Irene Zizblatt is still telling her Holocaust survivor story to students

I have written several blog posts about Irene Zizblatt in the past: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/tag/irene-zisblatt/

This blog post is my best one about Irene: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/stuck-in-the-door-of-the-gas-chamber-how-irene-zisblatt-survived-auschwitz-birkenau/

Irene is still out talking to students in America about how she manged to survive during the Holocaust.

The following quote is from this news article: http://cornellsun.com/2017/05/04/holocaust-survivor-irene-zisblatt-shares-experience-at-concentration-camp/

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Irene Zisblatt, a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and other atrocities during the Holocaust, shared her story on Wednesday.

The event, hosted by Cornell Hillel, invites a Holocaust survivor every year, “so people truly understand what happened during the Holocaust and get an account from someone who [was] there,” according to Jeremy Marchuck ’19, chair of cultural programming.

“We are the last generation who are able to do this so we want to ensure that as many people hear these stories as possible,” Marchuck said.

During the presentation, Zisblatt described how her youth and her family were destroyed by Nazi hatred.

“At the age of nine, I was thrown out of the one thing that I loved most, my school, because I was a Jew. And from that day, my world changed, and so did the world,” she said.

She then shared her experiences in a ghetto after being forced there with fellow Hungarian Jews.

“I didn’t even know what a ghetto was, but they made me feel that I had to be punished for something and leave my home,” she said. “The ghetto was a brickyard, but there were no bricks being manufactured. There were just people everywhere suffering.”

Zisblatt also discussed her experiences in Auschwitz, in a labor camp and on a death march.

“I was reduced to a number that represented a nothing. I was stripped of my identity and my dignity,” she said. “That was their first process of dehumanizing us.”

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Hitlersplain — your new word for the day

I found your new word for today in this news article: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/4/15538798/holocaust-american-memory-trump-spicer-history

This quote is from the news article:

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During the opening months of the first Gulf War in 1990, President George H.W. Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein had used human shields on strategic targets, a kind of “brutality that I don’t believe Adolf Hitler ever participated in.” Five years later, New York City Congress member Charles Rangel equated Republicans’ social policies toward minorities with the treatment of Jews under Hitler, and his fellow representative, Major Owens, declared Republicans “worse than Hitler.”

The impulse to Hitlersplain existed across much of the 20th century, starting as far back as Rep. John Robison of Kentucky, who claimed that FDR’s New Deal “treated our citizens worse than Hitler treated the Jews in Germany.” Posted into the congressional debate record in 1939, Robison’s indictment predated the Holocaust itself — not that that made the argument any less foolish.

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The news article also mentions General Eisenhower’s visit to the Ohrdruf camp. I wrote about the Ohrdruf camp on my website: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Ohrdruf/index.html

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That April, Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower paid a visit to the camp at Ohrdruf, Germany, afterwards cabling to his superior, General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, that he wanted “to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.'” He called for a contingent of press and elected representatives to visit the same month, and these accounts formed the core of the first chapter in postwar American interpretation of the Holocaust.

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