The title of my blog post today is a line from a news article which you can read in full at http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/general-news/20160507/oakland-woman-traces-familys-holocaust-story
The following quote is from the news article cited above:
Begin quote
The Nazis started weekly transports from Amsterdam in July 1943.
“Relatives tried to get them off the transport list,” Vasos-Baczewski said. “That’s when they knew it was over.”
The Mosbachers did not remain in Auschwitz, Vasos-Baczewski and her husband learned. “We knew that they had been there, but didn’t have specific dates, documentation that they had been killed immediately,” she said.
The world knows now what occurred at the concentration camp. “They had a ramp,” Vasos-Baczewski said. “They could offload directly from the cattle car into the gas chambers.”
End quote
Trains brought Jews into the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in 1944
On the map below, note that the gas chambers are marked in red at the top of the map. The train tracks going into the camp are shown at the bottom of the map.
The top of the map shown below points west and shows the western end of the Birkeanu camp where the Zentral Sauna is located. “The little white house” is shown behind the Sauna and to the right. The Sauna was the building where the clothing was disinfected in steam chambers; this building also had a large shower room. The buildings shown just below the Sauna on the map were the clothing warehouses. To the right of the clothing warehouses were Krema IV and Krema V (No. 17 on the map) which had gas chambers disguised as showers. Behind the clothing warehouses were the hospital barracks. On the left side of the map below (No. 15) are Crematorium II and Crematorium III, shown in red. The white part of these two buildings in the drawing denotes the undressing rooms and the gas chambers which were partially underground. No. 14 on the map denotes the main camp road with the women’s camp on the left; the women’s kitchen is right below Crematorium II.
Map of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp
The following quote is also from the news article, cited above:
Begin quote
The other piece of Vasos-Baczewski’s story came via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and an archive called the International Tracing Service. The tracing service is a portal to “more than 150 million pages of documents relating to 17 million people,” according to the museum’s Raymund Flandez.
It was maintained in Bad Arolsen, Germany, and kept closed to the international community until 2007.
Since then, at no charge, the museum has fielded about 250 requests a month arriving from 75 countries around the world, from people hoping to trace missing relatives or shed light on the experiences of Holocaust victims, Flandez wrote in a release.
The Nazis kept meticulous records of their atrocities, Vasos-Baczewski said. “That was the most sobering thing to see: their names on the documents, the transport lists. The Germans were just great record keepers,” she said.
The Nazis started weekly transports from Amsterdam in July 1943.
“Relatives tried to get them off the transport list,” Vasos-Baczewski said. “That’s when they knew it was over.”
The Mosbachers did not remain in Auschwitz, Vasos-Baczewski and her husband learned. “We knew that they had been there, but didn’t have specific dates, documentation that they had been killed immediately,” she said.
The world knows now what occurred at the concentration camp. “They had a ramp,” Vasos-Baczewski said. “They could offload directly from the cattle car into the gas chambers.”
End quote
My photo of original cattle car that brought Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau
