Remarkable nonsense

Holocaust Survivor

11/16/2004

www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=13372898
&BRD=901&PAG=461&dept_id=130069&rfi=6

HARLAN — “Every minute was a triumph for me to be alive,” Judy Meisel told 150 wide-eyed freshmen at Harlan Community High School Thursday.

Meisel, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, spoke to students in Harlan, Audubon and Elk Horn-Kimballton last week. Her visit was sponsored by The Danish Immigrant Museum.

Meisel related her experiences and answered questions after students watched her documentary film, Tak for Alt, meaning Thanks for Everything. The film describes her experiences during World War II, and her eventual arrival in Denmark during the spring of 1945. […] She was taken into custody and placed in the concentration camp, forced into slave labor at the age of 12. […] One of her scariest moments was watching her mother taken to the gas chamber. When she visited the same chamber years later, you could still see the fingernails in the walls of the chamber, she said.

[…]

---

Webmaster note: No wonder no one has been able to find any evidence of a Nazi gas chamber: Everyone has been looking in Poland!

Meisel, Holocaust survivor, lectures at SHU

10/30/04

By Neha Bawa

Copy Editor

blogs.setonhill.edu/Setonian/005553.html

Judith Meisel, Holocaust survivor, lectured at Seton Hill University (SHU) on October 26, 2004.

[…]

In June 1944, her family, along with other Jews, was taken into trucks and sent to Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. Here she was separated from her brother.

“We went into Stutthof and all I saw was [this] huge pile of shoes,” said Meisel, describing the camp. She lost her mother at Stutthof, where she was gassed to death.

[…]

Posted by Setonian Online at October 30, 2004 09:57 AM

Diary provides new glimpse into horrors of Holocaust

• Entries from Dutch prison camp depict loneliness, sorrow and finally desperation

By ISABELLE WESSELINGH

Agence France-Presse

Wednesday, Oct 20, 2004

www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/

TPStory/LAC/20041020/DIARY20/TPInternational/Europe

THE HAGUE — A newly discovered diary of a young Jewish woman has allowed for a haunting glimpse into her life at a Dutch prison camp during the Second World War, before she was sent to her death.

“Even though everybody is very nice to me, I feel so lonely. […]

[…]

How the diary was smuggled out of the detention camp and survived all these years is “an absolute mystery,” Tilburg archivists said.

[…]

2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.

[…]

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 [email protected] 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.