20.4.09

you're lucky...

...you didn't get to live during the Holocaust. Or was not a Jew in Germany or Poland or Austria back in 1939-1945. I just finished watching a documentary on NGC titled Scrapbook from Hell: Auschwitz Album. It is a scrapbook made by a SS officer during the Holocaust with pictures of him with other German officers having fun, boozing up, flirting with other girls, eating, laughing. While miles away millions of jews were gassed, tortured, killed. It's the biggest crime in history that was strategically concealed during the WWII. I wish everyone who participated in the murders are now being gassed or burned in hell over and over every single day. It's really really heartbreaking, especially seeing the children some still with smiles on their faces unknowing of the gruesome truth that lies ahead for them.

So, I researched some more and here are just fragments of the horror that happened for 12 years under Hitler's regime.

Legends:

Auschwitz-Birkenau - one of the biggest Nazi concentration camp where people were gassed and killed from starvation and diseases. There are 5 other camps.

Kremas - Crematoriums disguised as shower rooms where the SS officers made their captives believe they are being subjected for disinfection but upon entering the chamber the doors will be locked and pellets of poisonous gas are thrown inside. It takes 15-20 minutes before the people inside dies.

Zyklon-B - a poison gas that was also used for delousing the clothing at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It's the same gas they used to murder the Jews.

Schindlers List - Schindler is a german industrialist who saved many jews from death by taking them in his custody to work.


(read the links below for a detailed narration)

* from an SS officer's scrapbook; The photo above shows Auschwitz staff members in the summer of 1944 cavorting with women auxiliaries, aka Helferinnen, while on holiday at the SS retreat at Solahuette, 20 miles from the camp. The SS men were enjoying themselves, without a care in the world, while 3,000 Jews per day were being gassed and burned at Birkenau

* a jew being tortured an dtaunted by SS officers

* Pole execution by the Germans.


* The gas chambers in the Birkenau camp were disguised as shower rooms.

* Women and children chosen to be gassed.

* Distraught woman at Krema IV gas chamber struggles to join labor group.



* Hungarian Jews waiting to take a "shower" only to be gassed after.

* Franz Hoessler in front of load of corpses at Bergen-Belsen, April 1945

* Disposal of the bodies that was gassed.

* Child survivors at Birkenau death camp.


*On the far left is Dr. Josef Mengele, the SS officer who selected the Jews to be gassed.

* Liberation by Soviet troops.

Among the survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau was Philip Riteman, a Polish Jew sent to the camp in 1941, who had the presence of mind to lie about his age in order to be selected for the line that was destined for slave labor. In a speech which Riteman gave to Riverview and Central Collegiate students in Moose Jaw, Canada in May 2008, as reported by Lacey Sheppy in the Moose Jaw Times Herald on May 23, 2008, Riteman said that he grew up in Szereszow, Poland, a town of about 25,000 people - not unlike Moose Jaw. He was in Grade 5 when the war began in 1939. The Ritemans were rounded up and sent to the Pruzhany ghetto, where they lived for nine months in a 10-foot by 12-foot room with two other families.

The following quote is from the article written by Lacey Sheppy, which was published on May 23, 2008 in the Moose Jaw Times Herald:

In 1941, Riteman's family was put on a train with about 10,000 other people. Seven days later, after being crammed in alongside 100 people in a rail car with no food, no water or bathrooms, the train finally stopped . . . at Auschwitz-Birkenau. As Riteman's eyes adjusted to the sunlight, he saw something that still haunts him to this day.

"There was a woman in her 20s, pretty, who got off the train," he said "I'll never forget her because she wore high-heeled shoes."

The woman was carrying an infant in her arms. A Nazi soldier ripped the baby from her and smashed its head onto the pavement.

As the mother lunged for the child, screaming and crying, the soldier shoved a bayonet into her stomach.

"There was just blood, all over, blood," said Riteman.

With no time to process what he just witnessed, Riteman was put in a line to be separated. Although only 14, Riteman lied about his age and told the Nazis he was 17.

Riteman - along with other men and young, fit boys - were separated into one group, while women, children, the elderly and infirm went into another.

Labourers were sent into the camp for processing, while the rest - including Riteman's parents, grandparents, five brothers, two sisters, nine aunts and uncles and numerous cousins - were sent to the gas chambers.

______________
There are two famous stories about Dr. Josef Mengele: one about his attempt to change brown eyes to blue and one about sewing two children together, back to back, to create Siamese twins.

Vera Alexander, a survivor of Birkenau, was a witness to the Siamese twins experiment. Dr. Mengele had died in 1979 but his death was kept a secret by his friends and family. In October 1985, while an intensive manhunt for Mengele was underway, Vera Alexander said the following in an interview for the TV production "The Search for Mengele," as quoted in the book "Mengele, the Complete Story":

One day Mengele brought chocolate and special clothes. The next day, SS men came and took two children away. They were two of my pets, Tito and Nino. One of them was a hunchback. Two or three days later, an SS man brought them back in a terrible state. They had been cut. The hunchback was sewn to the other child, back to back, their wrists back to back too. There was the terrible smell of gangrene. The cuts were dirty and the children cried every night.

The Germans came, the police, and they started banging houses: "Raus, raus, raus, Juden raus." … [O]ne baby started to cry … The other baby started crying. So the mother urinated in her hand and gave the baby a drink to keep quiet … [When the police had gone], I told the mothers to come out. And one baby was dead … from fear, the mother [had] choked her own baby.

—Abraham Malik, describing his experience in the Kovno ghetto.[140


Pictures from the link below:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6076323184217355958
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/index.html


...hope something as horrific as this never happens again EVER. Cheeks! Thanks for the video. I'll watch it later.

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