Author: Webb

THE BELL CURVE: Auschwitz remains stark after 60 years

JOSEPH N. BELL

February 2, 2005

www.dailypilot.com/front/story/2152p-3159c.html

I suspect that all of us have a handful of places or events in our lives that leave such an indelible impression that they are never very far from our consciousness. One such place for me is the Nazi death factory called Auschwitz.

It has been much on my mind this past week as both the print media and television have been full of remembrances of this place on the 60th anniversary of its liberation by the Russian army. Although my memories come from a visit long after the carnage that took place at Auschwitz, they are nonetheless vivid.

[…]

[…] We took a bus from Krakow — a delightful river city that ironically serves as the gateway to the horrors of Auschwitz — enduring some 30 miles of garrulous talk in broken English from an anti-Semitic female bus driver who dropped us off at the gates to the prison camp on a lovely late summer day. There was a long, graveled walk to an arch that marked the entrance. We got our first view of the interior of the camp — and were stopped dead in our tracks — when we made a sharp turn at the arch and saw a bevy of German soldiers in uniform, many of them holding straining police dogs on tight leashes, standing guard over dozens of prisoners in striped clothing.

That’s the scene deeply implanted in my memory. We found out quickly that a movie was being shot there that day, but the fictitious German guards became more and more real to me as we explored the camp, and, by day’s end, I found myself unable to put down a smoldering hatred of the actors playing the Nazi soldiers.

[…]

It was only a minute’s walk from the unloading platform to the room, full of overhead showers, where most of the new arrivals were sent to disrobe and supposedly be deloused. But instead of water, the showers pumped out gas. […]

[…]

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column appears Thursdays.

Copyright 2005 Daily Pilot

Swiss court ruling opens door for historic Gypsy suit against IBM

Jerusalem Post

February 2, 2005

www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?
strwebhead=Gypsy+suit+against+IBM+moves+forward+
&intcategoryi

A European Gypsy group suing IBM for conspiracy to commit genocide has prevailed in its efforts to secure jurisdiction in Switzerland, charging that the company consciously coordinated its punch-card automation for the Nazis out of its European headquarters in Geneva.

[…]

In the concentration camps, IBM’s code for Jews was 8 and its code for Gypsies was 12. General executions were IBM-coded as 4, death by gas chamber as 6. The Nazis used these codes to manage and track their prisoners efficiently.

[…]

The Holocaust Revisited: Feeling the Pain

Diana Sevanian

Signal Staff Writer

1/29/2005

www.the-signal.com/News/ViewStory.asp?storyID=6345

[…]

In 1976, I married the son of a concentration-camp survivor — a non-Jewish, former Russian soldier. Through the years, I heard many of my father-in-law’s camp memories. I knew Ara Sevanian had been beaten and starved, hauled off semi-conscious for mass burial with a heap of lifeless Jews and others who’d shared his rickety horse-pulled cart.

I knew that the Nazi soldier driving that wagon recognized my classical-musician father-in-law from a concert he performed for Stalin before the war. Amazingly, that German guard decided instead to let Ara live and play for the troops.

Evidently the guy preferred Mahler to murder.

[…]

Diana Sevanian is a Signal staff writer. Her column represents her own views, and not necessarily those of The Signal.

Copyright 2005 The-Signal.com — Site powered with DynamicBase by ActiveQuest, Inc.

Note: It’s difficult to decide which is more fantastic — a Nazi soldier at a concert for Joseph Stalin in the USSR, or a concert-goer’s ability to remember the face of one musician out of an orchestra after many years and in utterly different circumstances.

Holocaust horrors couldn’t break the spirit of Auschwitz survivor

Nick Lees

The Edmonton Journal

January 29, 2005

www.canada.com/edmonton/edmontonjournal/news/

insight/story.html?id=2319303e-68c5-4b09-b8d3-e3969a127a0a&page=1

[…]

[Rajmund] Pierzchajlo spent three years and four months in Auschwitz and says he witnessed countless brutal beatings, executions carried out at the whim of guards, and countless Jews and others walk innocently to the gas chambers.

[…]

“Everyone knows the smell of a barbecue,” says Pierzchajlo. “We had that smell in our nostrils every moment of every day. It was the smell of burning flesh. We of course felt sorry for all those who died. But there was absolutely nothing we could do.”

[…]

“As a carpenter, I also visited the Birkenau and other sub-camps to make repairs,” he said.

“I saw what was going on. I saw the never-ending black columns of smoke belching from chimneys.”

[…]

Pierzchajlo watched the first Russian prisoners — about 500 top officials of the NKVD, the political police — arrive after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

“They looked well-groomed and marched with confidence, as if to say, ‘Stalin wouldn’t let anyone harm us,’ ” says Pierzchajlo. “But most or all of them were of Jewish ancestry and were placed in the death barrack.”

[…]

The memory of those dreadful times still brings nightmares.

When he finds his mind drifting back during the day, he makes himself think of the few lighter moments there were at Auschwitz. SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer (Captain) Rudolph Hess [sic] was the commandant of Auschwitz and never did find out what happened to his impeccably groomed German shepherd that vanished as soon as it arrived at the camp.

“The dog was cooked in the prisoners’ kitchen,” says Pierzchajlo. “If you have ever been close to dying from hunger, you’d know what a treat that was.”

© The Edmonton Journal 2005

Sharon: World Didn’t Help Stop Holocaust

• Israeli Prime Minister Says Jews Can Only Rely On Themselves

KCAL 9 | kcal9.com

Jan 26, 2005 3:14 am US/Pacific

kcal9.com/topstories/topstories_story_026061757.html

In a speech marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Wednesday that the world “didn’t lift a finger” to stop the Holocaust.

Sharon said Jews learned a lesson from the genocide that they can only rely on themselves.

In unusually harsh remarks to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, Sharon noted that when the Nazis began deporting Jews from Hungary to the Auschwitz in large numbers in 1944, Allied forces did not bomb the railroad tracks leading to the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. He said that over a period of several weeks, more than 600,000 Jews from Hungary were killed in Auschwitz.

“The sad and terrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being killed,” Sharon said.

“At the time of the most terrible test, friends and benefactors didn’t lift a finger,” he said. “This is the Jewish lesson of the Holocaust.”

“The state of Israel has learned this lesson, and since its founding, it has defended itself and its residents, and provides safety to Jews everywhere. We know that we can only rely on ourselves,” he said.

© 2005 CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Note: Although it’s not mentioned in this article, Sharon must really be ticked off at the Zionists in Germany and elsewhere at the time, who likewise “didn’t lift a finger.” The most reasonable assumption is that no one did anything because the rumors of mass extermination were not true; that is, there was nothing to do. If we don’t have evidence to support claims of mass extermination now, the evidence certainly wasn’t available back then!

Auschwitz Survivors Fight to Keep Memory Alive Despite ‘Opening Wounds’

2005-01-25

Associated Press

www.ushmm.org/newsfeed/Auschwitz/viewstory.php?storyid=2023

JERUSALEM–A museum painting of a barefoot girl holding up a pair of shoes led Bracha Ghilai to break a half century of silence about what befell her in Auschwitz.

[…]

In Auschwitz death was always close and survival depended on fluke.

Ghilai said she survived one “selection” — when the Nazis weeded out the weak and sick for extermination — by pleading with a fellow inmate to open a barracks window when she was running a temperature. She crawled through the window to safety.

Like all children too young to work, 10-year-old Martha Weiss was selected for death when she arrived at Auschwitz in 1944 but the Soviet army was approaching and the SS diverted her group from the gas chamber after Soviet planes flew over. She said she and her older sister Eva spent their last month in camp doctor Josef Mengele’s notorious experimental ward.

“He would tell little children to sit on his lap and tell them to call him ‘uncle,’ ‘uncle Mengele’ and sometimes give them a sweet and in the same tone of voice that he said ‘I’m uncle Mengele’ he would tell the officials to give them a lethal injection,” Weiss said.

“So when he approached my sister, I threw myself on him. I had enough sense to know that it was dangerous but he happened to be in a good mood and it didn’t matter to him if he killed Eva Weiss or whether he killed the next person, so she survived.”

[…]

The Nazis began evacuating Auschwitz 10 days before the Soviets arrived, forcing some 60,000 prisoners into the Polish forests on “death marches” during which many thousands were murdered or died of cold, hunger and exhaustion.

[…]

Copyright 2005, YellowBrix, Inc.

Webmaster note: Interesting that there was danger inside the barrarks, but safety outside, where presumably she wasn’t supposed to have been, in the heart of an “extermination camp.”

Gas Chamber Survivor Who Found Love at Belsen

By Laura Elston, PA

news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=4027691

Fri 21 Jan 2005

2:47am

(UK)

Gena Turgel entered the gas chamber at Auschwitz and lived to tell the tale.

In the winter of 1944, the 21-year-old was made to strip naked with her mother inside the concentration camp’s extermination block and wait, but miraculously the deadly poison was never released.

“We were trembling. I didn’t know where we were. Inside, it looked terrible. A woman came in that I recognised from a previous camp. She was very shocked I was there and went out again.

“We waited a while and then water came through the walls. It was wonderful. For many weeks we had had no water on our backs. We were all drinking it.

“As we came outside, the women there said how wonderful it was to see us. They screamed with happiness. I didn’t understand what they meant. I said ‘What are you shouting about?’

“They said ‘Don’t you know? You were in the gas chamber.‘ I lost my voice. I couldn’t produce any saliva.”

[…]