Remarkable nonsense

LANDIS — “My number is 34042.”

Dr. Susan Cernyak-Spatz can never forget that number. Living through two years in a Nazi death camp during World War II carved it on her mind like Adolf Hitler’s Nazis tattooed it in blue on her left forearm.

Cernyak-Spatz survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of Germany’s five death camps […].

[…]

Cernyak-Spatz was, she says, lucky. When she arrived at Birkenau in 1943, she was 18 years old and childless, good for labor. Preteen girls, women past their mid-30s and women with children went straight to the gas chamber, she said.

[…]

Cernyak-Spatz […] is a retired language professor. She still teaches one course a year on the Holocaust at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and travels extensively speaking about it.

[…]

“He didn’t exterminate a race,” Cernyak-Spatz said of Hitler. “He exterminated innocent babies, old people, young people, brilliant writers, brilliant artists, brilliant scientists … for no other reason than he wanted it.”

[…]

Then the soldiers started killing them. At first, German SS soldiers forced Jews to dig a pit, then lined them up and knocked them into the pit with bullets from their machine guns — line after line of Jews.

[…]

It also cost a lot of ammunition, which the German army decided it couldn’t afford with a war going on. So the Nazis looked for a more efficient means of mass murder.

They settled first on trucks, into which they packed Jews and ran carbon monoxide exhaust. But they could only kill about 150 people at a time that way, so they built the death camps.

[…]

So fierce was Hitler’s hatred, trains carrying Jews to the death camps were given priority even over troop trains carrying soldiers to battle, Cernyak-Spatz said. When she stepped off the train and onto the platform at Birkenau, the results assaulted her senses.

“The first thing you noticed was an absolutely incredible stink,” she said. The noxious, sickly sweet odor hung in the air with a dusky vapor billowing from smokestacks and staining the distant sky, she said.

[…]

“Then they took them directly in the direction of that smoke,” Cernyak-Spatz said. Soon, those who survived learned what burned in those buildings.

Guards led prisoners into the large buildings, told them to take off their clothes, hang them on hooks. And remember, tie your shoe laces together, they said, so you don’t lose a shoe.

The Nazis had told Jews to dress in their warmest clothes for the journey to the “work” camps, Cernyak-Spatz said. After the gas chambers, they gathered those clothes for their own use.

For the years during the war, “that is how the whole German nation was clothed … in the clothing and property of dead Jews,” she said.

[…]

The mass killings in the gas chambers took only about eight minutes, Cernyak-Spatz said. For those not selected to die right away, death could come more slowly, usually after a couple of months of hard labor and near starvation.

[…]

“Infection in Birkenau went directly into gangrene,” she said. “And you were ready for the gas.”

[…]

Newly arrived prisoners got a bowl — only a bowl, no utensils. They used it to eat and drink. And when they had to, when a guard wouldn’t let them use a bucket outside at night, to eliminate their own bodily waste.

When they had to do that, they dumped the waste out beside their bunks, which were stacked three high. Cernyak-Spatz said one of the first lessons at Birkenau was “to find a top bunk.”

[…]

Between 1,500 and 2,000 Jews died in the chambers at Birkenau every day. Some went willingly, Cernyak-Spatz said.

[…]

She also survived scabies, hepatitis, scarlet fever and probably other illnesses, she said.

[…]

Source:

www.salisburypost.com/2000may/051300a.htm
BY SCOTT JENKINS
SALISBURY POST

COMMUNICATED BY THE ISRAELI MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, JERUSALEM.

Contact: David Baker, Ministry of Education, Jerusalem.

Tel: 972-2-560-3408, 972-2-560-3700; Fax: (02) 560-3706 Home: 972-2- 673-2221

Israeli Education Minister’s speech at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland, scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, May 2, 2000

THE Honorable President of the State of Israel, The Honorable President of Poland, The Honorable Minister of Education of Poland, Our precious pupils, My brothers and sisters,

How terrible this place is, and how awful this ground we walk on is, the most defiled place in the history of mankind, and the holiest place in the history of mankind.

There is no other place in the world where the ground cries out more, crying out to us in the voice of our brothers and sisters, and the sounds are those of blood crying out.

And when the blood cries out — who would not stand still? We are all here, standing for a moment of silence and we — together, hear the blood cry out.

We stand above the largest factory in the world — the largest death factory in the history of mankind. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the largest death camp of all,

Twenty-Thousand Jews were massacred, cremated, choked and poisoned here in one day. At this place, Satan installed the most sophisticated extermination assembly lines in the history of the industry of murder.

The death factory — Auschwitz-Birkenau — began operating on June 5, 1940, and continued working till January 1945 — nearly five continuous years — until the Red Army arrived and saved the survivors.

One and half million people, the vast majority of them Jews, were murdered at this place, their piercing screams reached the heavens, which had no mercy on them. The crematoriums’ chimneys hid the skies.

I walk in Auschwitz, in the tracks of the abandoned shoes, of the extracted teeth, of the cut off hair, of the misplaced baggage — in order to find the last moments of my family — the Schneider family — of which only a SARID — survivor — was left.

From within this great wail that we hear today, I am attempting to sort through the cries and hear the screams of uncles and aunts, of my cousins, little boys and girls, my grandmother and grandfather. They call out my name, and I hear them now.

Here they are, right before me, their eyes are darting back and forth, they stare at us now. This is our family, the family was devoured and this is the robe of Yosef (Joseph) my Uncle Joseph.

And the Holocaust survivors say that there was and will not be any robe, and that Joseph was never here and that he was never murdered.

Some three weeks ago, in London, David Irving was called a Holocaust denier by the court. This vile person, like his other associates, have told the world in recent years that the trains never reached this place from across Europe — from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Greece, France, Germany, Belgium, Yugoslavia and other countries.

The Holocaust deniers say that Mengele never stood here on the ramp to identify the twins, and tear them from the arms of their mother and father, and conduct medical experiments on them, as if they were animals in an experiment.

They say that the crematoriums were a product of the imagination, and that the chimneys were a backdrop.

From this place we will voice our contempt for Holocaust deniers, and those who have forgotten it. And our contempt will be echoed from one end of the world to the other.

The robe in our hands is one we have identified, this is the robe of our father, this is the robe of our sons, this is the robe of Joseph — who was murdered.

This is his hair, these are his teeth, these are his eyeglasses, these are his shoes, and this was his final journey from the ramp, the “rampa”, to the gas chamber, and this was the last station in his life, and the ashes of his body are scattered here, around us.

Your presence here today, all of us, of the President of our country here together with us, is the answer to the Holocaust deniers.

And our collective answer shall be: there shall be no hope for the deniers! — there shall be no hope for the deniers!

From this ramp, from Mengele’s block, from the gas chambers — we still hear the voice:

Hear o’ Israel, Hear o’ Israel.

And Israel hears. And Israel hears.

AP-NY-04-05-00 1835EDT

By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel on Wednesday urged lawmakers to fight re-emerging anti-Semitism and other prejudice around the world, telling a Senate committee that “hatred is still alive and well.”

“I belong to a traumatized generation that has witnessed the defeat of Nazism and communism, but not that of hatred,” said Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize. “Had I considered the possibility hatred would re-emerge so soon, I would not have believed it.”

Wiesel testified at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that brought together a disparate group of witnesses to talk about the “Legacy of the Holocaust.”

Jewish groups urged the U.S. government to speak out against what they said is a revival of anti-Semitism in the Middle East, former Soviet Union and elsewhere. U.S. government officials brought the committee up to date on programs around the world to compensate Holocaust survivors and on the progress of a U.S. presidential commission that is investigating Holocaust-related issues in the states.

“Hatred did not die in Auschwitz,” Wiesel told the committee. “Jews perished there, not anti-Semitism. Hatred is still alive and well.”

“Nazis and neo-nazis are everywhere,” he said. “I don’t know who finances them, but they are active and vocal, and we find them everywhere.”

He raised the question of what should be done about those who deny the Holocaust or espouse hatred and prejudice.

“Should there be a way of checking when and where their words cross the line of free speech, which is so important to us?” he asked. “When it becomes a cycle of hate and violence, what are we to do? What can you do as the lawmakers of this land?” [note]

American Jewish Committee Executive Director David A. Harris urged the panel to look at what his organization called the “shocking revival of vitriolic anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial” across the Arab world.

“Islamic anti-Semitic activity in the Middle East can no longer be ignored or downplayed or viewed as little more than an Arab negotiating tactic in the complex Arab-Israeli peace talks,” he said in his prepared testimony.

“There is an urgent need to reject this behavior unconditionally,” he said, citing comments by the Mufti of Jerusalem trivializing the Holocaust during the Pope’s pilgrimage there last month.

And the National Conference on Soviet Jewry said U.S. officials should emphasize to their counterparts in former Soviet states the importance of democracy and minority rights.

“We would never have imagined a post-Soviet landscape littered with neo-Nazi and fascist-oriented extremists visibly trying to revive the … ideology against which the Russian people battled so fiercely,” said Mark B. Levin, executive director of the group, which advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States and Eurasia.

“It is with sadness and frustration that we must face reality — ethnic hatred in Kosovo and Rwanda, nationalist hatred in Chechnya, political hatred in the Middle East,” Wiesel said.

Note: Holocaust revisionists (not “deniers,” as Wiesel and others mendaciously refer to them) are the victims of violence, not the cause of it. There is not one reported or known case of Holocaust revisionism leading to violence. There are, however, numerous cases of revisionists being harassed, beaten up, and even murdered for their views.

History lesson in person

• Teens hear from Auschwitz survivor

By Shelly Whitehead, Post staff reporter

Publication date: 03-29-00

For awhile, Gene Deutsch’s teen-age years had been as carefree as those of the Dayton, Ky., students he talked with Tuesday: He liked to walk to school with his girlfriend, and he loved his family very much.

Then his world changed. It was 1943. Deutsch lived in Hungary. And he was Jewish.

“When we arrived at Auschwitz,” said Deutsch, a Cincinnati businessman recalling the day he rolled into the Nazi concentration camp in a crowded boxcar, “there was a sign that said in German, ‘Work will make you free.’ When people got off the train, most were directed to what they called the bathhouse, which was where the killing took place.

“Confusion soon took over. Children screamed for their mothers as they became lost. There was blood everywhere. The SS guards picked up the children who were screaming and hauled them away. And the poison gas was poured into the gas chambers from the outside so the people closest to the vents were the first to die. The others kept screaming for their life, but after about ten minutes, everything was quiet.”

[…]

Deutsch’s account of his first day at Auschwitz — and the last day to see his family — drew the rapt attention Tuesday of the junior history students he was speaking to in the school’s library. For two hours the students listened, watched and questioned continually.

[…]

“When were you allowed to eat,” a student wondered. “What did they give you?”

“In the morning for breakfast — there was no breakfast. We were supposed to have tea, but all it was was warm water. Then they took us to the camp and for lunch we had potatoes if they had them, but most of the time we got dog meat or mice… In the evening, back at camp, bread was issued, but it was black bread with a small piece of margarine added to it.”

[…]

Please forward to Germar Rudolf.

Dear Germar:

I am Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine. I would like to ask you a few questions about your research. In Errol Morris’ film “Mr. Death,” he shows the fatal mistakes made by Fred Leuchter in his chemical analysis of the concrete and brick from numerous locations at Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. I would like to inquire if you made the same errors in your research and if not, how did your research take these problems into account:

1. Since the gas chamber at Auschwitz 1 is a reconstruction, what would make him (or you) think that the particular section from which he chipped concrete was part of the original?
2. The bricks at Kremas 2, 3, 4, 5 at Birkenau have been moved about the camp over the decades, some used by the locals to rebuild their homes. How can you be sure that the bricks you tested are from the actual gas chambers?
3. Even if the bricks and concrete at Kremas 2, 3, 4, 5 at Birkenau were original, they have been exposed to half a century of brutal weathering. How did you adjust your findings accordingly?
4. Leuchter chipped off huge chunks of concrete and brick and ground up the entire chunks into powder when they were analyzed (or, more to the point, the chemist whom he gave the samples to did because Leuchter didn’t tell him what they were), thereby diluting the Zyklon-B traces by hundreds of thousands of times. As you must know, Zyklon-B gas only penetrates about 10 microns into concrete (a human hair, by comparison, is 100 microns thick). What was your procedure for controlling for this problem?

Thank you for your attention.

Michael Shermer

[email protected]

Note: Others have responded to these questions from Shermer elsewhere, although one scarcely knows where to begin. Even after being exposed to the answers to these questions for years prior to the sending of this message, Shermer cannot or will not forsake his anti-revisionist bias in favor of skepticism. If as publisher of Skeptic magazine, Shermer is at the forefront of skeptics in the United States — if not the world — then skepticism is dead, as is independent thought.

I visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp during Winter 1997 (…) Near the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers one may still see an old truck, the engine of which was activated by the Nazis in order to prevent the inmates from hearing the shrieks of their fellow comrades …

From the February 29, 2000, Journée nationale des Justes de France:

Private hell of a charming rabbi

Chasing Shadows

Hugo Gryn with Naomi Gryn

Viking, £16.99

Reviewed by Hyam Maccoby

Rabbi Hugo Gryn was well known as the genial contributor of Jewish wisdom to the radio programme The Moral Maze. […]

Yet, despite his bonhomie, no one had a deeper experience of human misery and human evil. As a youth, brought up in a wealthy, loving and pious family, he was plunged into the hell of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Most of his family perished, but he survived by good luck and at times good judgment. He was one of the very few who actually entered a gas chamber at Auschwitz and lived to tell the tale (he had somehow wandered into a crowd of children marked down for gassing and was sent out by a meticulous guard at the last moment as over-age).

[…]

[…] They were eventually gassed in Auschwitz. Hugo himself, having escaped the gas chambers by pretending to be a carpenter, was one of the few survivors of the subsequent death march and came within an inch of death from typhus. His father, however, was too ill to survive more than a few days after the liberation. Hugo made his way back to Berehovo and was overjoyed to find his mother alive, the only other survivor of his immediate family.

[…]

“I am here for my wife,” said Dutch veteran John Franken, 77, who was captured and forced into slave labour in a Japanese coal mine three months before the atomic bomb was dropped Hiroshima. “She was at Auschwitz and got sent to the gas chamber three times. She survived because they kept running out of gas.”

Montreal Gazette, February 10 (?), 2000, discussing a demonstration outside the Austrian embassy by Holocaust “survivors” and other Jews.