Nazis allowed Jews to write letters on their way to the gas chamber, and those letters are now kept in the archives at Arolsen…

An article which you can read in full at http://augustafreepress.com/misas-fugue-to-make-its-staunton-debut/ has this remarkable quote:

While they worked on this, students in the history department worked with Goss to research additional primary source photographs and film footage from the era through USHMM in Washington, D.C.  They also completed an International Tracing Service (ITS) request to see if any documentation on the Grunwald family existed in the Holocaust-era archives in Germany.  Dozens of documents were found.

The documents are among hundreds of artifacts that appear in the film, some emerging “out of nowhere,” Gaston said, during the lengthy discovery process.  Perhaps the most touching example is a hastily written letter by Grunwald’s mother to his father – moments before trucks took her to the gas chamber.  That letter was donated this past July to USHMM and will become part of their Permanent Exhibition, a testament to its uniqueness and importance as an artifact from this tragic time.

Grunwald’s mother was apparently selected for the gas chamber because she was not able to work, but his father was spared.  I can just hear Dr. Mengele saying to Grunwald’s mother:  “Sorry, but I can’t let you slide  — I have to send you to the gas chamber, but not to worry, you can write a letter to your husband, and we will keep it in our archives, so 70 years from now, your descendants can read it.”

Babo Batren waiting for the truck to take her to the gas chamber (Click on photo to enlarge)

Jews waiting for a truck to take them to the gas chamber

Most of the Jews had to walk to the gas chamber and there are numerous photos of them walking, carrying their bundles.  You can see a large collection of these photos on this website: http://www.nazigassings.com/StrollingtotheGasChambers.html

Holocaust survivor says the Nazis were in such a hurry to kill the Jews that they didn’t bother with tattoos in the last days of Auschwitz

In a news article in the online Wellsville Daily, which you can read in full here, Eva Abrams tells how she escaped death at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This quote is from the news article:

Following the horrific account, students asked questions about her scars. She wasn’t tattooed.

“It was near the end of the war and they were in too much of a hurry to kill us, so they didn’t bother with the tattoos,” Eva said.

To go back to the beginning of the Eva Abrams story, this quote from the news article tells about how she survived:

[Eva and her family] arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in the spring of 1944.

D-Day was a few weeks away and the Nazis were in retreat as Allied bombing increased, but the SS was determined to complete its “Final Solution” and eliminate as many Hungarian Jews as possible, Abrams told students at Bolivar Central School Friday as she gave her personal account of the Holocaust.

[…]

“As we got off the train, there was Mengele (Josef Mengele, an SS physician, infamous for his inhumane medical experimentation upon concentration camp prisoners at Auschwitz) and he pointed for my mother to go to the left and me to go to the right. My mother was only 50 years old and she was worried about what was going to happen to me,” Abrams said. Her mother and niece were sent to the gas chamber/crematorium. Abrams was sent to a barracks holding 1,000 women.

[…]

Abrams came very close to not surviving the concentration camp. Her mother, father, an older sister and her young niece didn’t survive. She recalled the 500-mile forced march, in the dead of winter, she and 1,000 other, starved, barefoot and nearly naked women, including her two older sisters, endured and how at the end of it only a family quirk may have saved her life when the German soldiers opened fire with a machine gun aimed at her and five other women.

“I fell down before they started firing. I don’t know why,” Abrams said.

[..]

Why did the Jews at Auschwitz march out of the camp with the Nazis instead of waiting for the Soviet liberators?

Prisoners on a death march out of Dachau on April 26, 1945

The photo above shows some of the 6,887 Jewish prisoners and Russian POWs, who were marched out of the Dachau concentration camp on April 26, 1945.  Today’s students are taught that the purpose of this “death march” was to kill the prisoners before the camp could be liberated by the Allies.  Note the two German soldiers who are marching with them.  There is no photo of the march out of Auschwitz, but the photo above will give you an idea of how the Auschwitz march might have taken place.

On a similar march out of Auschwitz-Birkenau, on January 18, 1945, the German soldiers marched at the head of the column, tramping down two feet of snow to make it easier for the Jews to march.

I am on the e-mail list of Bradley Smith, a famous Holocaust denier, and today I received an e-mail from him, which included a letter which he had recently sent to Kent State University, where Elie Wiesel was expected to give a talk to the students.

As you may know, Elie Wiesel and his father were allegedly on the death march out of Auschwitz on January 18, 1945.  Elie wrote, in his book Night, that they were given a choice of either marching or staying behind to be liberated by Soviet soldiers.  The Dachau prisoners, shown in the photo above, were not given a choice.  They were marched out of Dachau, so that they could not attack civilians in the town of Dachau, after they were liberated.

I love Bradley Smith and I am a great admirer of his writing.  I read the copy of Bradley’s letter to the University and laughed out loud.  I am quoting from the letter, so as to share it with those who may not be on Bradley’s e-mail list.

Quote from letter written by Bradley Smith to Kent State University:

=====
In his autobiographical book Night, Elie Wiesel writes that in January 1945, when he and his father were both prisoners of the murderous German Nazis at Auschwitz, they were asked by their captors if they would prefer to remain in that death camp, where countless Jews had already been murdered in gas chambers, to await the imminent arrival of their Soviet liberators, or would they rather leave with the Nazi Jew-killers who were abandoning the camp. Elie Wiesel and his dad, talking it over, agreed they would prefer to leave on the death-march retreat with German Nazis dedicated to exterminating Jews as a race rather than wait for their Soviet liberators.

Is there one professor at Kent State University who thinks it might be worthwhile that students consider the significance of this confession? Why not?
=====

I don’t think that Bradley Smith will get an answer to his letter, so I am going to explain to him and to the students, the purpose of the death march out of Auschwitz.

I learned the reason for the death marches from Professor Harold Marcuse, who teaches the history of the Holocaust at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Professor Marcuse wrote the following in a comment on my blog several years ago:

In any case the death marches in 1945 were a largely futile attempt to keep human evidence of and witnesses to atrocities from falling into Allied hands. That rationale hinged on the illusory notion that the Germans would ultimately defend some territory and in some bizarre way “win” the war. When some responsible German officials realized beyond doubt that the war was lost, they drew the “logical” conclusion and burned the marching prisoners alive, as happened at Ohrdruf, Gardelegen and numerous other places. For them apparently, dead evidence was better than alive evidence.

I am assuming that the professors at Kent State University teach the students the same story that is taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Elie Wiesel and his father trusted the Nazis not to burn them alive on the march, so they didn’t stay behind at Auschwitz, when given a choice. If you have ever read Elie Wiesel’s book, you know that Elie and his father survived the burning ditches at Auschwitz on the Night that they arrived.  They expected to survive the burning of the prisoners on the march out of the camp.  They didn’t know what the Soviets might do, so they chose the Nazis instead.

Children were being burned alive at Auschwitz on the night Elie Wiesel arrived

The Jews who stayed behind at Auschwitz found out that they had made the wrong choice because the Soviets didn’t take care of them at all.

After the three Auschwitz camps were liberated, the survivors were on their own. Unlike the concentration camps in Germany, where the liberated prisoners remained in the camps as Displaced Persons and were cared for by the Americans or the British, the Auschwitz prisoners from 29 countries were released to find their own way home.

Primo Levi was an Auschwitz survivor who wrote a book, later made into a movie, about his long journey home to Italy which took him many months. He described how the Jewish prisoners were greeted with hostility in every country along the way.  (Primo Levi was forced to stay behind because he was sick at the time of the death march out of the camp.)

Binjamin Wilkomirski, who falsely claimed to be a child survivor of Auschwitz, wrote in his fake book, entitled Fragments, that there was no liberation. “We just ran away without permission,” he wrote. “No joyous celebration. I never heard the word ‘liberation’ back then, I didn’t even know there was such a word.” Binjamin Wilkomirski also describes this in his book, Fragments: “And the people outside the camp, in the countryside and the nearby town — they didn’t celebrate when they saw us.”

Wilkomirski’s fake book is still being taught in American schools, but it is now called a novel.  Elie Wiesel’s fake book was at one time classified as a novel, but is now being taught in American schools as the Gospel truth.

time is running out for Elie Wiesel, famous (alleged) survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald

I previously blogged about Elie Wiesel and his lack of an Auschwitz tattoo here.  I wrote about Elie Wiesel’s alleged stay at the Buchenwald camp here. Elie Wiesel has no Auschwitz identification number and no Buchenwald identification number, but he still maintains that he was a prisoner in both of those camps.  Wiesel doesn’t seem to care that there is a website devoted to telling the world that he has no tattoo.  I was blogging about Elie Wiesel and his famous book way back in 2010 here.

This website gives some information about the case, which I am quoting:

…. we wanted to check the most overwhelming fact [the lack of a tattoo], by contacting Auschwitz first by mail, then by phone. The head of Archive of the Auschwitz Museum, M. Plosa, confirmed that the number A-7713, which Elie Wiesel claims without ever displaying it publicly, was attributed to Lazar Wisel, born 15 years before him, and who therefore cannot get mixed up with him.

I am taking the liberty of quoting from the letter that was sent to the French investigator, whom I quoted above:

Thank you very much for your message of 4th December 2012.  I would like to inform you that basing on archival documents from our collection it is possible to settle as follows:

The prisoner number A-7713 was given on 24th May 1944 for Mr. Lazsr WISEL, born on 4th September 1913 in Marmaroasieget (Hungary). After the liquidation and evacuation of the Auschwitz camp Mr. Lazar Wisel was transferred to KL Buchenwald. His arrived to this camp is dated on 26th January 1945 […]

Yours faithfully
Wojciech Plosa
Head of Archive
The state Museum Auschwitz Birkenau in  Oswiecim

So even the Auschwitz Museum will not confirm that Elie Wiesel was a prisoner at Auschwitz nor that Elie was given the tattoo number A-7713 which he swore under oath that he has.  It is time for Elie Wiesel to publicly admit that he is an imposter.

I previously blogged about Elie Wiesel and the world’s belief about Auschwitz here.

The first gassing of prisoners by the Nazis took place in Block 11 at Auschwitz

Block 11 at Auschwitz where the first gassing allegedly took place

A reader of my blog recently made a comment in which the issue of the first gassing of prisoners by the Nazis was brought up:

The First Gassing at Auschwitz: Genesis of a Myth: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v09/v09p193_Mattogno.html

The article in the above link, written by Carlo Mattogno, is quite long, but I have quoted part of it below:

The First Gassing at Auschwitz: Genesis of a Myth
Carlo Mattogno

Paper Presented to the Ninth International Revisionist Conference.

Introduction

The story of the Auschwitz gas chambers begins, notoriously, with the experimental gassing of approximately 850 individuals, which supposedly took place in the underground cells of Block 11 within the main camp on September 3, 1941.

Danuta Czech in Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau (Calendar of Events in the Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau), describes it in the following way:

“3.9. [September 3] For the first time, experiments in mass murder through the use of Cyclon B [sic] gas were conducted in the concentration camp of Auschwitz.

[…]

This account, in support of which Danuta Czech gives no documentary proof, is nonetheless accepted with an exemplary lack of criticism by all Exterminationist historians. This is even more surprising in that the alleged gassing in Block 11 of Auschwitz would constitute the very beginning of the process that would subsequently lead to the gas chambers of the crematoria of Birkenau. The intermediate steps of that process were the mortuary chambers of Crematorium I of the Main Camp and the so-called “Bunkers” 1 and 2 of Birkenau. The Block II “gassing,” then, by the canons of Exterminationism, initiated the greatest murder operation of all times.

[…]

We will begin with the exposition of these sources.
I. The Sources

[…]

2. The Sources from the Postwar Period

Four witnesses, as far as we can determine, have confirmed the reality of the first gassing by giving specific descriptions: Josef Vacek, eye-witness; Rudolf Höss, indirect witness; Zenon Rozanski, eye-witness; Wojciech Barcz, eye-witness. To these is added the report of inquiry by the Polish Commission of Investigation on German crimes at Auschwitz.

[…]

E. THE REPORT OF THE POLISH INVESTIGATION COMMISSION

In a publication issued in 1946, the Central Commission for investigation of German Crimes in Poland presented the following account of the first gassing:

“All of these methods used in killing were not enough to absorb all superfluous prisoners, and, above all, they could not resolve the problem of freeing themselves of hundreds of thousands of Jews. This method was tried out in the summer of 1941 in the coal- cellars of Block XI on about 250 patients from the hospital blocks and about 600 prisoners of war.

After the victims had been put there, the windows of the cellars were covered with earth, and afterwards an SS man in a gas-mask poured the contents of a can of cyclon on the floor and locked the door. Next afternoon Palitzsch, wearing a gas-mask, opened the door and found that some of the prisoners were still alive. More cyclon was accordingly poured out, and the doors locked again, to be reopened next evening, when all the prisoners were dead.”[15]

Did you catch that?  “… the windows of the cellars were covered with earth…” and “an SS man in a gas-mask poured the contents of a can of cyclon on the floor and locked the door”

“window wells” of Block 11 are shown along the foundation of the building

Allegedly dirt was put down into the concrete well around the window of room #27 in the basement of Block 11, which is shown in the photo above.  Maybe a Polish person would have put dirt down into a window well, where it would have been very hard to clean it out, but I don’t believe that a German person would have done something like that.  The photo below shows a window in a similar cell in Block 11.

window in the prison cell where Father Kolbe died

Cell #27 in Block 11 where the first gassing allegedly took place in 1941

Cell # 27, where the first gassing allegedly took place, was not open when I took this photo in 1998. As far as I know, tourists have never been allowed to see the inside of this prison cell where the first gassing took place.

Why don’t I believe that prisoners were gassed in Block 11 in September 1941?  For one thing, the “Final Solution” had not yet been planned.  It would have been completely stupid to test Cyklon-B in 1941, without an order from someone in authority in the Nazi hierarchy, and to throw the pellets on the floor of a prison cell where it would have been very hard to retrieve them, not to mention that it would have been hard to clean the dirt out of the window well.

In my opinion, it is time to lay this story to rest.  If this story is going to continue to be included in the official Holocaust history, at least let us see the inside of Cell #27.

Maybe a re-enactment of the first gassing should be conducted for the benefit of tourists.  Then everyone could see just how stupid this alleged first gassing was.

At Auschwitz, seeing is believing — as long as you turn off your mind completely

Another day, another Holocaust Educational Trust student trip to Auschwitz in the news.  You can read about the latest trip, headlined “Inside Auschwitz; the heart of darkness” in the Shropshire Star here.

This quote is from the news article:

There is only so much that youngsters from Shropshire can learn about the Nazi plan to wipe out Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents during the Holocaust from textbooks, teachers and documentaries.

But seeing is truly believing.

[…]

The scheme was set up initially just for Jewish pupils by Rabbi Marcus from the Central Synagogue in London. He first took students 14 years ago and has been on every trip since, about 150.

“I felt there was a need to educate people,” he said. “You learn about it in school but here you see it, feeling, breathing, walking.”
You can be told that Jews were gassed, but when you see empty cylinders of poisonous Zyklon B crystals, it makes it real.

Seeing the empty Zyklon-B cans “makes it real” but what does this prove?  The empty cans are proof that Zyklon-B was used for something, but was it used to kill lice or people?  Do these students ever hear the word typhus spoken on their trips to Auschwitz?

The quote from the news article continues with this:

You can be told Jews had their heads shaved, but when you see two tonnes of human hair, that makes it real.

What are the students told about the reason for shaving the heads of the prisoners?  Are they told that this was done to humiliate the Jews, or were their heads shaved to get rid of any lice that might have been brought into the camp?  Are the students told that typhus is spread by lice? Is the word typhus ever mentioned?

Continuing the quote from the news article:

Textbooks tell you they were stripped naked and their possessions taken from them, but when you see 80,000 shoes and 40kg of glasses, that makes it real.

And this was just a fraction of the items recovered after Nazis tried to hide their appalling crimes by burning the storage units at the three Auschwitz camps.

Are the students told that the wooden “storage units” at Auschwitz-Birkenau were still burning on January 27, 1945 when Soviet soldiers arrived to liberate the camp, after the Germans had left with some of the prisoners on January 18, 1945?  Who set the fire in the “storage units,” the Nazis or the Soviets?  Do any of the students ever ask WHY the storage units were burned?

Do the students ask any questions at all on their trips to Auschwitz?

A photo of the suitcases on display at Auschwitz is shown, along with the news article. What do the suitcases tell you?  The suitcases are not deteriorating like the hair that is also on display.  Do any of the students notice this and ask what this means?

Taking students on a trip to Auschwitz and withholding important information should be against the law.  Enough already!

Holocaust survivor was a prisoner in four “death camps” and only survived because Mauthausen was “out of killer gas.”

You can read the story of Holocaust survivor Helga Weiss in full here. Helga has just published the journal that she kept for four years while she was imprisoned in several Nazi concentration camps.

Helga was born in 1929 and her story parallels that of Anne Frank, who was also born in 1929, except that Helga’s family did not go into hiding.  Helga was sent to Theresienstadt, now known as Terezin, where Anne Frank’s  family would have been sent, had they not gone into hiding.

This quote from the news article about Helga caught my attention:

Then in April 1945 they were moved by rail to Mauthausen in Austria. It took 16 days – so long the camp was out of killer gas.

After being sent to Theresienstadt, where she stayed in the children’s barracks for several years, Helga had been sent, along with her mother, to Auschwitz. From there, she was sent to Freiberg, which was a sub-camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. In the last days of the war, the Flossenbürg camp was evacuated and some of the prisoners were sent to the Mauthausen camp in Austria.

Helga was lucky.  She survived because the Mauthausen gas chamber was out of “killer gas” in April 1945.

But is this true?  Not according to the Mauthausen Memorial Site.  The photo below shows a sign that was inside the gas chamber in May 2003 when I took the photo.

Sign inside the Mauthausen gas chamber

The sign, shown in the photo above, indicates that the gas chamber at Mauthausen was in operation until April 29, 1945. The sign mentions that Cyclon B gas (the killer gas) was being used until April 29, 1945.

The plaque shown in the photo above was in the gas chamber in May 2003. In April 1989, there was a different sign with slightly different wording.

The English version of the sign in 1989 was as follows:

The gas chamber was camouflaged as a bathroom by sham showers and waterpipes. Cyclone B gas was sucked in and exchanged through a shaft (situated in the corner on the right) from the operating room into the gas chamber. The gas-conduit was removed shortly before liberation on April 4th, 1945.

Note that, in 1989, the date given for the removal of the gassing apparatus was April 4, 1945. In May 2003, the sign in the gas chamber gave the date of removal as April 29, 1945.

Helga was brought to Mauthausen after April 4, 1945 and the gas chamber was allegedly not in operation at that time.  But the sign had to be changed because Ludwig Haider was gassed AFTER April 4, 1945.

The photo below shows a memorial plaque for Ludwig Haider who was gassed on April 23, 1945, less than two weeks before the camp was liberated on May 5, 1945. At the time that Ludwig Haider was gassed, a Red Cross representative was in the camp and selected prisoners were being evacuated to neutral countries, but in spite of this, the gassing continued right up to the end.

Memorial for Ludwig Haider who was gassed at Mauthausen on April 23, 1945

So it seems that the Nazis had NOT run out of “killer gas” when Helga arrived at Mauthausen.  But what about Auschwitz?  Helga had been sent from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz; why wasn’t she gassed at Auschwitz?

This quote, from the news article about Helga Weiss, tells about an incident where children at Auschwitz, who were being taken to the gas chamber, escaped and ran into Helga’s barracks:

The teenager [Helga]  could hear the guards’ hobnail boots heading towards the hut [barracks] and froze in terror.

She wrote in her diary: “They’re coming! They saw the children running to us! They’ll shoot all of us. It’s the end!”

She says: “I hugged Mum and started to pray, ‘God, if I must die, let Mum and me die together. Don’t leave me alone here.

“Although I don’t want to die – let Mum and me survive’.”

And they did. From Auschwitz they were sent to Freiberg [sub-camp of Flossenbürg] in Germany as slave labour.

So Helga was writing in her journal at the exact time that a group of children were being taken to the Auschwitz gas chamber?  What did the guards say when they burst in and found Helga recording this event in her journal?   Did they say: “Oh, excuse us; we didn’t mean to interrupt your writing. Carry on; we will come back another day to take the children to the gas chamber.”

By this time, Helga was exempt from the Auschwitz gas chamber because she was 15 years old.  Anne Frank was not gassed at Auschwitz because she was over 15 years old.  Anne was sent on to Bergen-Belsen.

Helga was also sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she survived the typhus epidemic, only to be sent to Mauthausen to be gassed in the last days of the war, even though she was over 15 years old at that point.

What?  You don’t believe that there was a gas chamber at Mauthausen? Oh, ye of little faith.  I have two pages of gas chamber testimony on my website, starting here. I will have to add Helga’s testimony to the list.

A Holocaust survivor who criticized “Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories”

Yehuda Elkana was an Auschwitz survivor who is in the news today because he died recently “at the age of 78.”  You can read about him on the website of The Vancouver Sun here.

This quote is from The Vancouver Sun, which printed an article that was published in The Daily Telegraph on December 29, 2012, about the death of Yehuda Elkana:

While all societies needed a collective mythology (and Elkana was critical of those in Germany who want to “close the chapter” of the Holocaust), “any philosophy of life nurtured solely or mostly by the Holocaust leads to disastrous consequences.”

In a later interview Elkana spelled out his fears for where this philosophy was leading Israel: “We are heading toward turning 100 million Arabs into a terrorist army against us: the whole Arab world! The United States wants to support rational, moderate Arabs. And rational, moderate Arabs will tolerate Israel’s occupation of Arab land less and less. So what is there to look forward to if we go on this way?”

I believe that Yehuda Elkana hit the nail on the head. We have now reached the point where 100 million Arabs are against Israel and America is in the middle of it because of our support for Israel.

I watched Mike Huckabee’s TV show last night.  He told about his recent trip to Omaha Beach where American troops landed and went on to “liberate France and to eventually save the world.” From there, Huckabee traveled to Poland to visit Auschwitz, where he was photographed at the iconic “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate into the main Auschwitz camp. Huckabee said that “what they (the American soldiers) came to fight was made clear when we went to Auschwitz.”  I wondered why Mike Huckabee would go to Auschwitz in the dead of winter.  Now I have learned that he has scheduled a trip to Israel in February this year.  Huckabee is following in the footsteps of Glenn Beck, who first went on a pilgrimage to Auschwitz before going on to Israel.

I love Mike Huckabee: to me he is the epitome of a good person.  Huckabee is quite religious, since he is an ordained Baptist minister.  As a devout Christian, Huckabee supports Israel, as do most devout Christians.  But is he right to support Israel when even a Holocaust survivor refers to “Israel’s occupation of Arab land.”

This quote is from the article about Yehuda Elkana:

Moving to Israel after the war, Elkana experienced profound unease with the way the Holocaust was being manipulated by governments of right and left to craft an atavistic Jewish national identity. He became convinced that the motives behind Israel’s uncompromising approach to the Palestinians was “a profound existential ‘angst’ fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust and the readiness to believe that the whole world is against us, and that we are the eternal victim.”

The term “atavistic Jewish national identity” might need some explanation.  What bothers the Palestinians is that most of the Jews in Israel are not the descendants of the Jews who lived in Palestine before they were expelled. Today’s Jews who are “occupying Arab land” are the Ashkenazi Jews, aka Russian Jews, aka Khazars.  The original Jews in Palestine are believed to have been the Sephartic Jews who later settled in Spain; there are not many of them in Israel today.

Yehuda Elkana was 10 years old, and living in Hungary, when he was sent to Auschwitz in 1944, along with the Hungarian Jews.  Ten years old?  Wait a minute.  How did he survive? Surely, he didn’t lie about his age and convince Dr. Mengele that he was over the age of 15.

This quote from the article explains how Yehuda beat the odds and was not gassed at Auschwitz:

In 1944 the family moved to Szeged in Hungary where, later that year, they were rounded up and transported to Auschwitz. They survived by sheer accident. As they were being lined up for the gas chambers, SS guards pulled them out of the line and sent them in a train with other Jews to clean up Allied bomb damage in Austrian cities. They made it to Israel in 1948.

So why was the family of Yehuda Elkana not sent directly to Austria, where 10 year old Yehuda was put to work cleaning up bomb damage?  They were sent first to Auschwitz because of the location of the railroad lines in Europe.  Auschwitz was the largest railroad hub in Europe, analogous to the railroad yard in North Platte, Nebraska, which is the largest railroad hub in the world. The Jews from Hungary were first sent to Auschwitz where they changed trains and then went to Austria.  Yehuda had to make up a story to explain why, as a 10 year old, he was not gassed at Auschwitz.

Holocaust survivor who volunteered for the gas chamber, but a Nazi doctor intervened

Holocaust survivor Rose Sherman Williams told her story recently to students in San Antonio, Texas.  Her emphasis was on the consequences of bullying.  The Nazis were the greatest bullies of all time, and God forbid that today’s American children should grow up to be Nazis.

Rose is now speaking out after years of silence. The most remarkable detail in her story is that she was in such misery at the Auschwitz death camp that she VOLUNTEERED to go to the gas chamber so that she could end it all.  But a Nazi doctor stopped her.

In her speech to the school children, Rose said that when “Nazi Germany troops” invaded her home town in Poland, she was about the same age as the middle school students, who were visiting the Jewish Community Center that day to hear her speech.

Rose told the students that, instead of water, gas would come out of the shower heads in the camp where she was taken.

Rose was eventually sent to Auschwitz.

This quote is from the news article about her speech, which you can read in full here:

“They gave us a number which I still carry on my hand, tattooed: “A15049,” Williams said while holding up her arm so students could see the tattoo. “That was the name I had to answer to and God forbid if I didn’t hear my name called. You cannot imagine the beating I would get.”

So much suffering, and Rose said she wanted to die: she volunteered to go to the concentration camp’s gas chamber.

But a Nazi doctor intervened. For years, Williams wondered why.

For years, Rose wondered why a Nazi doctor would not let her volunteer for the gas chamber at Auschwitz?  (By the way, who was this Nazi doctor?  Was this the famous Dr. Mengele, who appears in every Holocaust survivor story?)

Rose was not allowed to volunteer for the gas chamber because she had already been tattooed. She had already been registered in the camp and there was an IBM Hollerith punch card for her in the camp administration records. I previously blogged about the Hollerith punch cards on this blog post.

If her card had been found after Auschwitz was abandoned, this would have been proof that someone had been gassed at Auschwitz after they had been registered.   Of course, the Nazis were not going to let that happen.  The Jews who were gassed were sent immediately to the gas chamber without being registered and tattooed.  The names of the Jews who were gassed are unknown.

Nice try, but no cigar!  Sorry, Rose.

Otto Schimmel, an Auschwitz survivor who has no tattoo

This quote is from a news article, which you can read in full here:

[ Otto] Schimmel wasn’t tattooed. But for other survivors, the tattoos symbolize the moment the Nazis tried to rob them of their humanity with a number. A universal sentiment is illustrated in this summer’s documentary “Numbered.”

In an article on this website, it is mentioned that Otto Schimmel was a prisoner in Auschwitz:

There, [Betty] Schimmel met her future husband, Otto Schimmel. He had been held at the Auschwitz concentration camp and had lost his entire family in the Holocaust.

So how did Otto Schimmel get out of Auschwitz with no tattoo?  Prisoners who were selected for the gas chamber were not tattooed. What is Otto’s story of how he escaped from the gas chamber?

This quote is from the article which tells that Otto Schimmel has no tattoo:

Decades later, Schimmel recalls in vivid detail, the horror of the gas chambers. “Everything was locked and they had ventilation to pull the oxygen out and they pumped in the gas, so sometimes it took minutes. So [my] mother, my sister and my grandmother were killed within an hour.”

Otto Schimmel knew all about the gas chambers at Auschwitz, where his mother, sister and grandmother were killed within an hour of their arrival, but Otto was not selected for the gas chamber.  He wound up later at Mühldorf, a sub-camp of Dachau.

This quote is from the article about tattoos:

Schimmel will never forget those dark days when the identification marks were an attempt to degrade. He was just 17 when he was imprisoned in Muhldorf, Germany.

Prisoners at Dachau and it’s sub-camps were not tattooed.

It appears that Otto Schimmel was selected for labor when he was sent to Auschwitz, and because of this, he was not tattooed.  Prisoners who were brought to Auschwitz and then transferred out of the camp were not tattooed.  Auschwitz was the only place where Jews were tattooed, and then only if they were imprisoned in the Auschwitz camp.  Auschwitz was also a transit camp and those who were transferred out of the camp, after a period of quarantine, were not tattooed.