Survivor recalls Holocaust terror
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Author: Webb
Nazis Hated Hair
Holocaust survivor tells students at Monache her tales of terror
By Janet Enquist, The Porterville Recorder
www.portervillerecorder.com/articles/2004/10/14/news/local_state/news05.txt
The German soldiers admired her hair as she walked around the concentration camp.
“They said, ‘Look at her hair,'” said Holocaust survivor Elane Norych Geller. “It’s too pretty for a Jewish child. So they shaved my head. My aunt cried because she didn’t recognize me and for this she was beaten.”
This was one of many accounts Geller gave in a presentation to AVID students at Monache High School Wednesday afternoon. AVID stands for Advanced Via Individual Determination, which is a program designed to prepare high school students for a four-year college.
Geller was imprisoned when she was 4 years old and was not liberated until she was 8. […] Six million were killed and one million of those were children under the age of 17. […]
[…]
When the Nazis came into her town, her father told her to put on numerous dresses. She had so many on that she couldn’t put her arms down. He also took off her earrings because the Nazis were known for grabbing onto Jewish women’s earrings while they were running away to rip them off. […] Geller was taken to a concentration camp.
[…]
Since Geller was so young, she did not work. Therefore, in their eyes, she didn’t count. Her aunt shared whatever food she could with Geller.
“Every day that you lived there was a hope you would live another day,” Geller said. While in the camps she became sick with typhoid and tuberculosis. She also had two punctured ear drums from being hit and had suffered from lice and rats in her hair. She also drank urine and ate toothpaste. “I did whatever was necessary to stay alive.”
[…]
Students attending the presentation said it was interesting.
“I thought it was really good because she told us how it was and what she lived through so you don’t forget what happened,” said Victoria Avalos, 17.
“I thought it was really educational,” said 15-year-old Ben Hensley. “I was amazed at all of the things she had to go through and how she could talk about it without her emotions coming out and just share it.”
Geller, who currently lives in Southern California, travels all over California and the United States to share her story. […]
Contact Janet Enquist at 784-5000, Ext. 1050, or [email protected]
This story was published in The Porterville Recorder on October 14, 2004
Jews still fear bathing
Chicago Nursing Homes Grouping Residents
By DON BABWIN, Associated Press Writer
Tue Oct 12, 4:17 AM ET
news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519
&u=/ap/20041012/ap_on_re_us/ethnic_nursing_homes_2
&printer=1
CHICAGO — Mid America Convalescent Center is one of a growing number of Chicago-area nursing homes that assemble residents by ethnicity. Asians live on one floor, Hispanics are on another.
Each group has its own traditional food, activities and a staff that speaks its language. Within a few miles are other facilities doing the same for Poles, Russians, Indians and Koreans.
There have long been nursing homes that cater to certain nationalities and religions, or become popular with different ethnic groups. But in Chicago, with the third largest number of foreign-born residents in the United States, that sort of specialization is becoming increasingly common and formalized, said Kevin Kavanaugh, spokesman for the Illinois Council on Long Term Care.
[…]
Kavanaugh,[…] said nursing homes often already deal with a specific population with specific needs.
“They may be reverting back in time, perhaps speaking their native language, living in the past,” he said. “You want to have a program that meets them at their sense of reality.”
Specialized ethnic care can be helpful, advocates argue. Nursing homes must be aware, for example, of elderly Jewish residents for whom a trip to the shower may trigger memories of the Holocaust.
[…]
Copyright © 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Webmaster note: Thanks to website visitor Mike for sending in this gem.
Nazi target practice
Concentration camp
from Wikinfo, an internet encyclopedia
www.internet-encyclopedia.org/wiki.php?title=Concentration_camp
[…]
Germany
Concentration camps rose to notoriety during their use in World War II by Germany. The Nazi regime nominally maintained both kinds of concentration camps, work camps and extermination camps. The distinction between the two, in practice, was very small. Prisoners in Nazi work camps could expect to be worked to death in short order, while prisoners in extermination camps usually died sooner in gas chambers or in other ways. Guards were known to engage in target practice, using their prisoners as targets.
[…]
Webmaster note: I have dated this October 12, 2004, because this is the day I found it. There is no date on the webpage cited above.
Historians say Nazis planned to rebuild Auschwitz in Austria
Sunday October 10, 2004
kcal9.com/international/Germany-Auschwitz-ai/resources_news_html
BERLIN (AP) Nazi officials planned to move the Auschwitz gas chambers to a concentration camp in Austria as the Germans retreated westward from the Soviet army near the end of World War II, a magazine reported Sunday.
[…]
Austrian historians Bertrand Perz and Florian Freund drew their conclusions in part from correspondence and accounts by survivors of both camps, the report said.
[…]
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
The Holocaust was everywhere
Scholar: Holocaust crimes in countryside, small towns, too
by Kayleigh Kulp
Staff Writer
Issue date: 10.06.2004
www.washingtonsquarenews.com/news/campus/7869.html
Contrary to collective contemporary memory, the genocide of the Holocaust was perpetrated as much in small towns and the countryside as in the sprawling, mechanized death camps of the Third Reich, a Holocaust scholar said last night at the Kimmel Center.
[…]
Twenty-five percent, or about 1.4 million of total number of Jews killed were murdered outside of “bureaucratic processes,” Engel said, while 57 percent of total murdered Jews perished in concentration camps. The rest died in local, small-scale murders in smaller countries like Croatia, Ukraine and Estonia, said Engel, a Hebrew and Judaic studies professor and author of “The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews.”
It happened outside of people’s homes and police headquarters; even peasants joined the Nazis to destroy lives. This is a little-known fact today, even to Holocaust scholar Rolf Wolfswinkel, a historian and the organizer of the series.
[…]
Peace, hope, love, and lies about Germans
Holocaust survivor urges peace, hopes youth learn from past
By Kara Patterson
Post-Crescent staff writer
www.wisinfo.com/postcrescent/news/archive/local_18045739.shtml
GRAND CHUTE — In a Europe driven mad by war, Holocaust survivor Henry Golde was the innocent target of many hateful words and deeds.
For five years in adolescence Golde, 75, endured the terrors of nine different Nazi-run concentration camps during World War II.
But he’s chosen to share with everyone — especially young people — the message that love is stronger.
“When you hate, you actually hurt yourself more,” said Golde, a native of Poland and resident of Appleton, kicking off Fox Valley Technical College’s 2004-05 lecture series Thursday.
“Why don’t you hate ‘hate’ itself? Hate is nothing, and love is everything,” said Golde, whose message resonated with international student Kathi Tsang of Bielefeld, Germany, whose host family lives in Neenah.
[…]
In World War II’s notorious prisons of Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia — among them Buchenwald and Theresienstadt — Golde dodged death countless times through a combination of luck, quick thinking and the unpredictable whims of German overseers.
Golde said he witnessed horrors that made him an adult at 11, and five years later an old man.
[…]
He watched German officers loose their dogs on living prisoners. The dogs ripped the people apart, he said.
To elude capture one day, Golde lay prone atop a pile of dead bodies. He fought nausea and fear, telling himself they were “rag dolls” but still painfully aware they once had names and families.
[.]
The war was over for Golde when Russian troops liberated Theresienstadt.
But the world’s struggle for land, power, greed and recognition also outlived the war, Golde said, and he fears another holocaust can happen at any time, in any place, to anyone.
[…]
Kara Patterson can be reached at 920-993-1000, ext. 215, or by e-mail at kpatterson@ postcrescent.com
Webmaster note:A few days later at another speaking engagement (see http://www.ironwooddailyglobe.com/1020holo.htm), Golde is said to have survived ten concentration camps, and to have lain atop the pile of dead bodies for “several days.” His story appears to be getting better with each retelling.
Beware of the ‘shower houses’
Holocaust survivor carries message of respect and tolerance
The First Rathergate: The CBS anchor’s precarious relationship with the truth
September 15, 2004, 5:52 a.m.
By Anne Morse
www.nationalreview.com/comment/morse200409150552.asp
Critics are calling the media scandal over the Jerry Killian forgeries “Rathergate.” But to thousands of Vietnam veterans, the real Rathergate took place 16 years ago when Dan Rather successfully foisted a fraud onto the American people. […]
On June 2, 1988, CBS aired an hour-long special titled CBS Reports: The Wall Within, which CBS trumpeted as the “rebirth of the TV documentary.” It purported to tell the true story of Vietnam through the eyes of six of the men who fought there. And what terrible stories they had to tell.
“I think I was one of the highest trained, underpaid, eighteen-cent-an-hour assassins ever put together by a team of people who knew exactly what they were looking for,” said Steve Southards, a Navy SEAL who told Rather he had escaped society to live in the forests of Washington state. Under Rather’s gentle coaxing, Southards described slaughtering Vietnamese civilians, making his work appear to be that of the North Vietnamese.
[…]
Rather then moved on to suicidal veteran named George Grule, who was stationed on the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga off the coast of Vietnam during a secret mission. Grule described the horror of watching a friend walk into the spinning propeller of a plane, which chopped him to pieces and sprayed Grule with his blood. The memory of this trauma left Grule, like Steve, unable to function in normal society.
Neither could Mikal Rice, who broke down as he described a grenade attack at Cam Ranh Bay, which blew in half the body of a buddy, “Sergeant Call.” “He died in my arms,” Rice tearfully recalled. Rice described how the sound of thunder and cars backfiring would regularly trigger his terrible memories.
Most horrific of all were the memories of Terry Bradley, a “fighting sergeant” who told Rather he had skinned alive 50 Vietnamese men, women, and children in one hour and stacked their bodies in piles. “Could you do this for one hour of your life, you stack up every way a body could be mangled, up into a body, an arm, a tit, an eyeball … Imagine us over there for a year and doing it intensely,” Bradley said. “That is sick.”
[…]
The The Wall Within was hailed by critics who — like the Washington Post’s Tom Shales — gushed that the documentary was “extraordinarily powerful.” There was just one problem: Almost none of it was true.
The truth was uncovered by B.G. Burkett, a Vietnam veteran and author of Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History (with Glenna Whitley). Burkett discovered that only one of the vets had actually served in combat. Steve Southards, who’d claimed to be a 16-year-old Navy SEAL assassin, had actually served as an equipment repairman stationed far from combat. […]
And George Gruel, who claimed he was traumatized by the sight of his friend being chopped to pieces by a propeller? Navy records reveal that a propeller accident did take place on the Ticonderoga when Gruel was aboard — but that he wasn’t around when it happened. […] Nevertheless, Burkett notes, Gruel receives $1,952 a month from the Veterans Administration for “psychological trauma” related to an event he only heard about.
Mikal Rice […] actually spent his tour as a guard with an MP company at Cam Ranh Bay. He never saw combat. Neither did Terry Bradley, who was not the “fighting sergeant” he’d claimed to be. […]
[…]
[…] Says Burkett: The Wall Within “precisely fit what Americans have grown to believe about the Vietnam War and its veterans: They routinely committed war crimes. They came home from an immoral war traumatized, vilified, then pitied. Jobless, homeless, addicted, suicidal, they remain afflicted by inner conflicts, stranded on the fringes of society.”
Burkett, who did check the records of the vets Rather interviewed, shared his discoveries with CBS. So did Thomas Turnage, then administrator of the Veterans Administration, who was appalled by Rather’s use of bogus statistics on the rates of suicide, homelessness, and mental illness among Vietnam veterans — statistics that can also be easily checked. […]
[…]
— Anne Morse is a writer living in Maryland.
Flames and a terrible smell
Holocaust Memorial to Open in Oregon
SARAH LINN
Associated Press
Posted on Sat, Aug. 28, 2004
www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/9521829.htm
PORTLAND, Ore. — For years, Chella Kryszek had nightmares about the dark, crowded cattle cars that shuttled her from concentration camp to concentration camp as a Dutch Jew during the Holocaust.
She remembers stepping out of one such car in 1943 outside the notorious Auschwitz-Berkenau death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Smoke and flames painted the sky and there was “a terrible smell,” Kryszek said.
[…]