Auschwitz-Birkenau: "The world must know"

(source:  Jewish Virtual Library)


Today, from the BBC:

Auschwitz 70th anniversary: Survivors mark camp liberation

27 January 2015

About 300 Auschwitz survivors have gathered at the site of the former Nazi death camp to mark the 70th anniversary of its liberation.


The commemoration will be held at the site in southern Poland where 1.1 million people, the vast majority Jews, were killed between 1940 and 1945.


It is expected to be the last major anniversary event that survivors are able to attend in considerable numbers.


Heads of state and representatives from wartime Allies will also be present.


Events include the laying of a wreath, a church service, and the lighting of candles at a memorial in the former death camp of Birkenau, which was part of the Auschwitz complex.


Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by the Red Army of the Soviet Union on 27 January 1945. It opened as a museum in 1947....

Much more here. The emphasis this year is on the survivors of the atrocities of the Holocaust.

One of those survivors is Angela Orosz, who was born in Auschwitiz. 

 From the CBC:

Angela Orosz, Auschwitz-born Montrealer, returns to Poland for liberation anniversary

One of the youngest Holocaust survivors, Orosz was an infant when Auschwitz was liberated

26 January 2015

Angela Orosz came into this world in one of the most horrific places imaginable.

As thousands of Jews around her were sent to the gas chambers, Orosz's mother hid her pregnancy for months from her Nazi captors.

On Dec. 21, 1944, Orosz was born in Auschwitz.

• Auschwitz liberation's 70th anniversary focuses on survivors
• 
  

Within the month, Orosz and everyone else who had managed to cling to life in the desolate camp were liberated.


Seventy years later, Orosz — now a Montrealer — is returning to her birthplace to honour those who perished there, in an act of defiance against those who tried to erase her future.

A portrait shows Angela Orosz as a child. Her mother was sent to a Nazi concentration camp when she was two months pregnant, but managed to hide her pregnancy. (Submitted by Angela Orosz)

"My daughter said, 'We have to go there, and we have to show it that we are alive, we have [a] big family, and we have to show Hitler didn't achieve what he wanted.'"...

Much more (with video) here.

Film director Stephen Spielberg is in Poland and gave a short speech:

Spielberg, the Oscar-winning director of the 1993 Holocaust film “Schindler’s List,” was introduced by an 81-year-old survivor, Paula Lebovics, who praised him as “a man who has given us a voice in history.”


In a short speech, Spielberg spoke of how his own Jewish identity evolved, first as a boy learning to read numbers from the numbers tattooed on the arms of survivors, and as an adult when he filmed “Schindler’s List” in Krakow.


But he warned of “anti-Semites, radical extremists, and religious fanatics” who are again provoking hate crimes — a warning that comes after radical Islamists massacred Jews at a kosher supermarket earlier this month in Paris...

[...]

“These people … want to all over again strip you of your past, of your story and of your identity,” he told them. He stressed the importance of countering that hatred with education and preserving Auschwitz and other historical sites...

Go read more here.

Preserving the memory of those dark days of history is even more important today, as the world again ignores atrocities against other innocents around the world.

One of the survivors who determined to keep the stories alive is Yehuda Bacon

Jewish Holocaust survivor Yehuda Bacon: three months after liberation, and now

1945: 'It was a miracle to leave Auschwitz'

Czech-born Yehuda Bacon was just 14 years old when he arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in December 1943.


Six months later his father was killed in the gas chambers. His mother and sister, Hanna, were sent to another camp in Austria where they died two weeks before the war ended.
[...]

"I remember the day I left Auschwitz very well - January 18 1945.


The Russians were coming nearer and the Germans were emptying the camp, sending those who could work to other camps.


Only a couple of thousand prisoners were left and we knew we would be sent away but we didn't know where.


I had been there a whole year so I had good connections with prisoners who had important jobs like distributing clothes. Those prisoners had been told to get clothes ready for those who were leaving.
[...]


Liberation


We were liberated on 5 May.


That morning the guards had abandoned the camp but they had poisoned the food before they left.


When we realised the guards had gone we rushed to the store room to look for food.


I tried to take a huge piece of margarine.

[...]

It was a miracle to leave Auschwitz. But that was the beginning of the so-called death march.

[...]


Trying to tell our story

After the war, I dedicated my life to being an artist - at first to describe what I saw, in a childish way.

[...]


I think I am somehow obliged because I survived to tell the story of the people who didn't survive but what happens to the story is beyond my control. I hope that maybe someone, some time, somewhere will learn something from it...

There is more about Yehuda Bacon here.

The Telegraph shares the survival story of Zigi Shipper.  GO. Read,learn and honour.

From US Holocaust Memorial Museum:

As we remember these victims, we also honor the survivors, soldiers, reporters, and others who bore witness to Nazi crimes and reflect on the challenges we face 70 years after liberation.

“THE WORLD MUST KNOW”

In the months prior to the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, an elderly French inmate urged Jewish prisoner Olga Lengyel to observe everything that transpired, telling her, “When the war is over the world must know about this. It must know the truth.” Auschwitz prisoner Seweryna Szmaglewska recalled yet another powerful impulse to speak out: the eyes of her expiring comrades, “the last testament of the dying.” Like Lengyel, she penned her memoirs in the years immediately following the war to give voice to those who could no longer speak.

 General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, also understood the need to witness. In a cable to General George Marshall in Washington, he wrote about his experiences at the recently liberated Nazi camp of Ohrdruf:

The things I saw beggar description. . . . The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were . . . overpowering. . . . I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in [a] position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”

The Museum has a whole archive library of videos by survivors.  Rene Slotkin is one who talks of his liberation:

Uploaded on Jan 6, 2015René Slotkin (né Guttmann) and his twin sister Irene Hizme (née Renate Guttmann) were born in Czechoslovakia in December 1937. During the Holocaust, they were deported with their mother from Prague to Theresienstadt before being sent to Auschwitz, where as twins they were subjected to medical experiments. René was liberated from a death march that had just left Auschwitz in January 1945, a little over a month after his seventh birthday.


Watch René Slotkin and Irene Hizme's joint oral history online: http://collections.ushmm.org/search/c...

As we remember those lost and those who survived the horrors of Man's inhumanity to man,  the efforts must continue to ensure that the world never forgets.

The World MUST know.

Related:  Holocaust survivors: Europe is forgetting about the whole thing

A Special Kind of Hate

This is Gavriella

Not Just One Of The Righteous!

By Findalis
Monkey in the Middle

103 years ago today an angel sent by the Lord was born to Dr. Stanisław Krzyżanowski, a physician, and his wife, Janina.  A child who will grow up to save thousands of Jewish children from death in the Nazi Death Camps.

It was fomented into Irena a sense of Justice and equality among all people.  Her father Stanislaw died of Typhoid while attending patents whom other doctors refused to attend.  (i.e...Jews, Roma, etc...).  For this action the Jewish community offered to pay for Irena's education.

At university she spoke up against the practice of the ghetto-bench system that existed at some prewar Polish universities and as a result she was suspended from Warsaw University for three years.  But her greatest work was yet to come.

From Wikipedia:

During the German occupation of Poland, Sendler lived in Warsaw (prior to that, she had lived in Otwock and Tarczyn while working for urban Social Welfare departments). As early as 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, she began aiding Jews. She and her helpers created more than 3,000 false documents to help Jewish families, prior to joining the organized Żegota resistance and the children's division. Helping Jews in German-occupied Poland meant all household members risked death if they were found to be hiding Jews, a punishment far more severe than in other occupied European countries.

In August 1943, Żegota (the Council to Aid Jews) nominated Sendler (known by her nom de guerre: Jolanta) to head its children's section. As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto to check for signs of typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the Ghetto. During these visits, she wore a Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people and so as not to call attention to herself.

She cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. She and her co-workers organized the smuggling of Jewish children out of the Ghetto. Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions during a typhus outbreak, Sendler and her co-workers visited the Ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes disguising them as packages.

Children were placed with Polish families, the Warsaw orphanage of the Sisters of the Family of Mary, or Roman Catholic convents such as the Little Sister Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary Conceived Immaculate at Turkowice and Chotomów. Sendler worked closely with Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, a resistance fighter and writer, and with Matylda Getter, a nun and the Mother Provincial of the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary. She rescued about 2,500 Jewish children in different education and care facilities for children in Anin, Białołęka, Chotomów, Międzylesie, Płudy, Sejny, Wilno, and other places. Some children were smuggled to priests in parish rectories. She and her co-workers buried lists of the hidden children in jars in order to keep track of their original and new identities. Żegota assured the children that, when the war was over, they would be returned to Jewish relatives.

In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Żegota saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution. She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed. For the remainder of the war, she lived in hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish children. After the war, she and her co-workers gathered together all of their records with the names and locations of the hidden Jewish children and gave them to their Żegota colleague Adolf Berman and his staff at the Central Committee of Polish Jews. However, almost all of their parents had been killed at the Treblinka extermination camp or had otherwise gone missing.

Today there are 10's of thousands of people alive today who would not be if Irena and her Żegota resistance members did not save those children.

Many awards were given to Irena over the years.  She was named one of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem,  Given the Order of the White Eagle, the Jan Karski Award, Order of the Smile and the Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award (Posthumously).  In 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize but it was awarded to Al Gore for a flawed film on Global Warming.

Irena Sendler passed from this world on 12 May 2008 in the city of Warsaw, Poland at the age of 98.  But her work and story lives on.

In 1999, students at a high school in Uniontown, Kansas produced a play based on research into Irena Sendler's life story titled Life in a Jar. It has since been adapted for television as The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler. Actress Anna Paquin played Sendler. Her story was largely unknown to the world until the students developed The Irena Sendler Project, producing their performance Life in a Jar. This student-produced drama has now been performed over 285 times all across the United States, Canada and Poland. Sendler's message of love and respect has grown through the performances, over 1,500 media stories, a student-developed website with 30,000,000 hits, a national teaching award in Poland and the United States, and an educational foundation, the Lowell Milken Education Center, to make Sendler’s story known to the world.

In the fall of 1999, at Uniontown High School in Bourbon County, Kansas, four students were encouraged to work on a year long National History Day project which would extend the boundaries of the classroom to families in the community, contribute to history learning, teach respect and tolerance, and meet the classroom motto, "He who changes one person, changes the world entire."
Three ninth grade girls, Megan Stewart, Elizabeth Cambers, and Jessica Shelton, and an eleventh grade girl, Sabrina Coons, accepted the challenge and decided to enter their project in the National History Day program. Their teacher showed them a short clipping from a March 1994 issue of U.S. News and World Report, which said, “Irena Sendler saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942-43.” He told the girls the article might be a typographical error, since he had not heard of this woman or story. The students began their research and looked for primary and secondary sources throughout the year.

They discovered that Irena entered the Warsaw Ghetto under the disguise of a non-Jewish social worker and talked Jewish parents and grandparents out of their children, rightly saying that all were going to die in the Ghetto or in death camps. Irena took the children past the Nazi guards, using a variety of methods for escape: putting the sedated children in body bags, putting the sedated children under a seat on the tram car, or helping the children escape through the old courthouse. After removing the children from the ghetto, Irena and her coworkers adopted the children into the homes of Polish families or hid them in convents and orphanages. She made lists of the children's real names and put the lists in jars, then buried the jars in a garden, so that someday she could dig up the jars and find the children to tell them of their true identity.

Read more about this amazing program here.  You can find more about the Lowell Milken Center here, here and here.


While the chances of her becoming a saint in the Catholic Church is slim, to the Jewish people Irena Sendler is a saint of the highest rank.

Outrage: Students In Texas School Told To Call 9-11 Terrorists 'Freedom Fighters'

By Susan Duclos

Students forced to wear burqas, made to refer to the Holocaust as "ethnic cleansing" instead of genocide, and told to call the the terrorists that hijacked planes and slaughtered nearly 3,000 American citizens on 9-11-01, "freedom fighters."

One would think this was a school in Iran, but no, it was the  Lumberton High School in Texas, right here in the United States of America.

Worse, John Valastro, the superintendent of the Lumberton Independent School District, claims this is considered "educating the kids." (Via Fox News)

Parents of the Advanced Placement World Geography students are understandably upset, as evidenced by April LeBlanc, whose daughter was one of those students.

April LeBlanc’s 15-year-old daughter was one of the students in the photograph. She told Fox News that many parents in the district feel betrayed by school officials.

“My biggest thing is not the burqa,” she said. “That was the key to opening up the rest. It’s scary how far they dove into the Islamic faith. It’s scary what they taught my daughter. Who’s in charge of this? How did our superintendent let this slip through the cracks?”

LeBlanc said the students were told that they could no longer use the terms suicide bomber or terrorist. Instead, they were instructed to use the words “freedom fighters.”

“This teacher taught her that a freedom fighter is when they give their life for the Holy War – and that they’re going to go to heaven,” she told Fox News. “They were saturating these kids in Islam and my daughter is an American Christian child.”

Unlike the recent story that make headlines of a teacher misrepresenting the schools dress policy when she threatened to suspend a kid for wearing a shirt that supported the US Marines, this time, the teacher, according to Madelyn LeBlanc, was uncomfortable and stated she too was forced to teach her students this nonsense.

“I do have a lot of sympathy for her,” the 15-year-old said. “At the very beginning she said she didn’t want to teach it but it was in the curriculum.”

Her mother added that it was her impression that the teacher did not agree with the quote about calling the terrorists freedom fighters and laced her lecture with sarcasm.

During a lesson on Judaism, LeBlanc said the teacher told the class, “Students, I’m supposed to be politically correct and tell you that the Holocaust was not Genocide. It was an ethnic cleansing.”

Read the rest of the story over at Fox.

Recently it was also reported that Texas students were being given assignments to design a socialist flag, as part of the very controversial CSCOPE- Read more on that in an earlier WuA piece from February 4, 2013.

How on earth did all this become part of the curriculum in American schools?

[Update] WuA contributor Auntybrat has a piece up about this at her  own blog, Assoluita Traquillita.

 Contact Information

Lumberton Independent School District
121 South Main
Lumberton, TX 77657
Ph:   409-923- 7580
Fax: 409-755-7848

The World Memory Project Online: Searchable Data Base Of Holocaust Victims

By Susan Duclos

The World Memory Project's goal is to make the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's 170 million documents searchable for free online.

Via AP:

Records on more than 30,000 victims of Nazi persecution during the Holocaust are now available on Ancestry.com from collections of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

The World Memory Project can be found at Ancestry.com.

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6 Million Dead!

By Findalis of Monkey in the Middle

Today is the day we remember and mourn those who were murdered by the Nazis and their allies.

We have to remember it wasn't just Germans who worked in the camps, but volunteers from EVERY country the Nazis conquered.  These volunteers were often more impassioned with their horrid task, bringing an enthusiasm to the job that often the regular SS didn't share.

We can safely assume that the men and women who worked in the Concentration Camps were defective in their moral fiber.  Whether from birth, disease or upbringing, this defect of character added to the horror those interned there faced on a daily basis.

If there were no proof of the horror caused by these defective people then I would be at fault. I submit the following as partial proof of the horror they caused.

None of the horror would have been possible if the people of Germany first, then the occupied nations would have stood up and screamed NO!  Instead they were silent, or worse they collaborated with the murderers.  After all these were only Jews. And their church taught them to hate the Jews from birth.

Those who did not speak up, or try to save one life are as guilty of the murder of 6 million Jews as those who worked and ran the Camps.  An thought to remember on this Yom HaShoah.

NEVER AGAIN!!!!!!

Oliver Stone Wants To Put Hitler Into 'Context' Because Jewish Dominated Media Made Holocaust America's Focus

Lets start with NewsBusters which reports an interview Oliver Stone gave to Sunday Times stating his belief that America's focus on the Jewish massacre was a product of the "Jewish domination of the media" and his new Showtime series will attempt to put views of Hitler into "context."

Director Oliver Stone belittled the Holocaust during a shocking interview with the Sunday Times today, claiming that America's focus on the Jewish massacre was a product of the "Jewish domination of the media." The director also defended Hitler and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and railed against the "powerful lobby" of Jews in America.

Stone said that his upcoming Showtime documentary series "Secret History of America," seeks to put Hitler and Communist dictator Joseph Stalin "in context."

Stone wishes to put the slaughter of millions upon millions, under the command of Adolph Hitler, into context and believes that Hitler was somehow misunderstood, because of the Jewish dominated media, and those misunderstand souls simply need to walk in Hitler's shows to understand the man better.

Where do we start?

I choose to start with the misconception of Stone's that the horrors of the Holocaust were highlighted, and "focused" on by the Jewish dominated media.

I choose to start with General Dwight Eisenhower after the United States Army’s 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division captured the Ohrdruf concentration camp outside the town of Gotha in south central Germany.

Ohrdruf was where they held over 11,000 prisoners on their way to the gas chambers and crematoria at Buchenwald.

From the Dwight Eisenhower memorial commission:

General Eisenhower understood that many people would be unable to comprehend the full scope of this horror. He also understood that any human deeds that were so utterly evil might eventually be challenged or even denied as being literally unbelievable. For these reasons he ordered that all the civilian news media and military combat camera units be required to visit the camps and record their observations in print, pictures and film. As he explained to General Marshall, “I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”

(Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and other U.S. Army officers view the bodies of executed prisoners while on a tour of the Ohrdruf concentration camp- April 12, 1945- Photograph from the National Archives, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives)

General Dwight Eisenhower could have been speaking directly about people like Oliver Stone.

So began the media coverage. So much for the focus being created by Jewish dominated media. The atrocities alone gave focus. No one needed to create a focus, the evidence, the bodies, the photos and the first hand accounts gave the world a reason to remember and to document those memories so that people like Oliver Stone and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran (known Holocaust denier) could not create their own narrative and could not rewrite history.

Moving along to Stone's assertion that Hitler himself needs to be put into "context."

In 2006, 50 million documents were released from Hitler's secret archives, documenting the horror and highlighting the victims of that horror.

CBS reported at the time:

But most of the names here are of unknown people. While the Nazis did not write down the names of those executed in the gas chambers at places like Auschwitz, they did keep detailed records of millions of others who died in the camps. Their names are listed in notebooks labeled “Totenbuch,” which means “death book.” The names are written here, single-spaced, in meticulous handwriting.

"Here we see the cause of death: executed. And you can see, every two minutes they shot one prisoner," Jost explains.

"So they shot a prisoner every two minutes for a little over an hour and a half?" Pelley asks.

"Yes. Now look at the date: it’s the 20th of April. That was Adolf Hitler’s birthday. And this was a birthday present, a gift for the Führer. That’s the bureaucracy of the devil," Jost says.

The time line of the events leading to the Holocaust spans from 1933, when the Nazi party takes power in Germany and Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor, or prime minister of Germany to 1945 when Adolph Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, not only show Hitler's determination to rid the world of Jewish people, but shows Hitler sanctioned experimentation on human beings, including but not limited to twins, children and the disabled.

Freezing / Hypothermia experiments conducted by Dr. Sigmund Rascher at Birkenau, Dachau and Auschwitz . Dr. Rascher reported directly to Himmler. Dr. Rascher publicized the results of his freezing experiments at the 1942 medical conference entitled "Medical Problems Arising from Sea and Winter".

The icy vat method proved to be the fastest way to drop the body temperature. The selections were made of young healthly Jews or Russians. They were usually stripped naked and prepared for the experiment. A insulated probe which measured the drop in the body temperature was inserted into the rectum. The probe was held in place by a expandable metal ring which was adjusted to open inside the rectum to hold the probe firmly in place. The victim was then placed in the vat of cold water and started to freeze. It was learned that most victims lost consciousness and died when the body temperature dropped to 25 C.

The resuscitation or warming experiments followed, experimenting the thawing using Sun Lamps, Internal Irrigation, Hot Bath, and Warming by Body Heat, which consisted of the use women to warm the frozen men and forcing them to copulate with the frozen victims.

Genetic experiments and finally experiments on twins, the descriptions of those experiments as sickening as the rest.

More on Medical experiments conducted by Nazis, found here.



Many suffered in those experiments, and it is true that Hitler did not only target Jews but they were the largest group targeted by the Nazis with their "Final Solution" ... genocide of the entire race.

"First They Came for the Jews"

First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

Pastor Martin Niemöller

Rewrite it, try to change the narrative if you will, but photographs taken at the time, documentation that exists and first hand accounts that were given by survivors and those that liberated them cannot be erased from history and nor should they.

Put that into "context" Mr. Stone.
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Day Of Remembrance

By Findalis of Monkey in the Middle

Starting tonight at sunset and until tomorrow's sunset, Jews through out the world will be remembering those who were murdered in the Holocaust.

I could write volumes to describe the horrors that the German nation, their allies, and even the United State and Great Britain allowed to happen.  But instead I will let the survivors speak.

These tales of sorrow, and triumph tell the story, the truth better than this correspondent could.

From Yad Vashem via YouTube:

Yad Vashem: Remembering the Past, Shaping the Future




Holocaust Survivor Testimony: Eliezer Ayalon




Holocaust Survivor Testimony: Jakob Zim




Holocaust Survivor Testimony: Sara Israeli




Holocaust Survivor Testimony: Hannah Gofrit




Holocaust Survivor Describes Ghetto and Death Camp



Holocaust Victims' Names Commemoration



On 4 September 2003 3 Israeli Air Force F-15 fighter planes, piloted by offspring of Holocaust survivors, flew over the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp today as part of a salute to the victims' bravery and a pledge to be the "shield of the Jewish People in Israel."

The Israel Air Force planes departed for Poland on August 28 to participate in events marking the 85th anniversary of the Polish Air Force. Several air forces from the around world participated in the event. The Israel Air Force took part in the main event staged at the Polish air base in Radom, during which the three F-15s passed over the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

During the flyover, the head of the IAF team Brig.-Gen. Amir Eshel announced, over the pilots' communication system and broadcasted simultaneously on the ground, "We Air Force pilots flying in the sky above the camp of horror, created from the ashes of six million victims, carry their silent cries, salute their bravery and promise to be the shield of the Jewish people in Israel."

The planes, emblazoned with the Star of David, flew above the camp along the railway tracks which led to the crematoria before peeling away. They were accompanied by two Polish MiG-29 jets.

"[The pilots] will fly over the camp for about a second to honor the ashes of their fathers and grandfathers," said Israel Ambassador to Poland Shevach Weiss. "This will be a very emotional moment for them. They will probably be crying in the planes."

In addition to the flyover, some 200 Israeli soldiers were due to take part at a ceremony in the camp, during which the names of victims who arrived at Auschwitz exactly 60 years ago, on September 4, 1943, were to be recited.

IAF Israeli Air Force fly over Auschwitz



A year ago in Cairo, President Barack Hussein Obama said: 

"America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve."

Obama is wrong!

Israel is not a nation because of the Holocaust!  There was a Holocaust because there was no Israel!

Once more the Jewish people are being threatened by those who would seek their destruction.  And once more the so-called leaders of the civilized world will look the other way.  But this time we Jews will not go quietly into the gas chambers!  This time have the means to fight back! This time we will prevail!

NEVER AGAIN!!!

Scroll down for newer posts.

The UK Has Not Removed The Holocaust From School Curriculum

Rumors have a nasty little habit of starting and it can be very hard to counter them with facts once they do and that is doubly true for Internet rumors where emails with false or misleading information are forwarded then others that are concerned by the information forward it to more people and after a while it has gone viral and many believe the original false rumor to begin with.

Such is the case with a "urgent" email that I, myself, have received a few times over the last month, so, lets clear the air.

The claim in the email, directly from the email I have received is:

This week, the UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it 'offended' the Muslim population which claims it never occurred.

This is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.

It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended.
This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain , in memory of the
six million Jews,
20 million Russians,
10 million Christians
and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated with the German and Russia peoples looking the other way!

Now, more than ever, with Iran , among others, claiming the Holocaust to be 'a myth,' it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.
This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people worldwide!
Be a link in the memorial chain and help distribute this around the world.
Don't just delete this. It will only take a minute to pass this along.

Let us start with the media stories relating to this rumor because those original articles, along with the headlines, helped perpetuate some misconceptions.

The Guardian's headline "Schools drop Holocaust lessons".

The Daily Mail headline "Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims"

The Telegraph article has since been removed, but it was at this URL.

The articles stemmed from a report commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and undertaken by the Historical Association. The report, 'Challenges and Opportunities for Teaching Emotive and Controversial History 13-19 (TEACH)

The full TEACH report can be found here, via PDF file.

It is a 48 page report and this mischaracterization, for lack of a better word, that is being emailed from person to person, comes from an a portion on page #15, item #6, called "Teacher Avoidance of Emotive and Controversial History".

For example, a history department in a northern city recently avoided selecting the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils.

The report goes on to state that while some teachers did choose to teach about the Holocaust, others chose not teach abut the Crusades.

The important fact and one that seems to have gotten lost in the hype is that these courses are GCSE courses, not the National Curriculum.

GCSE stands for General Certificate of Secondary Education and it is the name of a set of British qualifications, taken by secondary school students at age of 14-16 in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland (in Scotland, the equivalent is the Standard Grade).

As the UK's Holocaust Educational Trust clearly points out when discussing this very issue, "This does not refer to Holocaust education on the National Curriculum-it is a post-14 History GCSE course (publicly examined course)"

Their other key points regarding this issue are:

**History at GCSE is not compulsory (only one third of pupils opt for history post-14)

**This is an anecdotal response from one teacher in one school out of four thousand five hundred secondary schools in the UK. While we cannot say what happens in every single school, our understanding is that this is highly unusual and not general practise of teachers around the country.

**All schools can choose which history topics they wish to study for coursework at GCSE level.

**There is no suggestion that this or any other school is failing to cover the National Curriculum in teaching about the Holocaust at Key Stage 3, Year 9 (age 13–14).

They go on to state:

At no point does the report from the Historical Association suggest that the Holocaust be removed from the National Curriculum for England and Wales. Obviously we and all Holocaust related organisations in the UK take this very seriously, however on this occasion we want to allay all fears and impress upon everyone that the Holocaust is not being removed from the National Curriculum. This particular incident does of course merit further investigation but in no way represents all the good work in our schools across the country.

Read their whole statement regarding these emails from the Holocaust Educational Trust.

As of December 27, 2007, a writer at The Salem News, Alan Lupo had also received an email about this and wrote an article where he stated "What prompts this is an e-mail I received the other day from a good friend. "Worth reading and forwarding," the message urged. So, I read it but refused to forward it."

Only the email sent to him had changed the location of where this was supposedly happening and claimed it was happening in Kentucky, at the University of Kentucky.

Mr. Lupo did his homework and checked into the story, naturally asking himself how it all got started, once he determined the story to be false.

How then did such a story get started?

There is on the Internet something called "Snopes.com," which describes itself as "The definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors and misinformation."

Snopes explains the rumor began not in Kentucky, but in the other UK, as in United Kingdom, as in Great Britain. Last April, British newspapers inaccurately reported that the nation's schools were dropping Holocaust studies because they feared Muslim pupils would be offended. But only one school had done so.

Snopes is right. When I checked some British newspapers, I found that sloppy reporting.

He goes on to warn people about doing some fact checking before believing everything you read on the Internet.

Good advice.

December 20, 2007, Israel News also tried to dispel these rumors with their own report after having examined the initial TEACH report and all evidence available, they too found the original rumor starting news articles to be "faulty" and "baseless".

Karen Pollock, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust assures readers that all English and Welsh pupils aged 11-14 are obligated to study the holocaust, a commitment which Education Secretary reaffirmed earlier this year.

She goes on to say "The UK has an excellent record in its promotion of Holocaust education and awareness; emails suggesting otherwise based on no evidence, are extremely unhelpful. It is extremely difficult to stem the flow of misleading emails once in circulation and we advise anyone forwarding on group emails to ensure that the information they contain is accurate and honest before pressing the send button."

These emails are still circulating as evidenced by my receiving one just last night. I was asked to look into it by someone that also would not forward it to anyone but me to research it.

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Ahmadinejad's reasons for wanting to visit 9/11

Hat tip to Hot Air and LGF, both of which has a link to the video which can be found at MEMRI.

The transcript of Ahmadinejad's reasoning for wanting to visit ground zero is here.

The lunatic's words:

Following are excerpts from an interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which aired on the Iranian news channel on September 29, 2007:

Interviewer: You were supposed to visit the site of the Twin Towers, but this aroused controversy and many objections in their media. What do you think about this?

LUNATIC: As you know, by spreading lies and by portraying me... For example, they show my picture next to a picture of Bin Laden, or next to tanks and cannons firing and killing people. This is psychological warfare.

9/11 has led to many significant changes. It was used as a pretext to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. It was the reason for the killing of hundreds of thousands of people. It is only natural for us to respond in an appropriate manner. I wanted to visit there last year, but there was no time for that. So I decided to visit there this year to pay my respect to the casualties and convey my sympathy to the families.

I also wanted to raise several questions and express my views. I wanted to say that in my opinion, this incident is the result of the mismanagement of the world, and the result of the inhuman management of the world. Why did such an incident take place? We need to get to the root causes. We don't want them to turn this incident, in 20 years' time, into another false idol like the Holocaust, which they would use as a pretext to kill peoples, and prevent anybody from opening this [Pandora's] box and examining what really happened in this incident. They might turn 9/11 into something sacred, and whoever does not accept it would be considered an infidel, whereas whoever accepts it would have to accept all the ensuing crimes.

In any event, we must express our views. I believe that this way, we would have formed cordial relations with the American people, and cold have opened this issue up for discussion. Well, this is exactly what they want to prevent.

I guess all of our concerns about his using a trip to 9/11 for nothing more than propaganda has been proven beyond a doubt now.

Calling the Holocaust, for anyone that knows anything at all about the holocaust, a "false idol" shows the depth of the lunatic, Ahmadinejad's, denial and insanity.

The documentation and evidence is unchallenged and indisputable and he only makes himself look as ignorant and insane as he he really is when he says things like that.

To think that America will look any differently at the mass murder of 3,000 people on 9/11, in twenty years, as they did on 9/12, is also incredibly asinine and geared at nobody but the farthest left liberals in the Democratic party.

Worse yet is the comment:

"They might turn 9/11 into something sacred"...

The lives lost that day were and will continue to be sacred, as they should be. The memory of that day, the millions of people across the world sitting at their televisions, watching in horror and disbelief as the pictures of those planes hitting the towers were shown, minute after minute, hour after hour and day after day.



Those memories are sacred. They remind us what types of monsters we are dealing with. Ahmadinejad wishes we would forget, and some already seem to have, but others will never forget and will never go back to believing that it "can't happen to us".

Those with a brain understand very clearly, it has and it can again.

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ESCAPE FROM BELZEC; SAVED BY A PAIR OF HEELS

I received an email last night in response to a piece I wrote in December of 2006, called "How Much Do YOU Know About the Holocaust?"many of you have already discussed it, but Julian Cohen had not and after reading it, Julian sent me an email to thank me for writing it.

This touched me because Julian is a product of the Holocaust who has lived with the consequences and has painstakingly worked to translate family history from Polish to English.

This morning Julian granted me permission to tell Hanna Cohen's story (Julian's mother).

Thank you Julian for sharing this with me and allowing me to share it with my readers.

So, without further ado:

ESCAPE FROM BELZEC; SAVED BY A PAIR OF HEELS
By
Julian Cohen

Incorporating the Narrative of Hanna Cohen (Szper),
Transcribed and Translated from the Polish

Hanna & Julian 1947

When the German army punched into Poland on September 1, 1939, my mother's family still had three weeks before the Nazi conquerors would seize the ancient city of Lublin. The family had lived in Lublin and its environs for centuries. It was a large, learned, middle class family, integrated in Polish society and culture to the degree that Jews were allowed to integrate. My mother, Hanna, lived in a big old townhouse with her parents, her older brother, the customary live-in domestics, and extended family and friends dropping by at all hours of the day.



As the Germans were approaching, my grandmother begged my mother to flee east, to Lwow, to relative safety. Lwow had just been occupied by the Soviets, by prior understanding with Hitler. Although life under the Soviets was harsh and perilous, compared with Nazi domination it was considered the lesser of two evils.



Hanna, twenty-four and a teacher of German literature, was reluctant to leave, but she could not ignore her mother's entreaties. She took the train to Lwow.



Her travails under the Soviets would end in July 1941, when the Germans, breaking their pact with Stalin, pushed east. Within hours of their entry into Lwow, the Germans sicced Ukrainian mobs to large-scale pogroms of Jews. Later, they decreed that all Jews must relocate to a ghetto.



My mother would have none of it. She decided to escape to Warsaw. On the train to Warsaw, the German Railway Police arrested her.


At this point, the commentator had better move aside, leaving only the translator. Those who saw the face of Chiron while being rowed across the Styx, and who swam back to the shore of memory, have a right to tell their story that cannot be usurped. They have a unique insight, too. The survivor of a holocaust possesses knowledge about the human species that the rest of us are rarely privy to, for he has seen people's character alloys melting even at the periphery of the evil furnace, revealing their true proportions of base and noble metals.



--------------------------------------------------------------



"They stopped the train and called one of them, a fat German wearing a helmet. 'Get off the train with her now. You'll take her on the first train back to Lwow, to the Gestapo.'



When we got off, I started asking that he let me go. I say to him, 'What benefit is it to you that they kill me; I am young, what I have with me I will give you.' And he answers, 'I would gladly let you go, but if I do that, they will kill me too.'


He hugged me, this old German, and started stroking my hair. He says, 'Child, I know one hundred percent that you will survive this war, but I will not.' And he took me on a train to the local police headquarters. I spent the night there, in jail. In the morning, they took me away, and he accompanied me.



At the jail, they conducted the first interrogation: who I am. He sat to the side. There was an officer and two sergeants, and they conducted the interrogation. At a certain moment, the officer takes a carbine off a wall rack and orders one of the sergeants: 'Take her downstairs.' And the fat one with the helmet winks at me, so that I won't be afraid. Then he got up, poured and gave me a glass of water. This was a man with a heart. And in the morning, he transported me to the Gestapo, and there I had a real investigation.



I only remember that there was a large commission. One of them walked me to the window and said, 'You see that tree? From that tree you will hang.' Everything was in German.



Then they threw me into a small cell where there were already some thirty people, Jews. Suddenly they opened the door, and threw in a young Polish woman. She cries, 'Woe, they caught me, woe.'


I didn't like the look of her. And she made like she was a great Jew lover, 'Give me what you have on you. If they find it they will club you to death, but I will hide it for you.' I had nothing left, but everybody else started digging out their last coins and valuables from various nooks in their clothing. She took all this, and then disappeared.



After a week or so, they packed the entire prison population, mostly Jews, into a sort of lorries, and took us to the Kleparowski train -- it was a freight train terminal in Lwow. At the platform, they ordered us to take off our shoes and overcoats, take off our clothes and deposit them in piles. Then they started herding us into the train. Polish train engineers stood by, and they were saying, 'Folks, jump from the windows, we will be going slowly.'


The Germans were saying that they were taking us to a camp, but the train engineers were saying 'It's a lie; they are transporting you to a gas chamber. Jump, we will be going slowly.'



I entered what was a sort of freight train, but with barbed wire. But before, when we were still being processed at the Kleparowski terminal, one of them stood -- they had a sort of steel whipping rod, with a little steel ball at the end -- and that's what they beat people with. He looked at me just so and said, in German, 'Ah, we have yet a few pretty women for the good-bye.' With the steel rod, he picked up one of my shoes and tossed it to me, then the other. Those shoes saved my life.



Because, I had said I wanted to jump from the [little] window, but there was an iron grid there. So I took the shoes and knocked out the iron grid; various people knocked out the grid, and they hoisted me up -- I don't know for the life of me how I managed to squeeze through that [little] window.



It was, more or less, noontime. With that, on each wagon's steps they stood with rifles. My goal was only that they shoot me; it was noon, impossible that they not see me. Let them kill me; I didn't want to die in agony.


I thrust my head through first -- but I couldn't jump with my head upside down. I had to turn around. I swear I have no idea how I did it; after all, I am a coward.


I jumped. And-- like-this --my heart was thumping. The train rolled along. They saw me and shot. They were all shooting. None of the bullets hit me. I was the first one [to jump]; maybe others jumped too, but later.



Before, in the train car, next to me stood the lawyer, old Mr. Axer -- a well-known personality in Lwow, one of the great lawyers. 'Child, what are you doing? Why do you want to jump to your death? We are traveling to a camp; you are young, you will be working.' And I say, 'Don't you see that we are not traveling to a camp? If it were a camp, would they have stripped us?'


In brief, they hoisted me up, and I jumped. The train rolled on; I started running. There was a forest on the horizon; I ran and reached that forest. And I started walking. Then I saw a clearing. And in this clearing, a peasant, working the soil with a horse and plough. And I have to cross, and I think, 'This is the end of me.""


QUESTION: "To which concentration camp was the train going?"


ANSWER: "Not to a camp, there was no camp there; there were only gas chambers."


QUESTION: "What gas chambers?"


ANSWER: "Belzec, notorious. That's where they hauled people; it was a death factory."


CONTINUED: "I crossed, and that peasant saw me and he says: 'That they sit here and wait.' And I am thinking to myself, 'He went to call the police; so be it, if that's my fate.'


After half an hour, he comes back with a pitcher of milk and a big piece of bread. He gives them to me and says, 'That they drink, eat, and leave with God.'



To this day I say -- since Jews have bad feelings about Poles -- I assert that we who survived, a small percentage though it be, none of us would have survived if in some moment he did not get help, usually without ulterior motives, from some Pole. It was impossible [to survive otherwise].



I started walking, walking -- it was September -- I was gathering wild blueberries, and that was what I ate. Only at night I walked. During the day, I lay low. When it got dark, I would start walking. I did not know where I was going.


After a while, I came to some buildings with a sign: Sanitarium Poluzki (sp?). And I knew that I was near Lwow, because there was such a sanitarium in Lwow.



It's a bright day, I am walking, and suddenly I see a woman walking towards me with containers of milk. She saw me and crossed herself, 'Jesus, Mary; Jesus, Mary,' because I looked like, you can imagine. She took off her apron and covered me -- for I was naked."



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This was only the end of the beginning of my mother's experiences during World War 2. She would escape certain death, improbably, at least three more times, not to speak of the daily dying she endured for six months in the infamous Janowska labor camp.


In July 1944, the Soviet Army liberated Lwow from the Nazis, in order to enslave it in turn. The Allies' betrayal of Poland at Yalta resulted in Lwow becoming a Soviet Ukrainian city. Most refugees from western Poland were allowed to repatriate.


My mother returned to Lublin as soon as it was possible. Her family was not there. The family house was not there. The street on which the family house had stood was not there. The city ward in which the street had been was not there. It was all rubble. Eventually, the site would be paved over.



Hanna had been corresponding with her mother, so she knew how the family had fared during the occupation. On a busy street, in 1942, the SS had shot to death her brother, a young lawyer and promising mathematician. In the same year, the SS had taken away her father, and sent him to his death in Belzec. In 1943, her mother's time had come. Again, I'll let Hanna speak:



"I still got a postcard [in Lwow] from my mother. I later learned that on the day on which she wrote the card, there was a liquidation [aktion, or roundup]. 'My dearest, beloved daughter,' she wrote, 'this is my farewell'... no, I can't."



-------------------------------------------------------------------


I never did learn what else had been in that postcard. There is a zone of private pain that even a son may not enter. Records show that my grandma was murdered at Majdanek, as were the other remnants of her --and my --family.



When I was born, the war had already ended. The Germans(*) had wiped out the family, looted its possessions, destroyed its houses, burned its mementos and documents — but for a long time I was unaware of that. All I knew was that, for some reason, I did not have the grandparents, aunts and cousins that my friends had. I also perceived that, uniquely, our home did not contain a single personal artifact, even a piece of paper, predating 1945.










Hanna After The War














My mother did not tell me about her lost family and lost years anymore than my father did about his. Eventually, in my late teens, I started asking, and she told me something. It wasn't until she was in her late seventies that she told me more. I recorded it.



I was too stupid, and too busy getting ahead in the world, to do the same with my father. He died at 67, having told me almost nothing about how he had lost his family, or how he had survived the war. The only scrap of information I have I retained from our conversation about his acute rheumatism, when he mentioned that he had lived in snowed-under forests, alternately fighting or hiding from the Germans.

One day, perhaps I will visit my native country that I left fifty years ago. I'll go and pay my respects to my grandparents at Majdanek and Belzec. Then I'll walk from Belzec toward Lwow along the railroad tracks. Maybe I will find a forest clearing, pick some wild blueberries, sit down and think about it all.




____________________________________________________________________________________

(*) I feel that it's unjustified to say that the Germans were Hitler's willing executioners, even though millions were. My mother shared this feeling, and the fat man with a helmet nods in approval. Nevertheless, even with the many thousands of executioners who must have been unwilling, and hundreds of noble heroes who, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, gave up their lives to oppose evil, in this particular war, in which Aktion Reinhard was just one component from hell, the scale of the evil, and usage patterns of the languages of the victim peoples (e.g. Polish), permit me to use this broad generalization.

Source:

Julian Cohen
All rights reserved by the author

Copyright © 2006 - 2007 by Julian Cohen / H.E.A.R.T

Originally printed at Holocaust Research Project.

http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/belzec/belzecescape.html


For those of you that do not know what Belzec Death Camp was, take a look for yourself.

Once again, Thank You very much Julian for your email, you kind words to me and your permission to share this with my readers.

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