Author: Webb

Holocaust History: A Lesson In Denial

History teacher Patrick Richardson will introduce his lesson on Holocaust denial by issuing students a press release from the future that declares Sept. 11, 2001, never happened.

[…]

By JESSE LEAVENWORTH

Courant Staff Writer

April 12 2004

www.ctnow.com/news/local/hc-5holo0412.artapr12,0,3974702.story?coll=hc-headlines-local

Copyright 2004, Hartford Courant

Survivor is more than a number

Dario Gabbai, who was interned at Auschwitz, shares painful memories with Chaffey class.

Jeff Benson

Claremont-Upland Voice

April 9, 2004

www.latimes.com/news/local/clv/la-clv-genocide09apr09,1,5938701.story?coll=la-tcn-clv-news

“182568.”

The teary-eyed man recited the number quickly and without looking, dejectedly revealing to a startled Chaffey College class last Friday why it’s tattooed on his left arm.

“I tell my story because there’s very few left anymore who can tell it,” he said.

An Auschwitz survivor, Dario Gabbai doesn’t feel like just a number anymore. But the fact he still bears one reminds him of other numbers — the estimated 6 million people slaughtered under the Nazi regime; the 54,000 Jews herded like cattle from his hometown of Salonika, Greece, to the Auschwitz labor and death camp in 1944, and the 12,000 people killed there every day, including his own mother and sister.

And at 82, the Italian-Greek Jew still feels he had a hand in unspeakable evils.

With the German Security Service aiming a gun at his back at all times, Gabbai was forced to assist the Nazis in their extermination of Jews at the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau labor and death camp.

“There was no choice,” he said. “If you didn’t do it, the guy behind you was going to kill you. That’s it.”

As sonderkommandos in Birkenau during World War II, Gabbai and his two cousins ushered Hungarian Jews into gas chambers disguised as “showers,” removed the bodies after the Zyklon-B poisoned gas aired out and discarded them into crematoriums in order to dispose of the evidence of Nazi crimes.

He said, at times, close to 2,000 people packed into gas chambers with capacities of 500. Gabbai tried to make the best of an impossible situation, though, going as far as telling those who were about to die exactly where they should move inside the chamber so they could die quickly with the least amount of suffering.

[…]

“Did you ever wish you were the one being killed?” one student asked him.

“Yeah,” he said immediately. “Many times.”

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PETA BRINGS CONTROVERSIAL ‘HOLOCAUST ON YOUR PLATE’ EXHIBIT TO AMSTERDAM

Date: Thursday, March 8

Time: Noon

Place: Leidseplein (Leiden Square)

www.unobserver.com/layout4.php?id=1564&blz=1

Amsterdam — PETA’s controversial “Holocaust on Your Plate” exhibit is coming to Amsterdam. The display, which consists of eight 6-meter-square panels, each showing photos of factory-farm and slaughterhouse scenes side by side with photos from Nazi death camps, graphically depict the point made by Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer when he wrote, “In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis.”

“Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”

— Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), German Jewish philosopher forced into exile by the Nazis

Queens Fire Kills Survivor of Holocaust

An 82-year-old Holocaust survivor was killed early yesterday morning when a fire tore through his Queens home.

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Rotter was forced to make the infamous “Death March” from Auschwitz into the Polish countryside, when the Nazis evacuated the camp in 1945, {grandson Boruch] Salzberg said.

By Jeremy Olshan

April 5, 2004

www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/22277.htm

Concentration camp survivor in Anniston has many scars

By Brett Buckner

April 5, 2004

www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040405/APN/404050531

ANNISTON, Ala.

Some remain hidden, consumed by the darkness of memory, where the delicate suffering of hope serves only as a constant reminder of a pain once endured but never forgotten. These are the scars that never completely heal. Max Steinmetz has many scars.

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In the fall of 1943, Steinmetz, along with his family and thousands of Jews, stood on the wooden ramp of a Polish railway station waiting in line for “the selection.” […]

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Born in what would become Hungary, Steinmetz and his family were sequestered with other Jews in ghettos before German soldiers forced them onto train cars. They spent three days riding in freight cars packed with people, and with only a third of a loaf of bread to eat apiece during the entire trip. When the doors opened in Poland, they were thankful to breathe fresh air again.

[…]

After looking the 16-year-old Steinmetz over, with a wave of his hand [Dr. Joseph] Mengele sent the teenager, along with his younger brother, to the right. Steinmetz’s mother, father and baby sister were sent to the left. He would never see them again.

Later that night, sick with worry, he grabbed the attention of a passing prisoner, a man who knew a great deal about the prison, including the horrible stench that hung heavy in the air, which Steinmetz describes as “smelling like burning meat:”

“I asked him what it was,” Steinmetz says.

‘You don’t know?’

“No,” I said.

‘When did you come here?’

“This morning.”

‘What about your parents, did they come with you?’

“Yes.”

‘Where did they go when you got off the train?’

“To the left.”

‘That’s what you smell. That’s the crematorium. Your parents are dead and that’s them being burned.'”

Prisoners sent to the left were urged quietly forward into “shower rooms,” where they were stripped of their clothes and told that they were about to be bathed and given fresh clothes. There were water pipes and sprays along the ceiling, but no drains on the floor. Instead of water, Zyklon B gas spewed from the showerheads, killing all inside within a matter of minutes.

[…]

After only a few weeks, Steinmetz and his brother were again packed into freight cars and taken to Dachau in Germany, the oldest concentration camp and known as “murder school” because it trained troops that went to other concentration camps. […]

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From the Holocaust to Saddam

Suzanne Fields

April 5, 2004

www.townhall.com/columnists/suzannefields/sf20040405.shtml

We’re supposed to learn lessons from history, but the lessons we learn depend on who’s writing the history — and who’s reading it.

With the help of a few of our friends, we rid the world of a psychotic madman who used torture, rape and poison gas to dispatch his enemies, and critics mock us for calling him “evil.” We have yet to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — the weapons that everyone agrees were once there because he used them — and our sunshine friends in Europe can’t see the moral purpose in the enterprise. They dismiss Saddam as just another monster coughed up by nature, a monster that we should have, or could have, ignored. The more these critics learn of his heinous crimes, the less they see how much his crimes mattered.

David Gelernter calls this phenomenon the “Holocaust Shrug.” It’s the head-in-the-sand defense for doing nothing. “The world’s indifference to the Coalition’s achievement resembles its long-running, well-established lack of interest in Hitler’s crimes,” he writes in The Weekly Standard. “I don’t claim that Saddam resembles Hitler; I do claim that the world’s indifference to Saddam resembles its indifference to Hitler.”

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Anti-Israel sentiment shows need for Holocaust education

Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi cited current anti-Israel sentiment Friday as a reason to boost education on the Holocaust during Italy’s presidency of an international task force.

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Berlusconi said he has proposed a day be set aside in Italian schools specially for education on the Holocaust. The history of the Holocaust “has to be remembered always, and above all by young people,” Berlusconi said.

Associated Press

Apr. 2, 2004

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/
ShowFull&cid=1080885960847&p=1008596975996