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.
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.
This photo of Anne Frank photo at age 13 was used in news article
Otto Frank, who died on August 19, 1980, at the age of 91, is back in the news because he revealed, several years ago, that he felt guilty about not saving his wife and daughters during the Holocaust. There is no mention, in the recent news story, about HOW Otto might have saved his family, nor of how he managed to save himself.
Otto Frank and his family hid in an attic in Amsterdam during World War II, and saved themselves until the war was nearly over. Eventually, the family was betrayed by someone who revealed their hiding place to the Nazis.
My photo of the front door into the building in Amsterdam where Anne Frank hid in the attic
The whole family was sent to the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, after their hiding place was discovered.
Soon after he arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Otto Frank had himself put into the camp hospital, claiming that he was too sick to work. He stayed in the hospital until the camp was liberated by Soviet soldiers on January 27, 1945.
Later, Otto Frank apparently felt guilty because he did not advise the rest of his family to voluntarily put themselves into the hospital at Auschwitz-Birkenau so that they would not have to work, and would get better food, as he did, because he was supposedly sick.
After less than two months in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, Anne and her sister Margot were transferred to the Bergen Belsen exchange camp in Germany in October 1944. We know that the train carrying Anne and Margot to Bergen-Belsen was a “sick transport” because the Red Cross was asked to monitor the train along the way.
The guilt that Anne Frank’s father felt after his two daughters and wife died in the Holocaust has been revealed by a former penpal.
The letters were sent to an Australian woman, who said Otto Frank told her of his turmoil following the deaths of Anne, Margot and Edith who all died in 1945 – just weeks before the end of the Second World War. [Anne, Margot and Edith all died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen]
Writing to 19-year-old Anne Finlayson in 1965, Mr Frank told her he blamed himself for the fate of his wife and two daughters and that he should have done more to protect them.
Anne was inspired, like many others, to write to the Holocaust survivor following the publication of The Diary of Anne Frank in 1947.
Anne’s diary entries spread across the globe after she began to write as a 13-year-old Jew hiding from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in a secret annexe of her father’s factory in Amsterdam.
The guilt that Anne Frank’s father felt after his two daughters and wife died in the Holocaust has been revealed by a former penpal.
The letters were sent to an Australian woman, who said Otto Frank told her of his turmoil following the deaths of Anne, Margot and Edith who all died in 1945 – just weeks before the end of the Second World War.
Writing to 19-year-old Anne Finlayson in 1965, Mr Frank told her he blamed himself for the fate of his wife and two daughters and that he should have done more to protect them.
Anne [Finlayson] was inspired, like many others, to write to the Holocaust survivor [Otto Frank] following the publication of The Diary of Anne Frank in 1947.
Anne’s diary entries spread across the globe after she began to write as a 13-year-old Jew hiding from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in a secret annexe of her father’s factory in Amsterdam.
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Here is the full story on the family of Otto Frank:
In February 1942, the Nazis had began rounding up all the Jews in Germany and the occupied countries for evacuation to the East in what the Nazis called “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
Knowing that his family would soon be deported, Otto Frank began preparing a hiding place in the annex with a two-year supply of food and other essentials. Five months later, Anne and her family suddenly disappeared, leaving behind notes saying that they had gone to Switzerland, which was a neutral country during World War II. Otto Frank’s brother actually did escape from occupied France to Switzerland, but Otto Frank wanted to remain in Amsterdam because he had a thriving business there.
Many other Jewish families in Amsterdam also went into hiding, trusting that their Dutch neighbors and business associates would not betray their hiding places to the police. Approximately 25,000 Dutch Jews hid during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands which began after the Germans defeated the Dutch in May 1940 in the early part of World War II.
Those unfortunate Dutch Jews who did not go into hiding were sent to the transit camp at Westerbork, from where they were then transported by train to Auschwitz, the infamous killing center, located in what is now Poland, where millions of Jews perished in the gas chambers. Many of the 160,000 Jews in the Netherlands were refugees, like the Franks and their friends in the annex, who had escaped from Germany after Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933. Westerbork was originally a refugee camp for German Jews who were regarded as illegal immigrants in the Netherlands after they escaped over the border from Nazi Germany before the war.
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