Documents

Ashes Adrift in a Gentle Wind

Thousands of men and women slaughtered, many of them incinerated, their bodies never to be found. Ashes, the remains of loved ones, friends and neighbors, drifting in a gentle wind for miles. Auschwitz, 1944, or New York City, September 2001? The stench of death making it impossible for anyone in the vicinity ever to claim that he or she was unaware of the carnage. Bergen-Belsen, 1945, or New York City, September 2001? No, there is no comparison. But there are echoes.

The effort to identify the thousands of people buried under the rubble of the World Trade Center has raised difficult questions for the guardians of ancient Jewish traditions.

By DICK FOSTER

Scripps Howard News Service

August 22, 2001

— Joe Mauk wears the green beret of the Army’s elite Special Forces and a uniform bedecked with ribbons and medals for bravery. He talks about his time in Vietnam, his 11 purple hearts for wounds, his Silver and Bronze stars for valor, and his captivity as a prisoner of war for nearly 2 1/2 years.

His stories have brought tears to the eyes of adults at his many speaking engagements. And when the Vietnam Memorial “Traveling Wall” came to the Denver area July 13-15, “Master Sgt.” Mauk was invited as the keynote speaker.

There’s only one problem.

According to Army records, Mauk was never a prisoner of war, never in Vietnam, never a member of the Special Forces, never wounded in battle, and never a master sergeant.

Mauk’s soldier persona began to unravel July 16, after the Rocky Mountain News published a photo and article on his appearance at the Traveling Wall.

Outraged Vietnam veterans and ex-prisoners of war erupted with e-mails and phone calls saying that Mauk is not what he claimed to be. They said impostors dishonor the 58,226 who died in Vietnam, the 153,363 who were wounded, and the 661 real military prisoners of war.

Mauk was confronted Monday with Army and Defense Department records in a meeting with the News and retired Navy Capt. Mike McGrath, an ex-captive who heads the national Vietnam prisoner-of-war organization NAM-POWS.

Mauk staunchly maintained that he served in Special Forces, was injured 11 times and was a prisoner of war for two years, four months and nine days, but could provide no records to confirm any of his claims.

“I’m in the process of getting documentation sent to me at the present time, from a colonel with (military) intelligence,” Mauk said.

Mauk’s stance brought an angry rebuke from McGrath, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and Navy fighter pilot who spent five years and eight months in a North Vietnamese POW camp.

“Mr. Mauk, I’d like to say one word. You’re not worthy of laying flowers on the graves of my roommates and my squadron mates and the people who died beside me in Hanoi,” McGrath said. “You’re not worthy of even talking to one of those graves.”

McGrath had known of Mauk long before their meeting Monday.

“He’s just a fraud,” McGrath said. “He’s been listed as a fraud for five or six years. I carry 668 of these frauds on our list now. What they think is that 28 years has gone by and people won’t know the difference, so they can just do anything they want.”

(Contact Dick Foster of the Rocky Mountain News.)

WASHINGTON, July 5 (UPI) — Defense attorneys have long known that eyewitness identifications are notoriously unreliable in criminal proceedings. A new study sheds light on why.

Ideas

ROME — When Alessandro Portelli was doing an oral history of a small working-class Italian city in the 1970s, he became puzzled when his subjects repeatedly made factual errors or even related events that had never happened. For instance, when talking about the death of a worker named Luigi Trastulli, who had been killed in a clash with the police in 1949, the people Mr. Portelli interviewed all insisted that the event had occurred during demonstrations in 1953.

WASHINGTON (AP) — People who disagree with political orthodoxy should not “censor ourselves” or yield to criticism, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Tuesday.

To: The MEDIA

Re: CONCENTRATION CAMP SURVIVORS

Dear Sir / Madam,

My name is Alexander McClelland I am an Australian veteran of WWII, a TPI (Totally and Permanently Incapacitated) and a survivor of a Concentration Camp.

Cremations nonstop in quake’s wake

• DISASTER: The number of dead creates an overwhelming need.

AHMEDABAD, India — An electric crematorium in this city was so overloaded that the hinges of the furnace door melted. Outside, wood-fired funeral pyres burned around the clock, overwhelming mourners with foul-smelling smoke.

“The bodies just keep coming in. Sometimes entire families, other times three or four members of a family,” said Syed Zain, the operator of the electric furnace at the Ellis Bridge Crematorium in central Ahmedabad.

The awesome human toll extracted by Friday’s earthquake in western India becomes obvious at Ahmedabad’s 11 crematoriums, which have been overwhelmed by the unending stream of bodies.

Hindus, the majority in India, believe that not cremating a body will leave the person’s soul in limbo — a fate worse than hell.

Zain said he has lost count of the number of bodies he has cremated. Besides those who died in Ahmedabad, people have brought corpses from nearby towns.

At the Ellis Bridge Crematorium, the registry clerk said that from an average of three to six cremations a day, the numbers had risen to about 50 a day.

“I have never seen anything like this in 22 years that I have worked in this crematorium. The number have mounted with each passing day,” said Zain, his eyes red with fatigue and fumes from the nearby wood-burning funeral pyres.

The proximity of the Ellis Bridge Crematorium to the V.S. Hospital, one of the city’s biggest, has meant that people who died of injuries have received the last rites here.

The electric furnace has been operating around the clock, Zain said. In the compound of the crematorium, 10 to 12 traditional funeral pyres of wooden logs burned continuously. At any given time, at least 10 or 12 bodies were being consigned to flames.

At the Saptarishi cremation ground, mourners lit incense sticks and threw sandalwood, sesame seeds and clarified butter into the flames in accordance with Hindu rituals. But the sweet combination could not hide the sulfurous, noxious smell of burning flesh.

The long wait and queues at the crematoriums have forced families to burn two or three bodies together.

Aslam Mansoori, the operator of the electric furnace at the Saptarishi crematorium, said it was so overworked after the earthquake that the hinges of its doors melted. The furnace had to be cooled down and the hinges replaced.

The electric furnace is maintained at more than 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, but the temperature in its inner chamber goes up when corpses are burned.

In Bhuj, the town closest to the epicenter of the earthquake, workers used wood pulled from fallen houses to light funeral pyres.

The late-night hours are the most hectic, said A. B. Mehta, manager at the Dudheshwar Cremation Home, the city’s oldest facility. At night, bodies lying unclaimed in the hospital or found on the streets are brought to be burned.

Source: NIRMALA GEORGE, The Associated Press

Webmaster note: Too bad India doesn’t have the secret Nazi technology that, according to anti-revisionists, allowed them to cremate Jewish bodies in a few minutes using a couple pounds of coal! Funny, how no one today has been able to equal that Nazi technology. A skeptic might wonder if the stories of Nazi crematory efficiency aren’t gross exaggerations.