Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 22, 2016

Chaim Rumkowski's "Give Me Your Children!" Speech

A Speech by Himmler to SS Officers in Poznan, Poland: Encouraging Genocide of the Jews

A Speech by Hans Frank, Governor of Occupied Poland Informing Subordinates that Genocide Must Begin

Rosa Robota: Jewish Heroine of Auschwitz

Alicia Appleman-Jurman: Survival & Heroism of a Young Girl During the Holocaust

The Mechanisms of Extermination: - how the gas chambers and crematories of Auschwitz-Birkeneau operated. Excerpted from Olga Lengyel's book ,"Five Chimneys".

Holocaust Poetry & Art: Your contributions are welcome.

References: Some of the books on the Holocaust I have read and recommend. These books served as data sources for the Holocaust pages within this website.

OTHER HOLOCAUST SITES: Alexander Kimel's Holocaust Website This is a link to a complete Holocaust site on the Net in my opinion. Mr. Kimel is a survivor.

The Nizkor Project One of the long-standing websites on the Holocaust and the fight against "revisionism".

The Concentration Camps Loads of info on the camps, the system, the forgotten camps, etc.

Authentic prisoner shirt from Buchenwald Concentration Camp

A prisoner with face turned downwards quickly whispers "If you have any jewelry or food - or anything of value, give it to me, for they will take it all away from you. Later, I'll give half back to you! Do it now! There is no time!". You struggle to decide, for you are not sure what to do. Already the prisoner is asking the same of others in the cattle car. You all decide against it. You don't trust him. After all, he is wearing prisoner garb, so he must be a criminal! But the prisoner knows something you don't. He's heard that almost all of this transport is to be sent straight to the gas chamber and this is his way of getting goods to trade for his own survival. Food could be traded to fellow inmates, but diamonds or piece of gold could buy favors, food or protection under a Ukranian guard or camp kapo. It could secure a transfer to a block not scheduled for any selections. This method of survival became famously known as organizing - and indeed was one of the only ways to survive in a camp. The prisoner, realizing no one is going to give him anything says to them quite bluntly: "Do you see the smoke in those chimneys?", motioning to the tall brick towers, "That is where all of you are going, may God help you all!". Everyone gasps in horror. You have found yourself at Auschwitz, "Anus Mundi", a true Knochenmuhlen ("bone mill"). It is the worst time to be there: the summer of 1944. Suddenly a Ukranian guard hurls insults and shoves the prisoner away and personally orders your group out. These Ukranians served the Germans with infamy during the Holocaust. From the Ghettos to the death camps, the Ukranians were there. Returning attention to the prisoner at the selection ramp - he himself walks a tightrope each day to survive. The guard glances and makes a mental note that if that prisoner continues to cause disturbances, he will report him. The prisoner himself could find himself among the next batch "selected" from the blocks. Finally, you are in the fresh air - it's amazing how air is taken for granted. There is music coming from an orchestra composed of inmates. It is funny, ironic, to see them playing music while wearing striped clothes and looking so malnourished. The barbed wire fence is outrageous: two of them, with cement pillars 12 feet high with electrical wires on them. Guard towers, armed SS men & women with dogs and Ukranian guards are everywhere. No, there is no way to escape and no where to go. An SS woman interrupts your thoughts shouting at you to let go of your younger sister. You resist and a whip hits your back - you are compelled by this brutality to let your sister go. An SS doctor glances at you and flicks his hand to the right. To the right is life, but you don't know this yet. You are pushed to a group...to the left of them is another group of mainly the old and women with children. A small group of young women are also being formed to the right. From there you are all marched away five abreast and a registration process begins. Your head is totally shaved. A number is tattooed on your forearm and you are issued striped clothes that don't fit. You have been selected to become a slave...to work until you are either selected later to be gassed, or to die of starvation or of disease - or simply murdered. It does not matter to them. Just as long as before you expire, some work can be extracted out of the energy that your body is capable of delivering - while being deliberately starved. Factories and industries (some still in business today) used the slave labor to contribute to the German war-machine. Here are names of some of them...get ready...for you will recognize some of them from whom you buy things: Bayer (pharmaceuticals), Phillips, Siemens (both electronics) and Thysenn. Then there are others: I.G. Farben and the famous Krupp conglomerate - these giant firms tooled up to manufacture military arms. How did these big businesses escape punishment? Easy....money talks, bullshit walks. Sad but true.

Let us return to the story... there are also tons of jobs to be done in order to run a death/work camp. Being part of the sonderkommando at the chambers, crematoria and pits was one of them - and it was the worst job - a living nightmare. After a few weeks in quarantine (the Germans were petrified of disease), you are assigned there. Your job is to work 12-hour shifts, processing the freshly killed bodies - some of them you even recognize. Things go through your mind as you are in that room loading up the freshly killed corpses. Most faces have the look of an anguished death. The children...always so many of them... Disentangling the human pyramid is nightmarish, they are so freshly dead that you even see movement here and there. Are they really all dead? We are going to be burning some of them alive! You avoid looking directly into their wide open eyes - only 15 minutes ago, they were alive. Why do they clutch so strongly to each other? They have to be pulled loose from each other - and the bite and scratch marks: symbolic of the animalistic way they were slaughtered. For in their last moments - in the dark, they were reduced to animals in the primal struggle for life. Hell itself has oozed to the surface of the earth here in Poland. Hauling them by stretcher to the crematoria is an endless task. When the stacks at the ovens are too high, the SS & Ukranian guards order them to be hauled to the open burning pits. Teams of doctors and engineers and SS made it a "project" to figure out the mechanics of the pyres. How high? How deep? How much wood? In what ways should the stacking be done? How many bodies at a time? Click here for Filip Muller's famous testimony on this). With your partner, you haul the freshly-killed and throw them onto the pyre. Your every move is being watched. You can't slow down. Your partner mutters between his teeth that one of the sonderkommado has just jumped into the pit itself, committing suicide rather than continue as a slave in this gruesome work. Others are down below the pits, collecting the human fat in buckets from run-off trenches to douse the corpses on top - to make the burning more efficient. What one will do to live another day! To live! To survive to tell the world. Your partner whispers something - then a guard jumps up and screams at him - talking among prisoners is verboten. Your partner is beat to the ground and his injuries cause you to have to work harder to pull the slack. The guards are grinning and fingering their rifles - your partner can no longer keep up. Two Ukranian guards wait for the right moment, when you and your partner are closest to the pit. They come up to your partner from behind, throw him face forward to the ground and shoot him in the nape of the neck. The guards then scream that anyone else who slows down, will likewise be shot. It's a game they play with the sonderkommando every day. After weeks in the sonderkommando, you have become an automaton, but you have not gone to the edge of existence as the so-called muselmanner ("Muslim") - a term coined by Himmler himself that became a universal slang in the camps describing people so starved, so decrepit, so near death, that in their catatonic state, they reminded Himmler of Muslims bent over in prayer. These were the "living corpses". Anyone who reached this state was considered "done for" and were usually immediately "selected". Your faith in this world and your ideals become something that no one else in this world could experience unless they too are among the sonderkommando - the sheer horror of what has happened to you is overwhelming and pushing your limits of adaptation. Every morning, you stand in the Appelplatz (parade ground) for roll call...it has to be perfect...the numbers have to be right - these Germans are so precise, you think. A few of your group are selected every day or so and you never see them again. The SS doctor has a special way of selecting those unfit for further work: if he can pass his clenched fist between your thighs without touching them, you are done for. Nonetheless, after 2 months, your entire kommando is selected for sonderbehandlung (special treatment), and you finally follow the trail of thousands before you. For a minute, you can't believe they are going to do this to you - you worked so hard for them! Then you realize that you have to be liquidated. For you have seen and you know too much. With terse resignation you undress and enter the familiar gas chamber - this time from the opposite door, feeling that you have been a traitor to your people by the work you have been doing. You had thought that maybe you would survive - and that you could tell the world. As the lights are doused and the Zyklon B (prussic acid) pellets are dropped in from the grating in the ceiling, there, in the dark with tears streaming down your eyes you try to remember everything you've done in your life, you picture the family members you hope to meet in heaven who were also murdered thusly. Your final thoughts are of the world: Don't they know what is happening here? How can this be happening? Will the world ever know what they are doing? Then you are immersed in self-pity and a final flow of tears. You inhale the gas as strongly as you can...for you have been given the small gratuity of knowing exactly what is happening to you and how to best die in the chambers.

Go now to Page 2...

See the original post:
Holocaust - datasync.com

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
Tags: