Remembering Auschwitz

[angels4u]

Remembering Auschwitz

17:00 Jan 27, '05 / 17 Shevat 5765

(IsraelNN.com) Dozens of world leaders took part in the memorial observance, marking 60 years since the liberation of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp near Krakow in southern Poland.

Addressing the memorial this morning, President Moshe Katsav called on European nations to increase efforts to educate their young against anti-Semitism.

Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed embarrassment over the rise in anti-Semitism in his country, pointing out ironically that it was Russian forces which liberated the death camp.

[Arthur Durnan]

Anti-Semitism REIGNS SUPREME today. Simply check Warrior-General & Polygamist Muhammad of Yathrib's followers & compatriots on the world scene: Hitler II. Why deny the very obvious?

GOD BLESS AMERICA INDEED!

http://arthurdurnan.freeyellow.com

[Ani Ma'amin!]

There were a couple of shows on PBS about Auschwitz during the past couple of nights. Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to watch them.

Never forget. Never again.

[RustyAngeL]

I pray that this never happens again. We are deminished for the huge loss in that horrible place. God Bless our Jewish brothers and sisters who survived it and lived to tell about it. They have a spirit that can only come from an unshakeable faith in God.

[angels4u]

Its good to realize what really happened:

Memories of Auschwitz

Read Memories of Auschwitz: Part two.

Stephen Moss

Thursday January 13, 2005

The Guardian

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday January 19, 2005

In the feature below, one survivor remembers, "There was a Hungarian Jew who was ill with typhoid, so I scooped the lice from under his arm and put it inside the coat. The doctor got the disease and died". Typhus is the disease passed from human to human by the body louse, although typhoid, caused by a salmonella bacterium, was also present in the camp.

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Barbara Stimler

Barbara Stimler lives in an immaculate bungalow in Stanmore, north London. "All my life I wanted to have a nice home," she says, "because I lost my home when I was 12 years old." Stimler is 77 but looks younger in her smart grey suit. She cries when she relates her experiences, but despite the stress she is a regular speaker at schools. "The children listen to me as if they are glued on," she says. "They don't move. I get myself very exhausted when I talk to them, but I somehow feel lighter in my heart. After I have spoken, the children shake hands with me and hug me and thank me for coming. The boys are even more emotional than the girls."

Stimler was born in Poland, in the town of Aleksandrow Kujawski, close to the German border. There was no phony war here: the Germans invaded on Friday September 1, 1939. "We were straightaway bombed," she recalls. "The corner of our house was hit immediately and our neighbours were killed."

She was 12 years old, the only daughter of Sarah and Jakob, who owned a small textile shop. She was, she says, "the apple of my father's eye". She has a photograph of the two of them walking hand in hand in her home town, her proud father, dark and thick-set, in his man-of-the-world homburg.

After the invasion, the family moved from town to town in increasing desperation. Her father was arrested, her mother beaten up, she was molested by SS guards. Routine terror. They spent some time in a concentration camp in Kutno, central Poland, where the gates were locked and bread thrown over the walls to the starving inmates. They were among the few who escaped Kutno, but it was a brief stay of execution. In March 1941, all the Jewish men in the town of Lubranec, where they were staying with her uncle, were suddenly rounded up. This included her father, her uncle and his two sons. They were taken to a camp near Poznan - she and her mother received a postcard - and then silence. She assumes her father was killed in Auschwitz.

Two months later, she and her mother were transported to the 140,000-strong Lodz ghetto. Stimler got a job in a children's hospital - "If you were not working in the ghetto, you didn't get a [food] token and the soup was the most important thing of the day" - and her mother worked in a kitchen. They ate; they lived. Then her mother became ill and went to hospital. Treatment was rudimentary and an operation left her paralysed. Now Stimler, still barely 15, had to fend for the two of them.

"One day, when I was going to work, they were closing the street," she says, her voice breaking. "I said, 'What am I going to do with my mother?' I carried her into the garden and put her into a hole in the ground, covered her up and went to work, praying to God that she would be there when I got back because I knew when they got her they will finish her off ... I come back in the evening and she is there."

If Stimler's later experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau were grotesque, the Lodz ghetto was its own corner of hell, one made more hideously draining by her mother's condition. In Auschwitz, at least, the battle was only to keep herself alive. Caged like animals, treated worse than animals, the prisoners relied on instinct. In the ghetto, there was a community of sorts, though governed by terror.

"One day," recalls Stimler, "two lorries came to the children's hospital. They told all the children to go into the lorries. The children don't want to go in the lorries; they are hiding themselves behind us. I didn't know what they're going to do with the children and I can't go with them because my mother is at home. Eventually the children left, and do you know what they did with them? They finished them in the lorries, gassed them. Now I have to look for another job."

After the Wannsee conference in January 1942, at which the SS determined on the "final solution", the ghetto clearances and deportations accelerated. Auschwitz-Birkenau beckoned. "One Sunday in the summer of 1943, two SS men came to our house and took me away," says Stimler. "I just stood in the door and said, 'Mamma, God should be with us.' " She never saw her mother again or discovered what happened to her. She assumes she was shot immediately. Now Stimler was alone.

"They took me to the cattle trains, gave us each a loaf of bread, put us in these trains, we were like sardines. In the middle was a barrel with water. When the train was going, the water was splashing everywhere; the stench, nobody can imagine. Two women were feeding me with sugar. I didn't know where we were going, but they did. I'd never heard of Auschwitz, I thought we were going to work.

"Eventually the train stopped, everybody should get out. It was night when we got there. We had to go one after the other to the gate; Mengele was standing there [Josef Mengele, a senior doctor in the camp and the arbiter of life and death, notorious for his experiments on prisoners]. I didn't know who Mengele was; now I know. These girls are still feeding me with sugar. He takes your hand and looks at the front and back, and out. I go to the right. They put us in fives and start counting us, counting us for ever.

"I can see a big chimney and the stench coming out from it is incredible. I still don't know where I am. It gets a bit lighter and I can see the barracks surrounded by electrified wire. A woman comes out of one of the barracks. She has no hair, she has no shoes, she wears a short dress. How could I think that in two hours I would look exactly the same? I thought maybe in this barracks they have mentally ill women."

Stimler spent a year in Auschwitz until, in the summer of 1944, she was moved to a work camp called Pirshkow on the Polish-German border, where she and 1,000 Polish and Hungarian women, all Jews, had to dig anti-tank ditches, fortifications against the advancing Soviet army. The following February, with the German army in flight, the contingent began a march to Bergen-Belsen, one of the "death marches" faced by many of the surviving prisoners as the Nazis sought both to hide the evidence of their crimes and to fulfil Hitler's "prophecy" that no Jews would survive in Europe.

Each night, the exhausted marchers, who had no food and lived on snow, would bed down in barns. One morning, Stimler hid beneath a covering of straw. German soldiers would bayonet the straw to make sure no one was hiding there, but she was far enough down to evade the blade. She was free and eventually fell into the hands of the Russians. Before the war, her extended family in Poland numbered around 80. She had so many cousins, she couldn't even remember all their names. She was the sole survivor.

Stimler came to the UK in 1946, married in 1948, built up a clothing business with her husband (who had fought in the Polish army, under British command, in the war), and had two sons. She built the home she craved. She had a nervous breakdown in 1956, a year after her younger son was born; she had her tattoo removed on the advice of her psychiatrist; she rarely talked of her experiences, not even to her husband.

Then, 10 years ago, she recorded her story for the British Library. "The interviewer sat opposite me. I just looked at one spot, and I was getting redder and redder, but it was very helpful," she says. Her granddaughter presented flowers to the Queen at the opening of the permanent exhibition on the Holocaust in the Imperial War Museum in 2000 (an event that, Stimler noticed, was sparsely covered by the mainstream media). Since then she has retold her story in many schools. "When I speak to the children, I ask myself, 'Do they believe me?' Because sometimes I don't believe it myself."

Leon Greenman

The first thing you notice about Leon Greenman's large but shabby terraced house in Ilford is that it has mesh shutters. He had them put up 10 years ago, soon after the National Front threw bricks through the windows. Two years ago, he received a Christmas card from the local fascists telling him he would make a lovely lampshade. Don't tell Greenman that nazism is a dry-as-dust historical phenomenon.

Greenman is an amazing 94, living alone in one room of his cold house; a room piled with papers and portraits of the wife and child he lost in the Holocaust, and of mementoes of his postwar days as a singer of ballads. The other rooms in the house are, he says, full of the goods he used to sell on street stalls, once the Beatles had done for the world of dance bands. He retired from the markets more than 20 years ago, so maybe the ladies' handbags in the locked-up rooms are back in fashion now.

The most poignant portrait on his living-room wall is of his son, Barnett "Barney" Greenman, born on March 17 1940; gassed in Auschwitz two and a half years later. Child and victim of war. Long, curly hair and a gorgeous, girlish face, thrusting a hand to a future that was to be denied him. Even now, had he lived, Barney would be only 64. The Holocaust. Greenman, small, wiry, a boxer in his youth, fought on, has spent 60 years combating racism, was awarded the OBE for his struggle, but in truth never recovered from that blow.

He was born in London, one of six children, but his paternal grandparents were Dutch and his father took the family to live in Rotterdam when Leon was five. His mother had died three years earlier and his father, struggling with his large family, had married his housekeeper. She beat Leon; the schoolmasters beat Leon; he took up boxing, a pocket battleship, unsinkable. He worked in a barber's shop and later in his wife Else's father's book business, commuting between London and Rotterdam.

Greenman's failure to leave Rotterdam before the Nazi occupation of Holland in May 1940 was a catalogue of catastrophes. He intended to leave in 1938 but was reassured by the Munich agreement; the British consul told him that, as a British passport holder, he would be evacuated in the event of war, but when war came, the embassy staff fled; he gave his passport to a friend for safe keeping; the friend panicked and burned it. Greenman was paperless, stateless, friendless. In October 1942, he and his wife and son were taken to the nearby Westerbork concentration camp. Four months later, they were moved to Auschwitz. Greenman was one of 700 Dutch Jews in that consignment; he and one other man survived.

In his book, An Englishman in Auschwitz, Greenman describes his arrival in Birkenau. "The women were separated from the men: Else and Barney were marched about 20 yards away to a queue of women ... I tried to watch Else. I could see her clearly against the blue lights. She could see me, too, for she threw me a kiss and held our child up for me to see. What was going through her mind, I will never know. Perhaps she was pleased that the journey had come to an end. We had been promised that we could meet at the weekends after our work was done. We will have a lot to talk about, I thought to myself."

"I thought they must be still alive," says Greenman now. "I didn't know they were gassed within hours. I didn't know about gassing. In my mind, there was nothing wrong with them. I told myself I would find them. They were somewhere in the camp. We'll wait and see. That went on day after day after day. The thought that I would see them again kept me going."

Greenman's hairdressing helped him survive: one of his jobs in the camp was to shave the inmates' beards. In September 1943, he was sent to the work camp at Monowitz, where he was employed as a builder, extending the camp. "You were there to work and to die," he says, "and the big fellers went quicker than the little ones." Greenman is a little over five feet tall and built for survival. He endured almost a year and a half in Monowitz, then a 60-mile death march to Gleiwitz, and a nightmarish five-day journey in open cattle trucks to Buchenwald, from which he was liberated by American forces on April 11 1945. A tiny man with the largest of hearts, in this tiny, paper-strewn room that contains the century.

Anita Lasker Wallfisch

Anita Lasker Wallfisch is a cellist. Music is her life; music also saved her life: she played in the women's orchestra in Auschwitz. The orchestra played marches as the slave labourers left the camp for each day's murderous work and when, if, they returned. They also gave concerts for the SS, who, as good Germans, adored music. Reinhard Heydrich, the orchestrator of the final solution, was an accomplished violinist.

At 79, Lasker Wallfisch's intellect burns bright. She plays Scrabble at weekends with a survivor of the Theresienstadt camp who is 101 and speaks half a dozen languages. "We don't score," says Lasker Wallfisch. "We play for the beauty of the words." She does not treat the Holocaust as the centre of her life, but as an episode in her life. After the war, she married a concert pianist; went on to be a professional cellist with the English Chamber Orchestra; her son, Raphael, is a distinguished cellist; her grandsons, too, are musicians. Despite the war, the camps, there is continuity.

Lasker Wallfisch is from a professional Jewish family, living in Breslau, then part of Germany, now in Poland and renamed Wroclaw. Her father was a lawyer; her mother a fine violinist; she had two sisters, Marianne and Renata, both a few years older. They suffered discrimination from 1933, and by the time war broke out their situation was desperate. "My father had fought at the front in the first war," she says. "He had the Iron Cross and kidded himself that it couldn't be as bad as it seemed, but it slowly got as bad as it could be."

Marianne, the eldest sister, had fled to England, but in April 1942 Anita's parents were taken away. She had no official notification of their fate, but believes they were murdered at Isbica, near Lublin, in Poland. "I'll never be sure what happened," she says, "but it is possible that they were among the people who were forced to dig their own graves and then shot into them."

She and Renata were not deported because they were working in a paper factory. There, they met French prisoners of war, and started forging papers to enable French slave labourers to cross back into France. In September 1942 they themselves tried to escape to France, but were arrested at Breslau station by the Gestapo. Only their suitcase, which they had already put on the train, escaped.

Her descriptions of life under the Nazis are startlingly matter-of-fact; it was lunacy, surreal. "Life was completely arbitrary. You didn't know what was going to happen the next moment." She says she never lost her sense of the absurdity of what was happening. Take that suitcase. The Gestapo were anxious about its loss, and carefully noted its size and colour. "I had been in prison for about a year," she recalls. "Then one day I was called down. A suitcase has arrived: could I identify it? It was my suit case. They stole everything, they killed everybody, but that suitcase really mattered to them. They had found the suitcase and everything was fine, though I never saw it again because it then went into the vaults of the prison and later I saw a guard wearing one of my dresses."

Lasker Wallfisch and her sister were eventually sent to Auschwitz on separate prison trains, a far less squalid way to arrive than by cattle truck. Less dangerous, too, since there was no selection on arrival. In the inverted world of Auschwitz, criminals were valued more highly than Jews. Better yet was to be a prisoner who played the cello.

"When I arrived, the girl [a fellow inmate, not an SS guard] processing me asked me what I did before the war. I told her I played the cello. What a stupid thing to say. 'Fantastic,' she said. 'You'll be saved.' She called the conductor of the orchestra, Alma Ros

[yomotalking]

I live in England, and last week there were a lot of services to remember the Holocaust, and I went to see the Anne Frank exibition which was on in a nearby town.

It was very sad and moving to hear what happened to so many Jewish people, in the concentration camps, and to have an understanding of what they went through.

A Rabbi gave a speech, called "We Want To Live"which was solemn and powerful, and a Jewish man who was sent to England as a child, spoke about his family who perished in the concentration camps.

I have since read, The Diary of Anne Frank, and started an autobiography of Jewish survivors, but found it quite upsetting. Not an enjoyable read.

I think that many children who have been taken to something like it last week, will not forget.

yomotalking.

[Ani Ma'amin!]

Sh'ma Y'isra'el! ADONAI Eloheinu ADONAI Echad!

[Guest mousiegurl69]

Hey all;

Naturally this was a tragity that touched the lives of many Jews. I would like to add that Jews weren't the only ones Hitler wanted to destroy My mom was of a well to do, and powerful family. She along with her brothers and parents were sent to this same concentration camp.

She remembers the horrors of it though she was young at the time. The family barely escaped with there lives. As I understood it someone on the inside helped them to escape. My mother is not Jewish but Lithiwanian. This tragedy of a war destroyed so many yet I do realize the Magority were Jewish. I would that this had never been. god loves the Jews and so do I.

Mousiegurl:}