Bernard Marks, a Holocaust survivor with no tattoo, is back in the news [updated]

Bernard Marks is the man in the center

Update: You can hear Bernard Marks speak in this video at http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article141862719.html

Bernard Marks is back in the news; you can read about it at http://metro.co.uk/2017/03/29/history-is-not-on-your-side-auschwitz-survivor-confronts-trumps-immigration-tsar-6541709/

I previously blogged about Bernard Marks, the Holocaust survivor who has no tattoo, on this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/how-holocaust-survivor-bernard-marks-survived-auschwitz-without-a-tattoo/

Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald Trump, should have immediately confronted this guy, asking him “Where’s your tattoo?” Kushner has relatives who lived in a hole in the ground, during the Holocaust, so they were survivors who had no tattoo, but this is very rare.

Sometimes the prisoners at Auschwitz would try to go through the food line twice. To stop this, the Nazis required each prisoner to show his tattoo before getting any food.  How did Bernard Marks get any food while he was a prisoner at Auschwitz?

Rudolf Kastner, a traitor to the Jewish people, is being turned into a hero

Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The title of my blog post today comes from a news article which you can read in full at https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/03/29/rezso-kasztner-the-man-who-betrayed-400000-jews/

Hungarian Jews waiting to be gassed

The following quote is from the news article:

Begin quote

From May 1944 to July 1944, more than 400,000 Jews were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz. The enthusiastic perpetrators of this crime — the fastest destruction of any Jewish population during the Final Solution — were Adolf Eichmann’s SS unit and the Hungarian government.

Throughout the preparations for, and the implementation of, the deportations, the Nazis conducted “rescue negotiations” with a small Jewish committee led by Rezső Kasztner (also known as Rudolf Kastner). The Nazi aim in these “negotiations” was to buy time for the mass murder operation by holding out the prospect of a rescue deal. As Himmler told one of his officers: “Take what you can get from the Jews. Promise them what you like. What we keep is another matter.”

[…]

Kasztner knew that the trains from the Hungarian ghettos were taking their victims not to a resettlement site — as the Jews had been told — but to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Yet he ordered his committee to send messages to the ghettos telling local Jewish leaders to prepare their communities for agricultural work in the countryside. By doing so, Kasztner guaranteed that there would no significant escape attempts, even though some of these Jewish communities were near the country’s borders, and the Romanian authorities — at this stage of the war — openly tolerated the arrival of Jewish refugees.

End quote

I have written about this subject on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/HungarianJews2.html

Begin quote from my website:

The following information is from the book “Auschwitz, a New History” by Laurence Reese:

On April 25, 1944, in his office at the Hotel Majestic in Budapest, Eichmann met with Joel Brand, another leading member of the Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee. Brand had already attended previous meetings with Eichmann and other SS officers in an attempt to bribe them to allow a number of Jews out of Hungary. Now Eichmann said to Brand, “I am prepared to sell one million Jews to you.”

Eichmann proposed an exchange of “Blood for Goods,” in which the British and the Americans would give the Nazis one new truck for every one hundred Jews. Eichmann promised that the trucks would only be used on the Eastern front where the Germans were fighting against the Communist Soviet Union. Brand was asked to go to Istanbul in Turkey to negotiate the deal. Eichmann hoped to obtain 10,000 trucks in exchange for one million Jews. But even before Brand reached Turkey on May 19, 1944, Eichmann had already ordered the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, which began on April 29, 1944.

According to Laurence Rees, SS officer Kurt Becher, who was a Lt. Col., equal in rank to Eichmann, was trying to blackmail the Weiss family, owners of the biggest industrial conglomerate in Hungary, into giving its shares to the SS in return for safe passage out of the country. Rees wrote:

By the time of his meeting with Brand, Eichmann knew that his rival Becher had successfully arranged for shares of the Manfred-Weiss works to be transferred to the Nazis; in return, about fifty members of the Weiss family were allowed to leave and head for neutral countries.

Brand was accompanied to Istanbul by another man named Bandi Grosz, a former agent of the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency, whose operations in Hungary had been taken over by an SS officer, Lt. Col. Gerhard Clages. At the last meeting with Brand, SS officers Clages, Becher and several other Nazis had been present.

In the book entitled “The Last Days,” David Cesarani wrote that an attempt to save the Hungarian Jews was made by Otto Komoly and Dr. Rezo (Rudolf) Kastner, two leading figures in the Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee in Hungary. In 1942, the Jewish Council of Slovakia had tried to bribe Dieter Wisliceny, an SS man, to stop the deportation of the Slovakian Jews. When Wisliceny arrived in Budapest, Komoly and Kastner revived the proposal first made to Wisliceny in Slovakia, offering him a $2 million bribe to save the Hungarian Jews from deportation to the death camps. Wisliceny suggested a down payment of $200,000 to show good faith, but while Komoly and Kastner were trying to raise the money, Wisliceny left Budapest to organize the deportation of the Jews in eastern Hungary to Auschwitz. According to Cesarani, the Jews confronted Wisliceny with his betrayal, and “he coolly offered to save 600 Jews of their choosing. Soon afterwards Eichmann himself took up the negotiations.”

End quote from my scrapbookpages.com website

Bronia Brandman watched two of her sisters being sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The title of my blog post today is a quote from a news article which you can read in full here: http://www.jewishpress.com/news/us-news/holocaust-survivor-86-returning-to-auschwitz-with-idf-officers/2017/03/28/

The following quote is from the news article:

Begin quote

Forty supporters of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) from across the US will embark on an unprecedented mission to Poland and Israel on April 24 to May 3, with IDF soldiers and officers, as well as Holocaust survivors – one of whom is returning to Auschwitz for the first time since her liberation.

Bronia Brandman, 86, who was born in Jaworzno, Poland, watched two of her sisters being sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Except for her older brother and cousin, who also reside in the United States, her entire family perished in the Holocaust.

End quote

Can you believe this! Those cruel Germans sent two girls to the gas chamber and made a third girl watch as her sisters marched to the gas chamber!!!

My photo of Talbrucktor tower above the gate into Marienplatz in Munich

As I have written several times, I lived in Germany for 20 months, after World War II was over. I met many German men and women who were all very nice to me. I was amazed that the German people never got upset about anything.  Maybe it was different during the war, and maybe Jews were treated differently by the Germans.

Brandia is the girl on the right in the front row

Begin quote from news article:

“I came to Auschwitz in 1943 as a child of 12,” Brandman said. “My parents and four siblings were consigned to the gas chambers. The daily bestiality and dehumanization was beyond words, and the world’s silence was deafening. I never wished to return to that place of our degradation and annihilation, but to return in the company of our noblest, bravest of the brave – our IDF soldiers, makes my spirit soar with pride and hope.”

End quote

Bronia Brandman did not give any explanation for why her parents and four siblings were sent to the gas chambers, but she was spared. It seems that the Nazis made sure that there were child survivors, who would live a long time, and tell the world about the gas chambers where 6 million Jews were killed.

“Into the valley of death rode the 6 million.”

Photos from Soviet film of Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors

Two weeks after Auschwitz-Birkenau and the main Auschwitz camp were liberated by soldiers in the Army of the Soviet Union, a film was made which showed the survivors of the camp. All of the photos below are still shots from the Soviet film.

Prisoners at the main Auschwitz camp celebrate their liberation by Soviet soldiers

There were 5,800 survivors at the Auschwitz II camp (Birkenau) when the Soviets arrived on Januray 27, 1945. There were more survivors in the Auschwitz I camp (the main camp), some of whom are shown the documentary film taken in February 1945. The photo above shows men in the main camp.

Child survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau; Eva Moses Kor is the girl on the far right

Both of the photos above are still photos from a documentary film, which was made by the Soviet Union in February 1945. This is what the survivors of a death camp looked like, no more than four weeks after they were “liberated” on January 27, 1945.

Were these survivors actually “local people dressed to look like prisoners” as my Polish tour guide claimed. This would mean that Eva Moses Kor, who is still alive, was not actually in the film, but was being impersonated by a local Polish girl.

Survivors of Auschswitz-Birkenau camp

The photograph above is a still picture taken from the Soviet movie which was shown at the beginning of the tour at the Auschwitz Museum when I visited in 1998. It shows some of the 5,800 Birkenau survivors, most of whom look like well-fed Polish peasants, walking out of the camp. In the background of the photo you can see the wooden barracks buildings, with windows under the roof, and the posts of the barbed wire fence.

The tall, skinny guy in the photo is Dr. Otto Wolken, a medical doctor in the Birkenau Quarantine camp, who stayed behind to help his fellow prisoners when the Birkenau camp was evacuated. He is the only one in the photo who looks properly emaciated, as death camp prisoners should look.

The survivors, who are shown in the photo above, are walking along an interior camp road which bisects the Birkenau camp from north to south, connecting the women’s camp with the new section of Birkenau, known as “Mexico.” For all I know, these people are imposters who were brought in by the Soviets because all the real prisoners had been forced to march out of the camp.

Dr. Wolken was the first witness to testify at the Auschwitz Trial, held by the German government in Frankfurt between 1963 and 1965.

Women who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau huddle under blankets to keep warm

In the evening the female prisoners in the Auschwitz women’s camp, who are shown in the photo above, were formed into columns, including the female prisoners who had been transferred from Birkenau. They were driven out in the direction of Rajsko. The female prisoners of the gardening and plant breeding squads from the Rajsko sub-camp joined the procession of the male and female prisoners evacuated from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

There were more survivors in the Auschwitz I camp (the main camp), some of whom are shown the documentary film taken in February 1945. The photo at the top of this page shows men in the main camp.

 

6th grade students in America should not be taught the Holocaust

Block 11 in Auschwitz main camp

Fat-faced survivors march out of Auschwitz-Birkenau after the camp was liberated

This recent news article tells about how sixth graders in America are being taught the Holocaust:

http://www.tcpalm.com/story/specialty-publications/your-news/st-lucie-county/reader-submitted/2017/03/27/holocaust-survivors-recount-history-sixth-graders/99685370/

What am I complaining about now, you ask. I don’t think that the Holocaust should be taught in the 6th grade in America. The Holocaust didn’t happen in America. The story of the Holocaust has nothing to do with America, where no Jews were killed during World War II.

Sixth grade students in America are so far removed from the Holocaust that they can’t possibly understand why the Jews were Holocausted.

 

Arbeit macht Frei

Gate into the main Auschwitz camp

It is hard to get a photo of the Auschwitz gate because there is a steady stream of tourists walking through the gate.

The slogan “Arbeit macht Frei” literally means that work will set you free. This slogan was put over the gate into the main Auschwitz camp, as shown in the photo above. The “death camp” known as Auschwitz-Birkenau did not have this slogan.

The following quote is from Wikipedia:

Begin quote

The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. The slogan’s use in this instance was ordered by SS General Theodor Eicke, inspector of concentration camps and second commandant of Dachau Concentration Camp.

The slogan can still be seen at several sites, including over the entrance to Auschwitz I where, according to BBC historian Laurence Rees in his “Auschwitz: a New History”, the sign was erected by order of commandant Rudolf Höss. This particular sign was made by prisoner-labourers including Jan Liwacz. The sign features an upside-down ‘B’, which has been interpreted as an act of defiance by the prisoners who made it.^[4][5]

In 1933 the first political prisoners were being rounded up for an indefinite period without charges. They were held in a number of places in Germany. The slogan was first used over the gate of a “wild camp” in the city of Oranienburg, which was set up in an abandoned brewery in March 1933 (it was later rebuilt in 1936 as Sachsenhausen^{[citation needed]}). It can also be seen at the Dachau concentration camp, Gross-Rosen concentration camp, and the Theresienstadt Ghetto-Camp, as well as at Fort Breendonk in Belgium. It has been claimed that the slogan was placed over entrance gates to Auschwitz III / Buna/Monowitz.^[6][7] The slogan appeared at the Flossenbürg camp on the left gate post at the camp entry. The original gate posts survive in another part of the camp, but the slogan sign no longer exists.^[8] Primo Levi describes seeing the words illuminated over a doorway (as distinct from a gate) in Auschwitz III/Buna Monowitz.^[9]

End quote

DOCTOR Josef Mengele gets no respect

Dr. Mengele is the man on the far left

Shown in the 1944 photo above, from left to right, are Dr. Josef Mengele, Richard Baer, Karl Hoecker, and Walter Schmidetski. Richard Baer, known as the last Commandant of Auschwitz, was the commander of the main camp; his adjutant was Karl Hoecker.

Dr. Josef Mengele was one of 30 SS officers at Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau, who allegedly decided who would live and who would die in the gas chambers. If selections were made by 30 SS men, this means that Dr. Mengele only made around 3% of the selections. Yet every Holocaust survivor claims that Dr. Mengele was on duty when they went through the selection process.

Dr. Josef Mengele was nicknamed the “Angel of Death” by the concentration camp prisoners because he had the face of an angel, yet he allegedly made selections for the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

DOCTOR Josef Mengele

One of the regular readers of my blog, who is a Holocaust denier, made a comment, in which he mentioned “Mengele” without using Dr. Mengele’s title of Doctor. Holocaust believers do not give Dr. Mengele the title of Doctor because they believe that Dr. Mengele made selections for the gas chamber.

Josef Mengele, Rudolf Hoess and Josef Kramer

Dr. Mengele had a Ph.D. in Anthropology as well as a degree in medicine, which he received in July 1938 from the University of Frankfurt. He earned his Ph.D. in 1935 with a thesis on “Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups.”

In January 1937, Dr. Mengele was appointed a research assistant at the Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfurt. He worked under Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a geneticist who was doing research on twins.

As the war-time director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching Genetics, located in Berlin, von Verschuer secured the funds for Dr. Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz. The results of Dr. Mengele’s research on twins was sent to this Institute. The grant for Dr. Mengele’s genetic research was authorized by the German Research Council in August 1943.

Dr. Mengele was very nice to the little children in the camp, yet he allegedly experimented on them as though they were laboratory rats. He volunteered to do the selections at Birkenau, even when it wasn’t his turn, because he wanted to find subjects for his medical research on genetic conditions and hereditary diseases, which he had already begun before the war. He particularly wanted to find twins for the research that he had started before he was posted to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Dr. Josef Mengele is the man on the far left

Dr. Josef Mengele was one of 30 SS officers at Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau, who allegedly decided who would live, and who would die in the gas chambers. The other 29 officers were probably not as handsome, nor as charming, as Dr. Mengele, so they never became famous.

Dr. Mengele had arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in early May 1943, just at the time that the second typhus epidemic was starting. Dr. Mengele himself contracted typhus while he was at Birkenau.

Dr. Mengele was known by all the prisoners because of his good looks and charm. According to Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, the authors of “Mengele, the Complete Story,” many of the children in the Birkenau camp “adored Mengele” and called him “Uncle Pepi.”

Vera Alexander, a survivor of Birkenau, said that Dr. Mengele brought chocolate and the most beautiful clothes for the children, including hair ribbons for the little girls.

Olga Lengyel, a prisoner at the Birkenau camp, wrote in her book entitled “Five Chimneys” that she had heard about Dr. Mengele from the other inmates before she saw him. Lengyel wrote that she had heard that Dr. Mengele was “good-looking” but she was surprised by how “really handsome” he was.

Lengyel wrote, regarding Dr. Mengele: “Though he was making decisions that meant extermination, he was as pleasantly smug as any man could be.”

Holocaust survivor tells his story — the ultimate sign of victory

Rabbi Nissen Mangel at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland. Photo: Screenshot.

The title of my blog post today is a quote from a news article, which you can read in full at https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/03/20/in-ultimate-sign-of-victory-elderly-holocaust-survivor-returns-to-auschwitz-birkenau-recounts-his-harrowing-experiences-there/

Begin quote from news article:

A video of an elderly Hasidic Holocaust survivor [shown in the photo above], returning to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland and emotionally recounting his harrowing experiences there has gone viral on Facebook, drawing hundreds of thousands of views in just a few days.

This is such big news, that I have put it on my own Facebook page.

In the video, Rabbi Nissen Mangel is seen telling a group of Boyaner Hasidim in Yiddish about how he, at the age of 10, underwent the “selectzia” process — supervised by infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele — with his family, who were from Bratislava. Mangel lied to Mengele about his age — claiming he was 17. Even though Mengele realized this was not true, Mangel and his father were chosen for slave labor, rather than immediate execution.

“It was a miracle,” Mangel said. “1.5 million children were sent to the gas chambers and to me Mengele said to work with my father.”

End quote

Notice that Dr. Mengele is never given the title of Doctor.  Mengele killed Jews, so he can never be forgiven, nor given any respect.

I think that this man should show a little respect for DOCTOR Mengele by using his title of DOCTOR.

My photo of the gas chamber where Rabbi Nissen Mangel could have been sent, but wasn’t.

 

The enormity of what transpired through this gate

The gate that is shown in my photo above is the same gate that is shown in the photo below. The road through this gate goes through the middle of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Elie Wiesel wrote in his famous book, entitled “Night” that he walked through this gate.

==============================================================

Recent photo of a gate inside the Birkenau camp where student visitor is resting

The following quote is from a news article, which includes the photo above: http://www.spencerdailyreporter.com/story/2397625.html

Begin quote:

Krakow is the home of Auschwitz. Auschwitz was actual several camps in the Polish area. Auschwitz was the original camp, then there was Auschwitz II Birkenau and Auschwitz III Monowitz. The original Auschwitz was mostly a political prison where Birkenau and Monowitz were more what one would think of as extermination camps. They were split into two groups. One was for the use of labor until their usefulness was gone. The second group were automatically sent to the gas chambers.

Warsaw had what was known as the Ghettos. Jews were segregated into these areas where they were overcrowded and had no food. They waited here until they were deported to the camps. To this day, there is still an uneasiness for the Jews in Poland.

End quote

I am totally confused by this article. I wrote about Krakow on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Kazimierz/Kazimierz01A.html

Does the person who wrote this article think that the Auschwitz camp was in the city of Krakow?

The old photo above shows the “Krakow gate”

Auschwitz or Oswiecim? Which came first?

The photo above shows the entrance into the Auschwitz main camp

Oświęcim, the town formerly known as Auschwitz, is in the news today; you can read the story at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/world/europe/poland-auschwitz-nazi-stunt-sheep.html

Begin quote:

Malgorzata Jurecka, a spokeswoman for the district police office in Oświęcim (Auschwitz is the German spelling), said late Friday that 11 people were detained — six Poles, four Belarussians and one German. “At the moment, we are gathering and securing all the evidence connected with this case to determine the exact involvement of the individuals in this dramatic incident,” she said. “It was macabre.”

End quote

I wrote about Auschwitz on this previous blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/why-auschwitz-was-picked-as-the-location-for-a-concentration-camp/

My photo of a house on the road to the town formerly known as Auschwitz

The town of Auschwitz was originally founded by German people in 1270, according to historian Robert Jan van Pelt. The town is now known by its Polish name, Oświęcim.

The original name of the town was Auschwitz and it was known by this name when the three Auschwitz camps were in operation; the Germans did not change the name of the town and they did not keep it a secret that they were turning the brick barracks, in a suburb of the town, into a concentration camp for political prisoners.

When the Auschwitz camp was set up, more than half of the inhabitants of the town were Jews and the second most prevalent population in the town was Gypsies.  There were very few Polish people in the town.

When I visited Auschwitz for the second time in 2005, I asked someone at the hotel, where I was staying, to call a taxi for me, because I wanted to go to the town. I was told that I was the first American to ever ask to see the town.

After visiting the town, I wrote the following on my website:

The actual town of Oświęcim has virtually nothing to recommend it to a typical tourist. As far as I could see, there were only four hotels in the town in October 2005, and no night life.

There is a 17th century Catholic church at the entrance to the Old Town, and the ubiquitous Duke’s castle on a bluff overlooking the Sola, a small stream that passes for a river, but nothing is left of the original castle except a small tower, now obscured by trees, which is not at all impressive. Like the church, the castle tower will never make it into most tourist guidebooks.

The town is completely devoid of charm. No famous artists come here to paint. There is no house that has been preserved as the birthplace of a famous person, nor any important historical buildings. The town square is surrounded by very ordinary looking buildings, constructed during the last 200 years, and has only one building of interest: the District Court.

An ugly looking modern store built right in the middle of the town square has totally ruined any character that Auschwitz might have had. There were no thatched-roof cottages, no log houses, nor half-timbered buildings that I saw on my trip there in October 2005. The town now has a population of 50,000 and it appears that most of the residents live in high-rise apartments built during the Communist era.

There are many ordinary towns in Poland and it is only because Auschwitz has become the most famous town in the history of the Holocaust that anyone today marvels at how ordinary it is. Yet a suburb of this ordinary town is included in every package tour of Poland or Eastern Europe: an afternoon of horror at the Auschwitz concentration camp, sandwiched in between stops to see the famous salt mine and the Black Madonna, the other main tourist attractions of Poland.