicz)

The following quote is from the news story which includes the photo shown above:

“Stones bear the names of hometowns and villages of Jews at the site of the Treblinka death camp in northeast Poland. About 875,000 European Jews were killed at Treblinka in a one-year span at the height of World War II. (Alik Keplicz, Associated Press file)”

According to Holocaust True Believers, Treblinka was an extermination camp where Jews were brought from Warsaw, and many small towns and villages in Poland, to be killed in gas chambers.  Allegedly, their bodies were burned and the ashes were buried inside the camp.  Years later, the alleged burial site was covered with stones, bearing the names of numerous places from which the Jews had been brought to Treblinka to be killed.

Holocaust deniers believe that Treblinka was a transit camp, where Jews were given a shower before being sent, to the east, across the Bug river into parts unknown.

Unfortunately, we will never know the truth, for sure, because the ground has been covered by stones in honor of the victims, so that no digging for evidence can be done.

Stones with names of towns from whence victims were brought to Treblinka

Stone monument at Treblinka surrounded by smaller stones which prevent digging

The photograph above shows the back side of the memorial tombstone at Treblinka. When the death camp was in operation, there was a narrow dirt path through a “tube” covered with tree branches which led to the gas chamber building in this spot. Notice the Menorah at the top of the tombstone.

Stone monument on the site of alleged gas chamber at Treblinka

Located on a knoll, at the top of a gentle slope, on the site of the former Treblinka extermination camp, is a large circular area with 17,000 stones of various sizes and colors set into concrete, which represents a symbolic cemetery, which is shown in my photos above.

When I visited Treblinka in October 1998, my private tour guide told me that 130 of the stones have the names of the cities or towns from which the victims were deported to the death camp. The guide told me that many relatives, of those who died here, come to the symbolic cemetery and are disappointed to find that their village is not named on any of the stones.

According to a pamphlet, which I purchased at the Visitor’s Center, “The great monument in Treblinka is a homage of the Polish people to those ashes lie under the concrete plates of the symbolic cemetery. It is one of the most tragic monuments of martyrdom in Poland.”

My tour guide informed me that the ashes of the 800,000 people, who were murdered at Treblinka, were dumped in this area and are now hidden underneath the concrete of the symbolic cemetery and under the grass and tiny flowers which cover the area.

One of the 17,000 symbolic stones represents the city of Kielce in central Poland, where 42 Jews were killed by a mob of Polish citizens in a pogrom on July 4, 1946, long after the Nazi occupation had ended.

Today Kielce is a modern industrial city with a population of 210,000, located between Warsaw and Krakow. In 1939, the Jewish population in the city was around 25,000, although until the early 1800s, Jews had been barred from living in the city. After the 1946 pogrom, many of the 300,000 Polish Holocaust survivors fled Poland and settled in other countries.

In 1968 there was more violence against the Jews in Poland, and almost all of the survivors were forced to leave.

Since my visit to Treblinka in 1998, I have learned that some tour guides now tell visitors that the number of 17,000 stones in the symbolic cemetery represents the highest number of Jews that were gassed in a single day when the camp was in operation. Others say that the number 17,000 represents the number of Jewish communities that were destroyed in the Holocaust.

According to the pamphlet which I obtained from the Visitor’s Center, the Treblinka memorial site was built between 1959 and 1963. In February 1960, the Warsaw Regional Council selected the designs of Polish sculptor Franciszek Duszenko and Polish architect Adam Haupt for the memorial stone and the Symbolic Cemetery.

According to the Warsaw Regional Council, the design of the symbolic cemetery would create a field of jagged stones that suggest a cemetery consisting of 17,000 stones with 700 of the stones inscribed with the names of the Jewish villages and communities in Poland that were obliterated by the Holocaust.

Symbolic cemetery at Treblinka has simulated burning pit in foreground

Treblinka stone commemorating victims from Sandomierz

Stone in honor of victims sent from Warsaw

The 800,000 bodies, which had allegedly been buried previously at Treblinka, were later dug up and then cremated on the orders of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, after he had visited the camp in 1943, according to Martin Gilbert. This project allegedly required three months of intense labor by 1,000 Jewish workers who were forced to perform this grisly task in an attempt to destroy the evidence of alleged mass murder at Treblinka.

Monument at Treblinka recreates burning pits where the bodies of Jews were burned

According to my tour guide, on my trip to Treblinka in 1998, the first gas chambers at Treblinka used carbon monoxide. The 10 new gas chambers used the poison gas known as Zyklon-B, according to the pamphlet which I purchased at the Visitor’s Center.

According to the True Believer version of history, Treblinka did not have delousing chambers; all the clothing taken from the prisoners was sent to the Majdanek camp to be disinfected with Zyklon-B before being sent to Germany. What? The Nazis couldn’t spare some of the Zyklon-B, used at Treblinka, to delouse the clothing?

A short distance farther up the slope, to the east of the gas chambers at Treblinka, was located the “cremation pyres” according to a map in the camp pamphlet which I purchased at Treblinka.

Strangely, none of the three Operation Reinhard extermination camps had a crematorium for burning the bodies of the 1.5 million Jews who were killed in these camps. Of the other five extermination camps which were in operation during the same period (Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau), only Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, which also functioned as forced labor camps, had crematoria with ovens for burning the bodies.

It is hard for me to believe that the Nazis did such poor prior planning of the extermination of the Jews in the death camps.

One of the 40 prisoners who escaped from Treblinka, and lived to tell about it, was Abraham Bomba, a Jew who was born in 1913 in Germany, but raised in Czestochowa, Poland. Bomba was one of the 1,000 Jews who lived in the barracks in a separate section of the Treblinka II camp and worked for the Germans who ran the death camp. Bomba was a barber and his job was cutting the hair of the victims inside the gas chamber, just before they were gassed. In 1990, he told about his experience in the camp in a video-taped interview for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The quote below is from the transcript of his interview:

“And now I want to tell you, I want to tell you about the thing…the gas chamber. It was, they ask me already about this thing. The gas chamber, how it looked. Very simple. Was all concrete. There was no window. There was nothing in it. Beside, on top of you, there was wires, and it looked like, you know, the water going to come out from it. Had two doors. Steel doors. From one side and from the other side. The people went in to the gas chamber from the one side. Like myself, I was in it, doing the job as a barber. When it was full the gas chamber–the size of it was…I would say 18 by 18, or 18 by 17, I didn’t measure that time, just a look like I would say I look here the room around, I wouldn’t say exactly how big it is. And they pushed in as many as they could. It was not allowed to have the people standing up with their hands down because there is not enough room, but when people raised their hand like that there was more room to each other. And on top of that they throw in kids, 2, 3, 4 years old kids, on top of them. And we came out. The whole thing it took I would say between five and seven minute. The door opened up, not from the side they went in but the side from the other side and from the other side the…the group…people working in Treblinka number 2, which their job was only about dead people. They took out the corpses. Some of them dead and some of them still alive. They dragged them to the ditches, and over there they covered them. Big ditches, and they covered them. That was the beginning of Treblinka.”

After each gassing, the Jewish workers at Treblinka had to clean up in preparation for the next batch of victims, according to Abraham Bomba. The clothing that had been taken off by the victims had to be removed and put into piles for sorting before being sent on the next empty transport train to Lublin. Everything was done with great efficiency in this assembly-line murder camp, and nothing was wasted. All of the clothes and valuables, taken from the Jews when they arrived at Treblinka, were sent to the Majdanek camp in a suburb of Lublin where everything was disinfected before being sent to Germany and given to civilians.

In his 1990 interview at the USHMM, Bomba described what happened next. Below is a quote from the transcript of his interview:

“People went in through the gate. Now we know what the gate was, it was the way to the gas chamber and we have never see them again. That was the first hour we came in. After that, we, the people, 18 or 16 people…more people came in from the…working people, they worked already before, in the gas chamber, we had a order to clean up the place. Clean up the place–is not something you can take and clean. It was horrible. But in five, ten minutes this place had to look spotless. And it looked spotless. Like there was never nobody on the place, so the next transport when it comes in, they shouldn’t see what’s going on. We were cleaning up in the outside. Tell you what mean cleaning up: taking away all the clothes, to those places where the clothes were. Now, not only the clothes, all the papers, all the money, all the, the…whatever somebody had with him. And they had a lot of things with them. Pots and pans they had with them. Other things they had with them. We cleaned that up.”

 

New book about the Lithuanians who killed their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust

Efraim Zuroff prays at monument for the Jews killed in Lithuania

The following quote is from a recent news article which you can read in full at http://www.timesofisrael.com/is-lithuania-ready-to-own-up-to-its-holocaust-past/

Begin quote

[Author] Vanagaite and Zuroff are not in full accord. She believes that in lieu of Lithuanian introspection, the extent and cruelty of Lithuanian complicity has been vastly exaggerated – including in survivors’ testimonies. She cast doubt on testimonies about a man who was boiled alive in Panevezys and an account that locals, after slaughtering dozens of Jews in Kaunas, sang the Lithuanian anthem. Zuroff says he has no reason to doubt these accounts.

End quote

Lithuanian man standing near the bodies of Jews that he has killed

The plight of the Lithuanian Jews has, unfortunately, not been told enough.  I have written three previous blog posts about the Lithuanian Jews who were killed, for no reason at all, during World War II, by their non-Jewish neighbors. This is a story that has been mostly kept out of the news — until now.

Author Ruta Vanagaite’s latest book, “Musiskiai” (“Our People”), is “a travelogue about the Holocaust consisting of interviews with witnesses to the atrocities perpetrated by Lithuanians against their Jewish neighbors.”

You can read more about her book in this news article:  http://www.timesofisrael.com/is-lithuania-ready-to-own-up-to-its-holocaust-past/

The following quote is from the news article, cited above:

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Vanagaite, who is 61 and not Jewish, visited killing fields in Lithuania and Belarus to research the book, which she co-authored with Efraim Zuroff, the renowned Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office. Though she found the journalist’s request to see her birth certificate unsettling, she complied anyway.

“I know where it’s coming from,” Vanagaite told JTA. “Lithuanian involvement in the Holocaust is such a taboo that being a Jew or a Russian spy are the only explanations for wanting to talk about it.”

But that is beginning to change thanks to Vanagaite’s book.

“In one fell swoop, the book has brought a wave of truth telling about the Holocaust to the mainstream of society who follow the large media outlets,” said Dovid Katz, a Yiddish scholar in Vilnius who has campaigned for historical accuracy on the Lithuanians’ Holocaust-era role in the near annihilation of the Lithuanian Jewish community of 220,000. “It is of notable importance that a born and bred Lithuanian author tells the simple truth as it has never been told in a trade book not intended for scholars and specialists.”

Geoff Vasil, a spokesman for the Jewish Community of Lithuania, said “the turning of the tide within Lithuanian society” on this issue “now appears to be taking place like never before.”

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This quote is also from the news article, cited above:

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Vanagaite experienced this reluctance personally last year when she made an unwelcome discovery that served as her motivation to write the book in the first place.

In researching the life story of her grandfather — a well-known activist against communist Russia’s occupation of Lithuania until 1991 — she found documents that showed he helped German authorities compile a list of 10 Jewish communists during World War II. The German authorities then gave him some Jews to work on his farm as slave laborers before they were murdered.

“It was devastating,” Vanagaite recalls. “This was a man who was a hero to me and my family.”

In Lithuania, locals who fought with the Germans against the Red Army are widely revered as patriotic freedom fighters — including Juozas Ambrazevicius, the leader of the Nazi collaborationist government.

In a funeral organized by the central government, Ambrazevicius was reburied in 2012 with full national honors in the city of Kaunas. Four years earlier, Lithuanian prosecutors investigated for alleged war crimes four Jews who fought against the Nazis with the Russians. The investigation was dropped amid an international outcry.

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What was the worst thing that happened to women at Auschwitz? Their heads were shaved

Women had their heads shaved on the day that they entered Auschwitz-Birkenau

The following quote is from a news article which you can read in full here: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/jess-phillips/lets-stop-drip-drip-drip-of-otherness_b_9274840.html

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Last week I travelled to Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust and young people from my constituency. Like all who visit, I was struck by the scale of human tragedy. I’ve seen some things in my life, met hundreds of survivors of torture, oppression and slavery. I have been trained to have empathy and understanding but to use techniques to cope and not take work home with me. I’m a tough cookie. The sight of tonnes and tonnes of hair sheared from the heads of Jewish women and girls floored me.

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The photo above show human hair at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Why was the hair shaved from the heads of the women at Auschwitz? Was it because the Nazis wanted to humiliate these women, or was it because lice, which spreads typhus, hides in the hair? Were the Nazis trying to SAVE lives?

My photo of the cloth that was made from human hair at Auschwitz-Birkenau

To make matters even worse, the Nazis used to human hair to make cloth, which is shown in my photo above.

My photo of the suitcases at Auschwitz

 

 

 

 

Funeral of Samuel Willenburg, famous survivor of Treblinka death camp, will be on Monday, Feb. 22, 2016

Read more about the life of Samuel Willenburg here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3456255/Last-survivor-Treblinka-dies-aged-93-73-years-daring-escape-Nazi-death-camp.html

Samuel Willenburg as a young man

Recent photo of Samuel Willenburg shortly before he died

You can read about the death of Samuel Willenburg in this news article:  http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4768494,00.html

The following quote is from the news article cited above:

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Samuell Willenburg, the final survivor of the Treblinka extermination camp revolt, passed away in Israel on Saturday at the age of 93. His funeral is to take place on Monday at 3:00 PM at Moshav Udim. He leaves behind his wife, daughter, and three grandchildren.

At the age of 17, Willenburg joined the Polish army and fought against the Nazi invaders in 1939. After surviving the Holocaust, he worked as a sculptor and commemorated one of his statues to the Trebelinka uprising, when prisoners launched a revolt that resulted in the successful escape of 67 of them.

He recounted his stunning escape to Ynet’s sister site Xnet in an interview: “They shot at me, but I continued to run away.” He added: “Some of the people who escaped with me ran to the left and others ran to the right; I ran straight ahead, alone.”
After the revolt, the Nazis murdered 900,000 Jews within 13 months at Treblinka. Willenburg later participated in the Polish Warsaw Uprising in 1944. His tale has been immortalized in an autobiography, “Surviving Treblinka,” published in Hebrew, Polish, and English in 2002, and the documentary film “The Final Witness”. The president of Poland also granted him the highest military decoration bestowed by Poland.

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You can read about Treblinka on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Treblinka/introduction.html

and on this page of my website:  http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Treblinka/Treblinka07.html

and on this page:  http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Treblinka/Treblinka06.html

Rest in Peace, Samuel Willenburg, famous Holocaust survivor.