The little boy with his hands up is back in the news…

This famous photo is being used to illustrate a recent news article about the Jews killed in the Holocaust

I wrote about the photo above in this previous blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/photo-of-the-little-boy-with-his-hands-up-the-rest-of-the-story/

The following quote is from a news article, which uses the photo above:

Begin quote

The soldiers in the First World War knew they might die and were encouraged to write letters to their loved ones, which were only delivered in the event of their death.

Such closure was denied the Jews, cruelly separated on arrival at Auschwitz and sent to the gas chambers thinking they were merely having a shower.

Thousands, like my grandfather Armin Klein, were picked up away from their loved ones with no opportunity to express their feelings or say goodbye – their families were left wondering what had happened.
I want people to understand what the Holocaust was really like and I hope I have achieved that. The ripples created by the Holocaust pebble in the world’s pond still undulate. They probably always will, while Yad Vashem receives 4,000 books on the Holocaust each year.

The betrayal of the Jews by the Nazis was so severe that a whole raft of international law came into force after 1945. However, the occurrence of the Holocaust does not mean that appropriate international law did not exist.

The pre-1945 international laws were perfectly adequate to protect everyone from the horrors of the Holocaust – the Nazis just chose to ignore them, as subsequent genocides have ignored the new legislation.

The Jews were told complete and deliberate lies about their future and destinations, what they could take with them, what would happen to them and their families.

End quote

But it gets worse.  The article continues with the story of what happened at Treblinka:

Begin quote

Even at the very end, when they were told they were going for a shower – in Treblinka, the gas chambers were disguised as traditional Jewish bathhouses with roof tiles made by a manufacturer whose trademark was identical to the Star of David, apparently called a ‘Molette d’eperon’.

The forensic archaeologist who worked at Treblinka told me: “I did find multiple tiles like this at Treblinka, some still cemented to foundations.” The star is not actually the star of David, as it turns out, but rather an emblem of a Polish tile manufacturer. Without a doubt, though, the Nazis modelled the gas chamber on a Jewish bathhouse and these same tiles can be found in other Jewish bathhouses throughout Poland.

I consider the lies that were told to Jews throughout their persecution to be an overwhelming betrayal.

The failure to tell people they were about to be killed is unforgiveable because the Jews were entitled to know their lives were about to be ended so they could prepare themselves and, where possible, say their goodbyes.

End quote

It is hard to believe how cruel the Nazis were, not even allowing the Jews to write a final letter before they were killed.  I wrote about Treblinka on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Treblinka/introduction.html

 

Famous photo of the little boy with his hands up, in the Warsaw ghetto

Today, I was doing some research about gun control in Nazi Germany when I read Wikipedia’s page about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. On this page, Wikipedia uses the famous photo of the “little boy with his hands up.”

Famous photo that was allegedly taken in the Warsaw ghetto uprising (Click to enlarge)

The photo, shown above, is very controversial; I blogged about it at

Controversial photo from the Warsaw ghetto

and again at

Photo of the “Little Boy with his hands up” — the rest of the story

Some of the new people who have joined the discussions on my blog might want to weigh in on this controversy.

Here is my last word on the subject:  Wikipedia should not put controversial photos on its pages.  This irritates people, especially me.

The photo below would be much better.  The caption on the photo is “German soldiers lead Jews captured during the Warsaw ghetto uprising to the assembly point for deportation. Poland, May 1943”

Photo taken in Warsaw ghetto shows Jews being led out of the ghetto

 

Photo of the “Little Boy with his hands up” — the rest of the story

Famous photo of the “little boy with his hands up”

A little over 5 years ago, I blogged about the famous photo of “the little boy with his hands up”.

Controversial photo from the Warsaw ghetto

This subject has come up for discussion again because the photo shown above has been put up on the Holocaust Facebook page.  The Holocaust Facebook page does not allow discussion, except from the True Believer point of view, so I am putting in my two cents worth on my blog today.

The people shown in the famous photo above were not part of the Holocaust, contrary to what is now believed by Holocaustians world wide.

The soldier, who is holding a gun on the little boy in the photo, was Josef Blösche; he was put on trial in East Germany after the war and was executed after being convicted of being a war criminal.

Seven-year-old Tsvi C. Nussbaum, who is allegedly the boy in the photo, was one of the Polish Jews who had been arrested, along with his aunt, on July 13, 1943, in front of the Hotel Polski on the Aryan side of the Warsaw ghetto, where they had been living as Gentiles. The soldier in the photo believes that he is holding a gun on a Gentile boy.

Since they had foreign passports, the little boy and his aunt were allegedly sent to the Bergen-Belsen detention camp as “exchange Jews.”

Little Tsvi’s parents had emigrated to Palestine in 1935, but had returned to Sandomierz, Poland in 1939 just before World War II started.

At the end of the war, Tsvi was one of the survivors of Bergen-Belsen. In 1945, he emigrated to Palestine where he lived until 1953, at which time he moved to America. He became a doctor, specializing in ear, nose and throat, in Rockland County in upstate New York.

Long after the war, Tsvi Nussbaum claimed that he was the little boy, with his hands up, in the photo above.

However, some sources say that the photo above was taken during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which took place between April 19, 1943 and May 16, 1943 before Tsvi was arrested.

The photo is one of the photos included in the Stroop Report about the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

On October 23, 1943 a transport of around 1700 of these Polish Jews arrived on passenger trains at the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, although they had been told that they were being taken to a transfer camp called Bergau near Dresden, from where they would continue on to Switzerland to be exchanged for German POWs.

One of the Jews on one of these trains was Franceska Mann, a beautiful dancer who was a performer at the Melody Palace nightclub in Warsaw. She had probably obtained her foreign passport from the Hotel Polski on the Aryan side of the Warsaw Ghetto, since she was pretending to be Aryan.

I blogged about the story of Franceska Mann in one of my very first blog posts: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/josef-schillinger-the-ss-man-who-was-shot-in-the-undressing-room-of-gas-chamber-2-at-auschwitz/

In July 1943, the Germans arrested the 600 Jewish inhabitants of the hotel and some of them, including Tsvi Nussbaum, were sent to Bergen-Belsen as exchange Jews. Others were sent to Vittel in France to await transfer to South America.

According to Jerzy Tabau, who later escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau and wrote a report on the incident, the new arrivals were not registered at Auschwitz. Instead, they were told that they had to be disinfected before crossing the border into Switzerland. They were shoved into the undressing room, next to one of the gas chambers, and ordered to undress.

The beautiful Franceska caught the attention of SS Sergeant Major Josef Schillinger, who stared at her and ordered her to undress completely.

Suddenly Franceska threw her shoe into Schillinger’s face, and as he opened his gun holster, Franceska grabbed his pistol and fired two shots, wounding him in the stomach. Then she fired a third shot which wounded another SS Sergeant named Emmerich. Schillinger died on the way to the hospital.

According to Tabau, whose report, called “The Polish Major’s Report,” was entered into the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal as Document L-022, the shots served as a signal for the other women to attack the SS men; one SS man had his nose torn off, and another was scalped, according to Tabau’s report which was quoted by Martin Gilbert in his book, The Holocaust.

Reinforcements were summoned and the camp commander, Rudolf Höss, came with other SS men carrying machine guns and grenades.

According to another report, called “Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe” written by Ainsztein and quoted by Martin Gilbert, the women were then removed one by one, taken outside and shot to death. However, Eberhard Kolb [at Bergen-Belsen] wrote that they were all murdered in the gas chamber.