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January 27, 2008
Never Again
In mid-January 1945, as Soviet forces approached the Auschwitz camp complex, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its satellite camps. Nearly 60,000 prisoners were forced to march west from the Auschwitz camp system. Thousands had been killed in the camps in the days before these death marches began. Tens of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, were forced to march to the city of Wodzislaw in the western part of Upper Silesia. SS guards shot anyone who fell behind or could not continue. Prisoners also suffered from the cold weather, starvation, and exposure on these marches. More than 15,000 died during the death marches from Auschwitz.
Sixty-three years ago today, on January 27, 1945, the Soviet army entered Auschwitz and liberated more than 7,000 remaining prisoners, who were mostly ill and dying.
From Belsen a crate of gold teeth,
from Dachau a mountain of shoes,
from Auschwitz a skin lampshade.
Who killed the Jews?
-- William Heyden
The Holocaust, symbolized by Auschwitz, the worst of the death camps, occurred in the wake of consistent, systematic, unrelenting anti-Jewish propaganda campaigns. As a result, the elimination of the Jews from German society was accepted as axiomatic, leaving open only two questions: when and how.
As Germany expanded its domination and occupation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, the Low Countries, Yugoslavia, Poland, parts of the USSR, Greece, Romania, Hungary, Italy and others countries, the way was open for Hitler to realize his well-publicized plan of destroying the Jewish people.
After experimentation, the use of Zyklon B was adopted by the Nazis as the means of choice for killing Jews, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Complex was selected as the main factory of death. The green light for mass annihilation was given at the Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942.
The Wannsee Conference formalized "the final solution" - the plan to transport Europe's Jews to eastern labour and death camps. Ever efficient and bureaucratic, the Nazi kept a record of the meeting, discovered in 1947 in the files of the German Foreign Office. The record represents a summary made by Adolf Eichmann, he was later tried and convicted in Jerusalem, and executed in 1962 in Ramlah prison.
The mass gassings of Europe's Jews took place in Auschwitz between 1942 and the end of 1944, when the Nazis retreated before the advancing Red Army. Jews were transported to Auschwitz from all over Nazi-occupied or Nazi-dominated Europe and most were slaughtered in Auschwitz upon arrival, sometimes as many as 12,000 in one day. Some victims were selected for slave labour or "medical" experimentation before they were murdered or allowed to die. All were subject to brutal treatment.
Holocaust Memorial on Miami Beach, Florida
In all, between three and four million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles and Red Army POWs, were slaughtered in Auschwitz alone. Other death camps were located at Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec (Belzek), Majdanek and Treblinka. Adding the toll of these and other camps, as well as the mass executions and the starvation in the Ghettos, six million Jews, men, women, the elderly and children lost their lives as a consequence of the Nazi atrocities. Amongst the ashes of the Holocaust, are the remains of my family.
Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, sixty-three years ago, after most of the prisoners were forced into a Death March westwards. The Red Army found in Auschwitz about 7,600 survivors, but not all could be saved.
For a long time, the Allies were well aware of the mass murder, but deliberately refused to bomb the camp or the railways leading to it. Ironically, during the Polish uprising, the Allies had no hesitation in flying aid to Warsaw, sometimes flying right over Auschwitz.
There are troubling parallels between the systematic vilification of Jews before the Holocaust and the current vilification of the Jewish people and Israel. Suffice it to note the annual flood of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN; or the public opinion polls taken in Europe, which single out Israel as a danger to world peace; or the divestment campaigns being waged in the US against Israel; or the attempts to delegitimize Israel’s very existence. The complicity of the Allies in WW II is mirrored by the support the palestinians have been receiving from the United States, Europe, China and Russia to this very day.
If remembering Auschwitz should teach us anything, it is that we cannot, we must not ignore the cries of "Death to Israel" and "Chrad al Yahood" (Kill the Jews) from the Middle East. The meaning is clear, the intent is clear, the danger is clear. We must meet the threat head on, and support Israel and the Jewish people against the vilification and the complicity we are witnessing, knowing where it inevitably leads.
The Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach, Florida
Never Again!
Posted by LindaSoG at January 27, 2008 08:54 AM
Comments
Linda, I join you in Never Again. When people hear another make slight of how we don't need to be friends with Israel, when they say things that scream of their true feelings of favoring the enemy of Israel we need to speak up to them, post what they say, get the word out any way we can. Because these people are most assuredly on the side wanting to destroy Israel a land that belongs to the Jews and also the very Jews themselelves.
I will forever be grateful to you for taking me to the Holocaust Memorial in Miami. It was haunting, and in ones face reality that I wish every human being could see, adults and children. People need to face what happened and G-d help us all if anyone would even allow or encourage one single step toward this ever happening again.
Posted by: Wild Thing at January 27, 2008 12:11 PM
Amongst the ashes of the Holocaust, are the remains of my family.
Mine too Linda. Thank you.
Posted by: Rivka at January 27, 2008 09:18 PM
Thank you Linda for the reminder.
For those too burdened by modern events to have a conscience nor think that it can't happen again please read this: http://www.deathcamps.info/testimonies/
Communism has killed many more than National Socialism as practiced by the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, and our generation is only reminded of the Halocaust because the Jewish people refuse to forget.
We have already forgotten the ruthless purge of humanity under Communists Josef Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Saloth Sar and Lon Nol.
Never again indeed!!!
Posted by: Jack at January 27, 2008 09:33 PM