Yanina Cywinska gets a standing ovation after she tells how she survived the gas chamber at Auschwitz

As everyone knows, the lethal gas that was used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz was Zyklon-B, the same gas that was used to disinfect the clothing of the prisoners. But according to Holocaust survivor, Yanina Cywinski, carbon monoxide was originally used at Auschwitz.  Yanina Cywinska was inside the Auschwitz gas chamber, where she watched her father die, before she passed out, but was secretly resuscitated by another prisoner.

If someone survived the gas chamber, it was the policy of the Nazis to allow them to live, never sending them to the gas chamber again.  Thanks to this policy, Yanina is still alive today; she recently gave a talk to students on the Pleasant Valley High School campus in Chico, CA.

Yanina Cywinska, a non-Jew, was sent to Auschwitz, after her family was arrested as Polish Resistance fighters early in World War II.

According to the talk that Yanina gave to students at Pleasant Valley High in November, she was put to work, at the age of 10, dragging bodies out of the gas chamber at Auschwitz. One day, she realized, to her horror, that she was pulling her mother’s body out of the gas chamber.  The Sonderkommandos who dragged the bodies out of the gas chambers were all men, except for Yanina and Greta, another female Sonderkommando who yelled at Yanina to stop whining, which prompted her to continue her grim duties, after the horror of finding her mother’s dead body.

The Sonderkommandos, who worked in the gas chambers, were killed every three months, and replaced by new prisoners.  Strangely, Yanina was not killed along with the others.

This quote is from an article in the online Chico News and Review, which you can read in full here:

Cywinska’s 20-minute speech was the most powerful of the performances. She recounted two harrowing escapes from Nazi execution. Her Polish, non-Jewish family was captured by the Nazis for stockpiling weapons and literally going underground, living in sewers as part of the Polish resistance. Cywinska was separated from her family and forced with other prisoners over five days without food or water to dig an enormous ditch that was to serve as their own mass grave.

She recalled that, while lined up along the ditch, she stepped behind a mother and baby to support them as they stumbled. Her maneuver shielded her from the firing squad’s bullets, allowing her to fall unharmed into the grave. She escaped only to be recaptured and sent to Auschwitz with her family. In the gas chamber she held her father’s hand as he died with the others. She passed out but somehow survived the gas—it was carbon monoxide, not the Zyklon B ordinarily used—and was secretly resuscitated by an inmate.

Her spirit, she said, triumphed after the war, when she went on to fulfill her dreams of becoming an actress and ballerina.

Cywinska’s talk elicited several standing ovations. “I’ve been crying for about an hour now,” exclaimed one woman.

I previously blogged about Yanina Cywinska here.

British HET tours start in Oswiecim …. then it’s on to Auschwitz

This quote is from an article in the Guardian online newspaper:

Last month Nicholas Rogers from St Andrew’s School in Leatherhead accompanied Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, and 200 other students on a visit to Auschwitz.

It was the 100th trip organised by the Holocaust Education Trust, whose Lessons From Auschwitz programme aims to take two students from every 6th form and college in Britain to the notorious camp in Poland so they can spread the word about what they experience there.

This quote is from the words of Nicholas Rogers, one of the British students on the HET tour, which were published in the Guardian; you can read the story in full here:

On my [HET] trip, we didn’t go straight to the two camps, but actually to Oswiecim, which was the town inside the Auschwitz area.  Before the Second World War, 58 per cent of the population had been Jewish, with a vibrant Jewish community.  Today not a single Jew remains.

The thing that really hammered home the meaning of this was that we were told this information standing in a grassy field. As it turned out, we were standing where the Great Synagogue had once stood. It had been completely destroyed, along with its Jewish population. This really helped me to understand that the Jewish victims were just ordinary people. This in turn changed my understanding of the 6 million murdered Jews from a statistic into a rehumanised group of real people who had been lost.

The first time that I visited the Auschwitz camps in 1998, I had a private tour guide; a Polish taxi driver drove us there. I asked the driver to first take us to the town of Auschwitz.  This was apparently an unusual request; the driver told me that I was the first tourist to ever ask to see the town.

I wanted to see the town of Auschwitz because I had read in a book that it had been established by Germans in the year 1270.  I was expecting to see an ancient German town with typical German architecture.  I was disappointed to see that the town square had been modified by the Communists who took over Poland after World War II.

The photo below shows a store that was built by the Communists right in the middle of the town square.

Modern building in the middle of the market square in the town of Auschwitz

You can see more photos of the Auschwitz town square on my website here.

Almost every article about Auschwitz that you will ever see, and some that you won’t see, mention that the name of the town was changed from Oswiecim to Auschwitz by the Nazis. No, it was the other way around.  The original name of the town was Auschwitz.

In recent years, there has been a big effort to educate tourists that the name of the town, in a suburb of which the Nazis set up the Auschwitz main camp in 1941, is Oswiecim.  At the time that the Nazis set up the main camp, Silesia (where Auschwitz is located) had been annexed into the Greater German Reich, so Auschwitz was in Germany and it was called Auschwitz.

Today, the Polish people are affronted when anyone calls Auschwitz a “Polish death camp.”  Auschwitz is properly called a “death camp” in what is now Poland.

The photo below shows the only remaining Synagogue in Oswiecim, aka Auschwitz.

The restored Chevra Lomdei Mishnayot Synagogue
Photo Credit: Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation

Why does all this concern me?

I think that these students are too young and immature to understand what they are being told.  They are being brain-washed with propaganda.  By starting the tour in the town, now called Oswiecim, the students are being told that this was a Jewish town, which the Nazis destroyed, implying that all the Jews in the town were killed by the Nazis.

Are the students told why there were so many Jews in the town of Auschwitz, which did not even have running water, before the Nazis took it over?  The next largest ethnic group in the town of Auschwitz was Gypsies.

The one remaining synagogue has a large Jewish Center attached to it.  When I visited Auschwitz, I saw a movie that was shown on a TV screen in a small room in the Jewish Center. In the movie, several survivors, who were children in 1939, tell about what it was like in the town before the German invasion of Poland. There was a “large Jewish presence in Auschwitz,” according to one survivor. All of the survivors said that they now live in Israel or the United States, but none of them mentioned anything about how they managed to survive the Holocaust.

One woman survivor said that the Jewish children in Auschwitz were all “organized.” There were many organizations for Jewish children, and she had joined the Zionist movement as a child. Another survivor said that she had a home tutor so that she could learn German. Her father told her that she would be able to go any place in Europe if she could speak German.

One survivor said that the Jewish houses in Auschwitz had no running water, no electricity, no central heating nor air conditioning, and no inside toilets, but the Jews had “culture.” Another said that the Jews were not rich, but they had a “rich Jewish life.” One survivor described the life in Auschwitz before the war as “a life of dignity.” All that is now gone; the Nazis not only killed the Jews, they destroyed their rich, dignified way of life in Europe.

So why did so many Jews live in a town that had no running water, no electricity, and no inside toilets?  Location, location, location. It was because of the location, the same reason that the Nazis established a camp there.  Auschwitz was the largest railroad hub in Europe.  Trains from every part of Europe could take passengers and goods to and from Auschwitz, without changing trains.

The photo below shows an old castle that was built by the Germans who established the town of Auschwitz in 1270.

Bridge over Sola River with Castle in background
Photo Credit: Tomasz Cebulski – http://www.republika.pl/polin_travel

Are the British students taken to see the old Castle in Oswiecim?  I doubt it.  The purpose of their trip is to indoctrinate them in Jewish lore, not to educate them in the history of Germany or Poland.

This quote is from the article written by the British student who took the HET tour:

The second, simply awful part of the experience at Auschwitz I was the completely intact gas chamber and crematorium which I walked through. Although extremely hard to explain emotionally, physically the entire room was so cold, in all senses. I agreed with others in my group that the room had even smelled cold, it was that overwhelming.

Did it occur to any of these students that the gas chamber was cold because it was a morgue?  Did it occur to any of them that it was stupid to put a gas chamber in a morgue because the Zyklon-B pellets had to be heated in order to release the gas?

Did any of the students say to the tour guide:  “Excuse me, how were the Zyklon-B pellets heated to release the poison gas?”

View of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp, as seen by tourists today

You can see more photos of the Auschwitz gas chamber on my website here.

The whole purpose of the HET tours is to indoctrinate young people who are too immature to question the propaganda that they are being force fed.

Was the “tree hanging” (den Baum hängen) punishment used at Auschwitz?

A reader of my blog made a comment on my post about Father Kolbe, the priest who volunteered to die in someone else’s place at Auschwitz.   It is well known that Father Kolbe died in a “starvation cell” at Auschwitz.  I had no reason to question this story until I read the following comment:

In July 49, it was said that Father Kolbe had died from stravation and injection of carbolic acid.

In August 55 it was said that Father Kolbe had died from starvation. It was also said that he was recovering from pneumonia at that time.

In March 1960 it was said that Father Kolbe had died in a gas chamber.

http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t827788-61/#post10038406

What is the true version of his death? Different versions generally mean “lie”. Maybe he just died from pneumonia…

I agree with the reader who made the comment.  When there are different versions of a story, that usually means that the story is a lie.  So I decided to do a little research on the subject of punishments used in the concentration camps.

In the course of my search, I found this quote on the website of the Auschwitz Museum:

Punishments and executions
Contributed by Jacek Lachendro
Page 4 of 10

The “post” was an especially painful punishment. It was usually administered in the loft of block 11 or in the yard outside the block. The victim’s hands were tied behind his back and he was hung from a post so that his feet could not touch the ground. The punishment was usually inflicted for several hours, an hour at a time. The prisoner lost consciousness because of the intense pain. The punishment usually caused the rupture of the tendons in the shoulder, leaving the victim unable to move his arms. This put him at risk of being sent to the gas chamber as unfit for work.

I  also found this quote, about the hanging punishment, on this blog:

2) Backwards Hanging
Outside of Block 11 stands a three-meter post, with a hook near the top. Victims of this unspeakable torture had their arms tied behind their back, were lifted up, and hung onto the hook by their bonds, their arms breaking at the joints. Some died of shock and pain there on the post; others did not. The problem with the latter case was that you were no longer fit to work and therefore of no use to your captors, and were either sent to the hospital where the experimenting doctors could find you (see #5), sent to the gas chamber (see #4), or simply executed via a shot of acid, injected directly into your heart.

I copied the photo below from the blog, from which I quoted above.

Tour guide demonstrates how prisoners were hung from these poles at Auschwitz

On my trip to Auschwitz in 2005, I did not take a guided tour, but I did hear a tour guide tell her group that the two poles shown in the photo above were used for the hanging punishment.

The photo below shows an exhibit at the Buchenwald camp, which was put up for the benefit of the German citizens of Weimar who were force marched, at gun point, to the Buchenwald to see the exhibits of the atrocities committed there.

Exhibit put up at Buchenwald illustrates the “tree hanging” punishment

A close-up of the sign on the “tree hanging” punishment exhibit

The display in the photos above depicts the punishment called “tree hanging,” which was devised by Martin Sommer, the SS officer who was in charge of the bunker, or the camp prison. This punishment was reserved for serious offenses such as sabotage in the factories at Buchenwald, where the prisoners were forced to work. It was discontinued in 1942 by order of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, who was the head of all the concentration camps.

The words on the sign, shown in the photo above, are “Ein Strafvollzug der Nazi-Kultur: Das sogenannte an den Baum hängen.” The last two words are illegible. The English translation is “A Punishment of Nazi Culture: The so-called hanging on a tree.”

Martin Sommer, the alleged innovator of this cruel punishment, was put on trial by SS officer Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen in a Nazi court in 1943 at the same time that Buchenwald Commandant Karl Otto Koch and his wife Ilse were put on trial by the Nazis for embezzlement and abuse of the prisoners at Buchenwald. After the trial, Sommer was transferred to the Russian front where he was wounded in action. Sommer was again tried by a West German court in 1958. Sommer, who was a paraplegic as a result of war wounds, was convicted of the murder of 25 Buchenwald prisoners by injection and was sentenced to life in prison.

I previously blogged about Martin Sommer here.

There were also claims by the Dachau Museum that the “tree hanging” punishment was used at Dachau.

This photo was hanging in the Dachau Museum in 2001

The photo above was taken in the Museum at Dachau in May 2001. The photo, which is a depiction of the tree hanging punishment at Buchenwald, was not included in the new Museum at Dachau which opened in May 2003.

According to Harold Marcuse, Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Barbara, this scene was created in 1958 for an East German DEFA film, which is why the photo is no longer used. Reference: H. Obenaus, “Das Foto vom Baumhängen: Ein Bild geht um die Welt,” in Stiftung Topographie des Terrors Berlin (ed.), Gedenkstätten-Rundbrief no. 68, Berlin, October 1995, pp. 3-8.

Buchenwald was in the Soviet Zone of occupation in Germany after World War II.  Why did the Soviets have to fake a photo of the “tree hanging” punishment?  The Germans took photos of everything, so why are their no real photos of the “tree hanging” punishment?

Before Heinrich Himmler banned this cruel punishment, it had apparently spread to the Auschwitz camp in what is now Poland.  You know it’s true if a tour guide mentions it.

I took the photo below in 2005, just after the tour guide moved on.

The Block 10 building at Auschwitz with two poles for the “tree hanging” punishment

Notice how short the poles are. They don’t look to be 3 meters high. The idea behind the “tree hanging” punishment was that the victims were hung by the arms so that their feet were not touching the ground and their whole body weight was on the arms.  Block 10 was a hospital building, so the victim could have been immediately carried into a hospital as soon as their shoulders became dislocated.

I personally don’t believe that this punishment was used at Auschwitz.  I am also beginning to have doubts about the “starvation cells.”

I also learned about these methods of killing at Auschwitz from this website:

In addition to the killing of prisoners who were not capable of working, children were the other target of execution. The SS men killed children by bending them over their knees and breaking their spines, then throwing them into ditches. They gassed all children under 1.2 meters tall. The adults also suffered from the brutal tortures used in the camp. The Nazis sometimes placed iron bar on the victims’ throats and stood on the bar with feet placed on the ends. Inside the Auschwitz’ starvation cell, prisoners were so desperate that they ate their own companions’ organs. The SS extracted nails from fingers, inserted needles into sensitive parts of the body and on women’s breasts, poured water down the throats.

Nazis were counting on the disbelief of the implausible monstrosity of Auschwitz

In a telephone interview with John Przybys of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Elie Wiesel gives his explanation for how the Nazis got away with the mass murder of the Jews at Auschwitz: they knew that no one would stop it because no one would believe it.

This quote from Elie Wiesel is in the article written by John Przybys which you can read in full here:

…. ‘But the trouble, maybe, was, why should a normal reader in New York or Paris believe that people were like that, that people did what they did to other people, to other human beings? That they created a universe called Auschwitz, that 10,000 people (a day) would be killed? Why would they believe it?”

The almost implausible monstrosity of the event was “exactly what these killers were counting on,” Wiesel says. “By going too far, by embracing too much and daring to do things no other state has ever done, they felt the world won’t believe, so they are immune.” In “Night,” Wiesel writes that when their train stops at Auschwitz station, the deported Jews on board know nothing of the name’s meaning and assume it to be merely a work camp.

“What pains me is at the end of May 1944 (the date of Elie Wiesel’s arrival in Auschwitz), everyone knew the meaning of Auschwitz,” Wiesel says. “They knew it in Rome, they knew it in Washington, they knew it in Stockholm, they knew it in London. Everybody knew it, except we Jews from Hungary didn’t.”

What Elie Wiesel seems to be saying is that the whole world, except for the people in Hungary, knew that 10,000 people per day were being murdered at Auschwitz, yet no one did anything to stop it.  Why?  Because this was such “an implausible monstrosity of an event” that no one could believe it.

Elie Wiesel may have gotten the idea for the expression “an implausible monstrosity of an event” from Primo Levi, another prisoner at the Auschwitz III (Monowitz) camp.  A reader of my blog post wrote this in a comment:

“The Italian survivor Primo Levi recorded in his The Drowned and the Saved the following admonishment that the SS guard enjoyed to give to the prisoners.

“However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world will not believe him. There will be perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say that they are exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers.”

Robert Jan van Pelt, Expert Report
http://www.hdot.org/en/trial/defense/van/INT.2

“Almost four million other innocents were swallowed up by the extermination plants erected by the Nazis at Birkenau, two kilometres from Auschwitz.”

– Primo Levi

As it turned out, Elie Wiesel and his father were spared because they were selected to work, and when the three Auschwitz camps were abandoned, they were taken to Buchenwald. (Auschwitz was a combination “death camp,” labor camp, and transit camp.)

You can read more about Elie Wiesel at this website.  You can read about the identity of Elie Wiesel on this blog.  I previously blogged about Elie Wiesel and his tattoo number here.

the death of Shlomo Venezia, a former Jewish Sonderkommando at Auschwitz

A regular reader of my blog alerted me to an article about the recent death of Shlomo Venezia which you can read in full here.

This quote is from the article about the death of Shlomo Venezia:

October 2, 2012

ROME (JTA) – Shlomo Venezia, a Holocaust survivor who wrote about his experiences in an Auschwitz Sonderkommando unit and spent years bearing personal testimony to the Shoah, has died.

Venezia, who was born in Salonika (Thessaloniki), Greece, died Sept. 30 [2012] in Rome at the age of 88.

Deported to Auschwitz [on April 11] 1944, he was one of the few survivors of the notorious Sonderkommando units – teams of prisoners forced to move and cremate the bodies of those killed in the gas chambers. His mother and two sisters were killed in Auschwitz. He wrote about his experiences in a memoir, “Sonderkommando Auschwitz,” published in 2007.

Venezia was very active speaking about the Holocaust at schools, public events and in the media, and he accompanied Italian student groups on study trips to Auschwitz.

What was not mentioned in the article about his death is that he was in the last group of Sonderkommandos who worked at Auschwitz-Birkenau, removing the bodies from the gas chambers and putting them into the crematoria where the bodies were burned.  Unlike all the previous Sonderkommando Jews, the Jews in last group were allowed to live.

The Nazis had tried to keep it a secret that the Jews were being gassed, so the previous Sonderkommando Jews, who had worked in the gas chambers, had been killed periodically and replaced by a new group of Jews that had newly arrived.  For some strange, unexplained reason, the last 100 Sonderkommando Jews were allowed to live and they joined the “death march” out of Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 18, 1945.  Some Holocaust historians believe that the purpose of the “death march” out of Auschwitz-Birkenau was to kill the Jews by marching them to death.

In one of the books that he wrote, Shlomo explained that he “managed to slip into the columns of deportees being led away to other camps…”  So that’s what happened.  Shlomo didn’t believe that the Auschwitz prisoners were being marched to death, so he sneaked into a column of marching prisoners. The fact that he believed that the purpose of the march was NOT to kill the prisoners makes him a “Holocaust denier.”

This quote is from page 187 of Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz, written by Shlomo Venezia:

On January 18, when the general evacuation of the Auschwitz complex took place, most of the Sonderkommando men who were still alive (including twenty-five Greeks) managed to slip into the columns of deportees being led away to the other camps within the Reich.  By do doing, they managed to avoid certain death.  Some of them, generally Polish Jews, succeeded in escaping when what was later called “the death march” set off.

In May 1945, at the end of the war, slightly more than ninety men of the Sonderkommando of Birkeanau were still alive.

Another Sonderkommando Jew, who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, was Dario Gabbai; he is one of the Holocaust survivors who is featured in Steven Spielberg’s documentary “The Last Days.”

This quote (the words of Gabbai) is from the book entitled “The Last Days” which tells the stories of the survivors who are featured in the documentary film with the same name:

When the Red Army was approaching, the Germans marched us to Austria; of the thousands who were on the march, only a few hundred survived, including ninety-six Sonderkommando.  There was one good morning when we woke up to an unexpected silence — all the Germans had gone and the Americans came a few hours later.  That was on May 6, 1945 and I weighed just sixty-seven pounds.

According to Holocaust historians, it was the custom to kill the Jews in the Sonderkommando squads periodically and replace them with new workers. This was done so as to eliminate any witnesses to the gas chambers.  But for some unknown reason, the Nazis allowed the last 100 Sonderkommando Jews to live.  According to Gabbai, the plan of the Nazis had been to take the Auschwitz survivors to a cave in Austria and blow them up. (Ernst Kaltenbrunner denied this during his testimony at the Nuremberg IMT.)  This plan was foiled when the Americans liberated the Mauthausen camp on May 5, 1945. General Eisenhower ordered that the liberation should be re-enacted on May 6, 1945 so that photos could be taken.

Father Kolbe, the Catholic priest who died in place of another at Auschwitz

This quote is from a piece written by Dean Stroud which you can read in full here:

In July 1941 in the Auschwitz concentration camp, a Nazi officer selected a group of prisoners to die a slow death by starvation. Some prisoners had attempted to escape, and the Nazi response was to kill prisoners as a lesson against trying such things.

One of the men selected to die in the “starvation pit” pleaded not to be among those killed because he had a family. At that moment a Catholic priest, Father Maximilian Kolbe, volunteered to take the man’s place. He had no family, he said, and no one awaiting him. He would die in the man’s place.

Uncharacteristically, the Nazi allowed the exchange. In the starvation pit, the priest never despaired or fell into bitterness. He encouraged the other prisoners until he alone was left alive. Finally, tired of waiting for him to die, the Nazis killed him. Years later, when Pope John Paul II beatified Father Kolbe, the Jewish man whose place he had taken, was sitting in the audience with his wife, children and grandchildren.

I feel that this story needs some explanation, especially the term “starvation pit,” so I am putting in my two-cents worth.

The photo below shows the door into prison cell No. 21, one of the “starvation cells” in Block 11, the internal prison in the main Auschwitz camp.

The door into Prison Cell No. 21 in Block 11 at Auschwitz

Cell No. 21, shown in the photo above, has two religious pictures which were scratched into the wall by a Polish political prisoner, using only his fingernails. The wooden door of the cell has  a piece of glass covering the upper half of the door where there are more scratchings made with fingernails.

Cell No. 27 was a “starvation cell” in Block 11

Cell No. 21 and No. 27 were called “starvation cells” because prisoners, who had been condemned to death, were kept there without food and water until they died.

Cell No. 27 is where the first prisoners were gassed with Zyklon-B at Auschwitz, on the orders of the Camp Commander Karl Fritsch, but that is another story.

Block 11 has window wells to let light into the prison cells in the basement

The prison cell that was occupied by Father Kolbe

Father Maximilian Kolbe was a Catholic priest who was arrested by the Gestapo on February 17, 1941 because he had hidden 2,000 Jews, and because he was broadcasting reports over the radio condemning Nazi activities during World War II. On May 25, 1941, he was sent to the main Auschwitz camp as a political prisoner.

The following quote is from Wikipedia:

In July 1941, a man from Kolbe’s barrack had vanished, prompting SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritsch, the Lagerführer (i.e., the camp commander), to pick 10 men from the same barrack to be starved to death in Block 11 (notorious for torture), in order to deter further escape attempts. (The man who had disappeared was later found drowned in the camp latrine.) One of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, lamenting his family, and Kolbe volunteered to take his place.

Gajowniczek was a Polish political prisoner who had been arrested because he was aiding the Jewish resistance in Poland, although he was not a Jew himself.

This quote is from Wikipedia:

Franciszek Gajowniczek (November 15, 1901 – March 13, 1995^[1]) was a Polish army sergeant whose life was spared by the Nazis when Saint Maximilian Kolbe sacrificed his life for Gajowniczek’s. Gajowniczek had been sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp for aiding the Jewish resistance in Poland.

Father Kolbe was canonized a saint in the Catholic Church on Oct. 10, 1982 in a ceremony held at the Auschwitz I camp.

This quote is from Wikipedia:

Gajowniczek was released from Auschwitz after spending five years, five months and nine days in the camp. Though his wife, Helena, survived the war, his sons were killed in a Soviet bombardment in 1945, before his release.^[1]

PopePaul VI beatified Maximilian Kolbe in 1971; for the occasion, Gajowniczek was a guest of the Pope.  […]

His wife, Helena, died in 1977.[1] Gajowniczek was again a guest of the Pope when Maximilian Kolbe was canonized by John Paul II on October 10, 1982.

The wife and children and grandchildren of Gajowniczek may have been with him at the beatification of Father Kolbe, but strangely Wikipedia doesn’t mention it, nor does Wikipedia mention that Gajowniczek was Jewish.

Dean Stroud’s version of the story is better because he tells how a non-Jew sacrificed his life so that a Jew could live.  If only more non-Jews had given their lives so that the Jews could live, there would have been no Holocaust.

Oshpitzin (Auschwitz) — there’s an App for that

Oshpitzin is the Yiddish name for the town formerly known as Auschwitz, which was originally built by the Germans in the year 1270. The Polish name for the town is Oswiecim.  In the context of the Holocaust, the town is still called Auschwitz because the main Auschwitz camp was located in a suburb of the town.  To a new generation of smart phone users, it will now be known as Oshpitzin.

According to a recent news article in JTA, a new iPhone/iPad app called Oshpitzin is now available.  This quote is from the article which you can read in full here:

A project of the Auschwitz Jewish Center, a Jewish prayer and study center in Oswiecim, the app includes augmented reality, testimonies of survivors, an audio-guide of the town’s Jewish heritage sites and 3D models of the destroyed Great Synagogue.

“It opens a totally new way of educating about the Jewish history and the destruction caused by the Holocaust,” Auschwitz Jewish Center Director Tomasz Kuncewicz told JTA. “It’s a way which today is the most appealing to the new generations.”

The app, which supplements an Oshpitzin guidebook and web site that are already operating, was unveiled Tuesday. Kuncewicz said it will be available soon at the iTunes app store and will be released later this summer for Android.

The only surviving Synagogue in Oswiecim

When I went to Auschwitz in the fall of 2005, I visited the Auschwitz Jewish Center which was built next to the only surviving Synagogue in the town.  You can see my 2005 photos of the Synagogue and the Jewish Center on my website here.

According to a brochure which I obtained from the Jewish Center, Jews first settled in Oswiecim 500 years ago. By 1939, over half of the population of Oswiecim was Jewish. This quote is from the brochure: “For several centuries, Jews prospered as traders, merchants, professionals and manufacturers, and were entrusted with tax collection and the administration of the lands of the Polish nobility.”  The second largest ethnic group in Auschwitz was Gypsies, but you don’t hear much about them.

Prominently mentioned in the displays in the Jewish Center are the Haberfeld and Hennenberg families who were engaged in distilling and selling liquor. During Prohibition in America, some of this liquor found its way here. There are persistent rumors that Oshpitzin was also a center for human trafficking.

When I visited Oswiecim in 2005, there were no more Jews left in the town. The last surviving Jew, Shimshon Klueger, died in 2000. Klueger is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Osweicim.

A movie was shown on a TV screen in a small room in the Jewish Center when I visited in 2005. In the movie, several survivors, who were children in 1939, tell about what it was like in Oswiecim before the German invasion of Poland. There was a “large Jewish presence in Auschwitz,” according to one survivor. All of the survivors said that they now live in Israel or the United States, but none of them told anything about how they survived the Holocaust.  (Out of the 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, 1.5 million were children.)

One woman survivor said that the Jewish children in Oswiecim were all “organized.” There were many organizations for Jewish children, and she had joined the Zionist movement as a child. Another survivor said that she had a home tutor so that she could learn German. Her father told her that she would be able to go any place in Europe if she could speak German.

One survivor said that the Jewish houses in Oswiecim had no running water, no electricity, no central heating or air conditioning, and no inside toilets, but the Jews had “culture.” Another said that the Jews were not rich, but they had a “rich Jewish life.” One survivor described the life in Oswiecim before the war as “a life of dignity.” All that is now gone; the Nazis not only killed the Jews, they destroyed their rich, dignified way of life in Europe.

Here is the back story on Auschwitz/Oswiecim/Oshpitzin:

The area of Europe, that was inhabited by German tribes in the Middle Ages, became known as the Holy Roman Empire in the year 800. By 1270, the Empire had expanded to include the area known as Upper Silesia, where Auschwitz is located. In 1457, Auschwitz became part of the Kingdom of Poland and the name was changed to Oswiecim.

Most of Silesia was annexed to the German state of Prussia in 1742, except for four duchies. The duchy of Auschwitz was annexed to Galicia, a province which was given to Austria when Poland lost its independence in 1772 and the country was divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Western Galicia soon became known as The Corner of Three Empires: Russia, Prussia and Austria. The town known as Auschwitz, or Oswiecim or Oshpitzin, became a prime location for Jewish traders or merchants during the time that Galicia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Map of the German Empire in 1871

In 1871, Prussia and the other German states, except Austria, united into the Germany Empire. After the defeat of Germany and Austria in World War I, Galicia and the industrial area known as Upper Silesia were given to Poland in the Treaty of Versailles. In 1939, after the joint conquest of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union, Upper Silesia was annexed into the Greater German Reich, which at that time consisted of Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland in what is now the Czech Republic.

When railroad lines were built in the 19th century, the little town of Auschwitz, at the junction of three empires, became the crossroads of Europe. There were 44 train lines coming into Auschwitz, making it at one time a larger railroad hub than Penn Station in New York City.

It was because Auschwitz was such an important railroad junction that a camp for migrant workers was built in a suburb of the town in 1916; seasonal farm workers from all over Europe were sent from Auschwitz to the large German estates. The migrant worker camp, with its beautiful brick barracks buildings, was the place that eventually became the Auschwitz I concentration camp.

In 1919, Poland became an independent country again and Auschwitz became a Polish town called Oswiecim. The former migrant worker camp was used as a garrison by the Polish Army.

Brick buildings in Auschwitz main camp were remodeled by the Nazis

The Auschwitz main camp originally had 20 brick barracks buildings; 14 of them were single story buildings and 6 were two stories high. When this camp was converted into the Auschwitz concentration camp, a second story was added to the 14 single story buildings and 8 new two-story buildings were added, making a total of 28 barracks buildings. Between 13,000 and 16,000 concentration camp prisoners were crowded into these 28 buildings where they slept in three-tiered bunks. At one point, in 1942, there were 20,000 prisoners at the Auschwitz main camp.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and the town of Oswiecim was captured on September 6th. Following the conquest of Poland, the name of the town reverted back to Auschwitz.

Almost every news article that you read today, and including the articles that you don’t read, will say that the name of the town was originally Oswiecim and the Nazis changed the name to Auschwitz.  I previously blogged about the origin of the names Auschwitz and Birkenau here.

the grandson of Rudolf Hoess is still bothered by the shame associated with his family name

Update: June 21, 2013

There is a documentary, by Chanoch Zeevi, entitled Hitler’s Chidren which you can watch on this blog. This quote is from the blog:

“Zeevi has tracked down five descendents of high ranking, powerful Nazi officials with one purpose: to examine the effects of an inherited legacy.”

The documentary shows Rainer Hoess, the grandson of Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz. Rainer visited Auschwitz and spoke to a group of Israeli teenagers.

The documentary shows the house where Rudolf Hoess lived with his wife and children.  Rainer was particularly disturbed by a gate on the property.  What was not pointed out in the film is that the gate looked out on the countryside that was opposite the Auschwitz main camp; the gas chamber building was not visible to anyone looking through this gate.

Strangely, the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp, that was “only yards from the gate” into the yard of the Hoess house, was not shown in the documentary.  Rainer should have been shown the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp, and someone should have explained to him exactly how the gas chamber worked.

Monika Goeth, the daughter of Amon Goeth, Commandant of the Plaszow camp, which is shown in Schindler’s List, is also shown in the documentary, as she tells about meeting a survivor of the Plaszow camp who has a tattoo on his arm. It should have been mentioned in the documentary that only prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau were tattooed.  This man must have been sent from Plaszow to Auschwitz, but he somehow survived.

Continue reading my original post:
Rainer Hoess recently visited the Auschwitz main camp, where his father, the son of Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoess, was raised in a house that was only a few yards from the gas chamber. You can see a video here which shows the garden of the Commandant’s house where the children of Rudolf Hoess played.  Rainer Hoess was particularly disgusted by the sight of the fancy wrought iron gate that opened from the garden into the Auschwitz main camp; he referred to it as the “gate into hell.”

This quote is from the article which shows the video:

When he was a child Rainer Hoess was shown a family heirloom.

He remembers his mother lifting the heavy lid of the fireproof chest with a large swastika on the lid, revealing bundles of family photos.

They featured his father as a young child playing with his brothers and sisters, in the garden of their grand family home.

The photos show a pool with a slide and a sand pit – an idyllic family setting – but one that was separated from the gas chambers of Auschwitz by just a few yards.

It was where his grandmother told the children to wash the strawberries they picked because they smelled of ash from the concentration camp ovens.

How far was the Commandant’s house from the gas chamber?

The aerial map of the Auschwitz main camp, shown in the photo below, includes the location of the Hoess house, which is on the extreme left in the photo.

Map of Auschwitz main camp shows the Commandant’s house on the far left

The photo below shows the street that runs along the outside of the original camp. Organized tours start on this street, then turn right at the first intersection and go through the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, which is to the right, but out of camera range in this shot. This street goes straight ahead to the gas chamber, and the former Political Section, which are to the right at the next intersection. The SS hospital, which is across from the gas chamber, can be seen on the right; it is the light-colored, two-story building.

Entrance road into the Auschwitz main camp

The SS hospital was across the street from the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp

I took the photo above early in the morning in October 2005, before the tour groups entered this part of the camp.  The street shown in the photo continues on to the rear of the house where Hoess lived.  The photo below shows the rear of the house.

The rear of the house where Rudolf Hoess lived

In the photo above, the garden is on the left side of the house, but it is out of camera range in the photo.

The front of the house where Rudolf Hoess lived

The garden, where the wrought iron gate is located, is on the far right side of the photo above.  On the left side, but not shown in the photo, is the fence around the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Why would the Commandant live so close to the gas chamber?  Why not?  The SS hospital was even closer to the gas chamber than the Commandant’s house, and the SS Political Department was on the other side of the gas chamber, as shown in the photo below.

The SS Political Department was located right next to the gas chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz

The photo above shows the gallows where Rudolf Hoess was hanged. On the left is the reconstructed chimney of the crematorium; on the right is the building where the SS Political Department was located.

The chimney at the Auschwitz crematorium was too far from the Commandant’s garden for ashes to get on the strawberries

What does all this have to do with anything?  It shows you how callous the SS men were.  It didn’t bother them that Jews were being gassed, 900 at a time, in a gas chamber that was right in the center of where they lived and worked and recovered when they were wounded or sick.  It didn’t bother the Commandant that his children had to wash the ashes off the strawberries from the garden before eating them.

How do we know that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz?  We know it because Rudolf Hoess confessed after he was almost tortured to death by the British.  You can read his confessions (plural) on my website here.  You can read another blog post about Rudolf Hoess here.

the long road from the shetetls of Eastern Europe to the good life in America and the UK….via Auschwitz

A house in the shetetl of Tykocin in Poland

When I made my first trip to Poland in October 1998, I wanted to see the death camps and the gas chambers.  Before I left on my trip, I made arrangements for a tour guide through a company in New York City.  I wanted to make sure that I had a guide who spoke English.  Before taking me to see the camps, my guide told me that I had to first see a shetetl so I could see what it was like for the Jews who were living in Eastern Europe during World War II.  I couldn’t even pronounce the word shetetl and I didn’t understand why I had to waste time seeing a village where Jews no longer lived.

A log house with a tin roof in the village of Tykocin in Poland

Many of the houses in Tykocin look like barns, with what appears to be a hayloft in the attic space, but you can tell they are dwellings because they are right next to the sidewalk and have curtains in the windows.

The German name for the shtetel Jews was Dorfjuden, or village Jews in English. A few of these villages had a population that was 100% Jewish, but in most of them, the Jews lived side by side with the Polish Catholics. The town of Tykocin was divided down the middle into the Jewish district on the west side and the Christian district on the east side.

The weathered gray wooden house shown at the top of this page appears to have shutters on the two doors which are closed and barred. On the top of the house is a window which looks like an opening into a hayloft. To prove that these buildings are not barns, I took a picture of a barn in the back yard of the house, which is shown in the photo below.

Shetetl house on the left with a barn in the background

If these barn-like houses look familiar, it may be because you have seen houses just like them in the movie Fiddler on the Roof.

When these houses were last inhabited by shtetel Jews, most of them did not have indoor plumbing. According to historian Martin Gilbert, there were whole villages in Poland, as late as 1945, that did not have running water, indoor toilets or a sewer system. There was no industry in Tykocin then and, according to my tour guide, the inhabitants were engaged in farming, including the Jews.

House in Tykocin, a former Jewish shetetl

After Poland was partitioned for the third time in 1795, Tykocin was located in the section that came under the control of Russia. Between 1835 and 1917, Tykocin was included in the Pale of Settlement, the reservation where the Jews were forced to live by decree of Russian Czar Nicholas I. The movie Fiddler on the Roof depicts the life of the Jews in the Pale and ends with the start of their expulsion in 1881 after the assassination of Czar Nicholas I during the revolutionary activity, that was just beginning, which finally culminated in the overthrow of Czar Nicholas II by the Communists in 1917.

Two million Jews were expelled from the Russian sector of the former country of Poland between 1881 and the start of World War I in 1914. Most of the Jews from the Pale of Settlement came to America, but some settled in Germany or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1917, some of the Jews from the Pale of Settlement, who had emigrated to America, returned to fight in the Communist Revolution.

In October 1998, when I visited the Auschwitz II camp, aka Birkenau, it was a rainy day and I was not able to take as many photos as I wanted to take.  When I told my Jewish tour guide that I wanted to come back at a later date, so I could take more photos, she said, “Don’t come during the March of the Living.”  When I asked why, she said that the March of the Living was held once a year to celebrate the victory of the Jews over the Nazis and it was not safe for a person, like me, who looked German, to be in Auschwitz at that time.  (The guide appeared to be Jewish, but she claimed that she was not a Jew because, as I learned when she was verbally attacked in Krakow, Poland was not safe for Jews in 1998.)

This morning, I was reading about three Auschwitz survivors, who now live in South Florida.  They were on this year’s March of the Living.  You can read the article here and see a video about their trip here. The March of the Living also goes to the Maidanek (Majdanek) camp, where the people on the march can see gas chambers and a reconstructed crematorium.

What impressed me about the story of the three Auschwitz survivors on the March of the Living is how lucky they were to have survived their ordeal in a death camp and to have been able to come to America where they could live the good life.

This quote is from the news article:

As the trio travels back to Auschwitz in Poland, each tells a terrifying story about being ripped from their homes and loaded onto crowded trains, with no idea where they were going or what would happen to them once they arrived.

Standing on the train platform at the Birkenau extermination camp, part of Auschwitz, Mermelstein remember the being greeted by the infamous Dr. Joseph Mengele, the man who performed cruel medical experiments on children and adults being held by the Nazis. “He looked at you, had on white gloves and a little stick and just motioned right or left.” Mermelstein is explaining what became known as “the selection process.”  In that split second, people where chosen for life or immediate death in the gas chamber.  No one realized at the time what was happening.  “The people went to right went this way, people who went to left, right behind the fence there, there’s a walk way, they walked about a half a mile to where the gas chambers,” recalls Mermelstein.

The photos below show some of the survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the people who were sent to the right during the selection process, and they survived.

Child survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau

Old woman walking with a cane as survivors leave Birkenau

Child survivors walking out of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp

other people’s blogs….or how I learned about Dachau and Auschwitz

This morning, having nothing better to do, I decided to check out other people’s blogs.  I use wordpress to do my blog and I used their software to find other blogs.  WordPress directed me to blogs that I might find interesting, based on my own history of blog posting.  That’s how I found this blog post entitled Dachau and My Heavy Heart with this statement:

In truth, one concentration camp is no different from another.  If there were any significant differences between Dachau and Auschwitz, it had to be the numbers who never walked out of the camps.  But a death is a death; it doesn’t make it less painful for me just because the numbers are fewer in Dachau.

My first thought was to scoff at this, but then I realized that this blogger is right.  The significant difference between Dachau and Auschwitz is the numbers.  The first report, released by the American liberators, gave the number of deaths at Dachau as 238,000, while the first estimate of the number of deaths at Auschwitz, given by the Soviet liberators, was 4 million.

“But a death is a death,” as this blogger correctly noted.  There was one big typhus epidemic at Dachau which started in December 1944 and quickly got out of control.  There were two typhus epidemics at Auschwitz, but when the Soviet liberators arrived, there was no epidemic in progress.   How many of the deaths at Dachau and Auschwitz were caused by typhus?