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My Visit To Hell
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In the wake of President Obama’s visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp today, The Daily Beast’s Christopher Buckley recalls his own horrific trip to Auschwitz with his father 10 years ago and his walk along the Wall of Death.
I went to Auschwitz, about ten years ago, with my late father. There is something about seeing Konzentrationlager Auschwitz that makes you want to give witness. I wrote a long description of the visit, which I’ve never published until now.
Note that the following contains disturbing descriptions.
February 19, 2001
You go through the visitors center and there it is. You’ve seen it in photographs a hundred times, the famous gate: “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Work will set you free. The idea was to be reassuring, unlike the slogan Dante hung over the entrance to his hell, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” Put in an honest day and everything will be all right. Counterproductive to panic the arrivals. Here, and up the road, in Birkenau, they thought through all the details, down to the numbered hooks in the dressing rooms outside the gas chambers. The SS jollied you along. Remember which hook you hang your clothes on so you’ll be able to get find them after the shower. And don’t forget to put your shoes underneath so you’ll be able to get them, too. You’re a shoemaker? Great, we need shoemakers. At Auschwitz, they even had a prisoner orchestra playing inside the gate. It helped keep order. Good for morale, too. How bad could it be, if they greeted you with music?
It’s February and gray. The poplar trees that line the avenues between the cellblocks are bare. The swimming pool—See? We even have a swimming pool!—that was to impress the Red Cross is covered with dirty ice. Crows, gallows. It’s hands-in-the-pockets cold, but would you want to see this in springtime, with blossoms and sweet earth smells?
Our guide is Jarek. Mid-forties, fluent English, dark mustache, knit cap. He grew up in Oswiecim. He speaks precisely, in a low, clear voice without emotion for nearly six hours, except for twice, once outside Block 10 and inside Block 11. We pass under Arbeit Macht Frei. He indicates a grassy strip. “Here is where they gave the welcome speech. They said, ‘You dirty Poles, this isn’t a sanitorium. There’s only one way out—through the chimney of crematorium. Jews, you have three weeks. Priests, one month. Three months for the rest of you.”
Sixty thousand, out of about 1.5 million, survived Auschwitz. If you made it through the first weeks, you stood a chance of making it. Some managed to survive five years, from 1940 to 1945. By contrast, out of 600,000 at Belzec, three people survived.
It feels colder inside the cell blocks, where the exhibits are. There is a blown-up photograph of Himmler viewing Auschwitz’s first inmates, Soviet POWs. Polish political prisoners, the intelligentsia, priests followed. Two years later, with the construction of the much larger Birkenau three kilometers away, the camp became ground zero for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
Between October 1941 and March 1942, some 10,000 Soviet prisoners died here. Jarek as well as the exhibits use the word “murder” instead of die, or kill, or exterminate. It takes some time before the ear gets used to it, modern speech being less direct.
“The method for murdering the Soviets was in many cases simple,” Jarek says. “Put them in a field, surround them with barbed wire and leave them.” Some became so resigned from hunger that they would climb themselves onto the wagons of corpses. There was cannibalism. In Thadeusz Borowski’s short story, “The Supper,” a group of Russians who have tried to escape are lined up, arms tied behind them with barbed wire, and shot point-blank through the back of the head in front of a crowd of starving prisoners. The prisoners clamor and rush forward and must be dispersed with clubs. “The following day … a Jew from Estonia who was helping me haul steel bars tried to convince me all day that human brains are, in fact, so tender you can eat them raw.” Borowski was at Auschwitz. He survived and later put his head in a gas stove at the age of 29.
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Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
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Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
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Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
clinical, brutal and moving.
There is a man in Italy who could afford to read this.
thank you for writing it.
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What the hell is wrong with you?
You are a very sick, demented individual.
Thank you, Mr. Buckley.
Thank you for this article!
I have read a lot about the Holocaust, but it always seems to furiously strike me again and leave me speechless.
I therefore understand the silence between your father and you.
What could you possible say?
I am an ardent world religions student and it is the Muslim's explanation of evil that always comes back to my mind. "Evil is that were God doesn't exist at all". I am certain that God didn't exist in Auschwitz.
God! Those Muslims are crappy spellers.
GOD! Those scoughs are assholes.
Thank you for your work. I have read and watched a lot of programs regarding the Holocaust and come to the conclusion I would not have survived. I just can't get a handle on this kind of inhumanity and sometimes don't want to be part of the humane race.
It seems you have access and the ability to answer a question that has come to me over and over as I read and watch these kinds of articles. During the years before and after WWII, (say 1934 - 1949) What were the Jewish people in the United States doing to prevent these activities? Do you have any websites you could direct me to? I am 60 and love to watch TCM. I often wonder as I am watching films made between these years...These movie makers were mostly Jewish....Why weren't there more movies made about the outrageous behavior of the German government? I have seen 'The Little Dictator' by Charlie Chaplin, and surprisingly enough, there were several movies or shorts by the Three Stooges (the first 1940 just before The Little Dictator, 'You Nazi Spy') so clearly there were messages getting out of Germany that were indicating things to come. However, most of the movies were all about 'entertaing' the masses into oblivion to make a profit. Was any of this money used to get the Jewish relatives in Germany out of that mess? I just wonder as I watch these old movies...Why weren't there more movies made to stop this? Or at least educate the population of the world what was really happening. There must have been letters from the Jewish people in Germany going out to the rest of the world. It just purplexes me.
Thanks for listening...and thanks again for your work.
Please see MGM's "Broadway Buchenwald Big Broadcast of 1939". It stars Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour and Eva Braun. There are a lot of coded references to what was going on in Europe. The allusions to the Nazis went over the heads of most American moviegoers of that era.
Every time I think I have read the hardest thing about the Holocaust, I read another story like yours and once again, I am left wounded. There are individuals out there who have done even worse things to peoploe. These individuals are profoundly mentally ill, regardless of their IQ, and are, in my opinion, not truly human, only wearing a human guise. When located and convicted, these people should be executed immediately. We have no other way of helping them or truly protecting ourselves from them.
But how does one protect oneself and one's family, one's community, from an entire nation gone mad? From an entire nation touched in varying degrees by total evil?
I do not know what caused the evil that entered Germany in the 1930's. I do not understand how an entire nation could be so infected with this evil that it made an industry out of killing millions of people. What I do know is that as the survivors leave us, it is the memories they leave behind, and the bones of the camps still standing that continually bear necessary witness to this horror. "Never again" is the only human response to such tragedy.
Thank you.
I pray that the destiny in the aferlife, for a certain man in Italy who claims to be of the cloth, is to be decided by a million & half angels.
You ate how much?
How could an entire nation could be so infected with this evil that it made an industry out of killing millions of people? I would guess there are many answers, and none complete. But the idea, spread, taught, and reinforced over years and generations, that people of certain different religions or races were so culturally different, strange, and unknowable that society could not "afford" to give them the same rights as other citizens and remain safe was required to make it possible. Those "others" were labeled as inherintly inferior or evil, and so needed seperate laws and different treatment. In the time of Guantanamo Bay and the war on terror, perhaps it is good for some of us to see a stark reminder of the path that thinking sets you at the beginning of, and whose footsteps precede you.
Sadly, too many of Sarah Palin's campaign rallies offered proof.
chris, thank you !!!!!!!!!!!! i do not want to get anymore emotional than i feel now so my comment is short !!!!!!!! i lived in prague for 4 years and could never bring myself to visit any camps !!!!!!!!!!! you are brave to do it !!!!!!!!!! i have a photographic memory so when i have seen the atrocities the images do not leave my mind ever !!!!!!!!!!!!! you are a great writer so i hope the revisionists read your account !!!!!!!!!
Dynisty, the jews were up on capital hill everyday and FDR would not do anything that is where american jews were !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! anti semitism will never end !!!!!!!!!!!
No they weren't. Even the New York "Times" admitted this in a long, and long overdue, mea culpa several years ago.
FDR was indeed most emphatic that the U.S. would *not* help the Jews of Europe. He was concerned that making the war into a "war to help the Jews" would cause a collapse in American support for the war.
Anti-semitism was as big an influence in American society in the 1930's and 1940's as it was in German society. As late as the 1960's, there was a three-tier society in the United States. White men were addressed by their last name, as "Mr. Sheffield" for example. Jewish men were addressed by their first name, as a child in the segregated South I was directed to address the Jewish drug store owner in the same building as my father's shop as "Simon", not by his last name. And of course, black men were simply addressed as "boy", they weren't allotted a name by American society at that time.
So it's easy, today, to fault FDR for his decision. But given how racist and anti-semitic American society was at the time, he may have had no choice...
Dear Mr. Buckley,
To change a mind, you must first change a heart. I fear that those who deny such evils have been done have no heart for those who are Other, or Enemy, or Useless.
"In my Father's house, there are many mansions."
This 'man of god' takes the name of God, his position as a figure of authority and uses it for a worldly purpose - among the gravest sins that any can make. Not only does he break the commandment, but he leads others to do so.
The more I read about the Nazis and the Holocaust, the harder it becomes to imagine the unbelievable evil perpetrated. There is no limit to the depravity of humans, given the "right" circumstances : collective, group control; fanatic nationalism and basic tribal instincts. It tells us how little our nature has evolved since we left the cave. Emotions can still be manipulated to override our intellect and sensibilities. Germany was the larges and best organized ethnic cleansing operation ever, but it is still happening on a smaller scale. It surely is a misnomer to call this "animal" behaviour -- animals don't kill for the fun of it, or engage in torture and ethnic cleansing..
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I always felt the story of Pilate washing his hands was a sop to the Roman empire. The gospels were as much about politics as religion.
Thank you, Mr. Buckley, for your grave and moving account of you and your father's visit.
This is hard to say, but I think the most dangerous thing we do when looking back is not speaking or even keeping silent, but allowing ourselves the comfort of believing that these people, the Nazis who did this, were not human. It was and is horrific, inhumane, and unfathomable, but they were just as human as we are. That's really the worst part- it was not only people like us who died there, it was people like us who killed and gassed and followed orders- and pulled the trigger. It was our fellow human beings who decided to do nothing because that's exactly what would most profit them.
We say "Never again", and we hope and we pray, but after Bosnia, Iraq, Darfur, I really don't know.
I have travelled Europe a number of times and in fact lived in The Hague for 4 years. I have been to Dachau a few times as a day trip from Munich. The first 2 or 3 times I went to Munich, I wanted to go to Dachau, but I just couldn't force myself to go. I eventually did make it to Dachau, and it was a very sobering experience. That's when I first saw in person "Arbeit Macht Frei" on the top of an entrance gate.
However, nothing could prepare me, not even Dachau, for what I saw at Auschwitz. In the early 1990s, I went to visit my sister, who was studying in Germany. I met her in Berlin, and we took the night train to Crakow. Somewhere around 03:30 or 04:00 in the morning, we both woke up and realized we had been robbed, just outside of Katowice. My sister had some books and money taken; my camera bag, eye glasses, and passport were taken. Fortunately, my sister thought to look in a trash can on the train, where we found my passport.
We arrived in Crakow early in the morning, where we met a taxi cab driver who spoke little English. We told him our story, and then he decided to help us out. He got us set up in a hotel; he helped us get some money (the hotel wouldn't give us any initially); he brought us to his home to meet his daughter who spoke English well; then they took us to the police station to file a police report; and then they took us to lunch out in the countryside.
After lunch, the taxi driver asked if we wanted to go to Auschwitz. We said that we did want to go.
We took the tour, and it was very much as Chris has described it....extremely moving, extremely sobering, extremely sad. There were even feelings of great anger and bewilderment that the Holocaust happened....how can human beings do this to other human beings?
Some of the things I remember most vividly and which caused me to shiver were the large rooms behind glass, rooms which separately housed clothes, human hair, and eye glasses. On that night train from Berlin, my own glasses had been stolen. I was upset that my glasses had been taken, but after seeing all of those eye glasses from people who were murdered, my feelings about my own glasses disappeared.
It is very difficult to explain what and how I felt taking the tour of Auschwitz. I always take many photographs of places that I visit, but in this case, my camera had been stolen; if I still had my camera, however, I would not have been able to take pictures. It was just too moving.
Thank you, Chris, for the article; I highly encourage anyone who has a chance to visit Auschwitz, or any other camp, to do so.
Apparently somebody got to this anti-Semitic nutcase British-born bishop because most assuredly, it wasn't a sudden case of moral conscience. To me, it smacks of his tush being kicked by a public-relations storm boot. Bishop Richard Williamson clearly spoke his misguided mind the first time and anything else is just a pressured, phony and tepid, at best, explanation. It wasn't an apology nor was it a recantation of his filth. In fact, It was the least encompassing statement he could have made short of not addressing it at all. It certainly does not even begin to amend the harm it created.
Please notice that Williamson didn't actually recant nor apologize for his first contention that there were no gas chambers and "only" 300,000 Jews, not 6 million, who perished in the Holocaust; as if that lower number, or any number of any religion, is okay to die in this way. Neither did he mention that in additon to the 6 million Jewish victims there were approximately 5-6 million additional victims who were non-Jews, gypsies, Nazi opponents and Jewish sympathizers who were also persecuted.
It is very interesting to me that he has these biased views since he is British born. Surely even he is aware of the Germans bombing London, including many churches, to oblivion. Adding to the situation is that Williamson voiced them, apparently unchallenged, on Swedish television, a nation quasi neutral to Germany's horrific war efforts.
No matter the death number Bishop Richard Williamson fabricates, it doesn't take someone like myself or Christopher Buckley who have personally seen the ovens, post war, thank G-d, to know that the mindset that allowed the Holocaust to happen is still evident and flourishing to this day. I wish I could write him off just as a rare, renegade anti-Semitic Church official but he's not. And that's the real horror of this Bishop, his comments and his "imprudent" and asinine non-apology.
Bishop Williamson's non-apology blog entry comes down to being almost as insulting as his original demeaning of Holocaust facts. And it hardly belies the fact that his personal views are unchanged. But given the current mindset of this Pope and the current mentality of the Catholic Church, I guess it's surprising even this was forthcoming.
I don't know. Somehow it all just falls a "wee bit short" of warming the cockles of my Jewish heart. How about you?
Hey Chris,
Another Chris here. I don't want to clog your comments section with an essay of my own, but this caused an upwelling of emotion a bit like a bit of rogue magma underneath a volcano.
I visited Auschwitz and Birkenau back in 2003, and I'm sitting here in Germany as I write this. (I'm American though.) I'm not normally inclined to violence, but let me tell you, I cast some awfully funny looks toward the oldsters here. The funny thing is, the 92 year old that you mention did not pay for his actions but subsequent generations here did. Young people here are still not allowed to be proud of themselves or their country; it's a bit like the lingering guilt that we back home have over slavery and Jim Crow but amplified a couple thousand times. It took a hundred years for Americans to _begin_ to get over slavery and the Civil War, and I imagine that it will be similar here. I wonder if anyone has that 92 year old man's home address. It might make for some interesting journalism.
Anyhow, I visited Auschwitz with two friends of mine, one Polish and one American. Like you we sat silent on the way back to Krakow, and we had lost our appetite for the rest of the day. No non-alcoholic beer for me. Your description of the classic movie-shot angle of the entrance to Birkenau is dead on. First you focus on the gate, which looks like the entrance to any 20th-century industrial complex and in fact kind of reminded me of the Chicago Stockyards. Then you pan out over the flat now-mostly-empty space, a swamp really. Yes, it's a slaughterhouse for people, like the Chicago Stockyards, built in a swamp. Where Auschwitz proper looks like a fairly pleasant college campus and you have to be told what that innocuous-looking garage really was, Birkenau looks like what it really was.
Unlike so many, we were able to walk _out_ of that front gate at the end.
Why was it the Germans that did it? If we'd sat here in 1900 and tried to predict who would do this, nobody would have guessed the Germans. They were at that time one of the more civilized European nations. The French and maybe the Hungarians were more anti-Semitic, the Russians more brutally so, the Poles more extensively so. The Brits were (and still are) very anti-Semitic in that snotty academic kind of way, and the Americans at that time were to a lesser degree. Mild anti-Semitism and racism were everywhere in the background; the Holocaust and civil rights revolution were still in the future. Even in the middle of the century it was difficult to be a Jewish academic in America; read some of the stories about Paul Samuelson or Milton Friedman to get a taste of this. I would have put my money on the Russians though, maybe the Poles.
My own guess is that there are this deep animal brutality and propensity toward resentment that lurk inside human nature, that we have to be constantly vigilant about. An intense propensity toward tribalism and a hatred out of outsiders that's hard wired. This is what gets things started, like a spark in a grain elevator. Add to this that most people will go along with a given situation out of self-preservation, and things can get unstable pretty quickly. One person speaking up against a mob gets a bullet in the head; it takes one million speaking up to put a stop to the mob (1989), and even then it doesn't always work (1953, 1956, 1968, 1980). It's not like most Germans really had a choice in the matter. They got their improved roads and good-paying jobs; for Otto Normalverbraucher, no matter what his actual opinion on the Jews, the thing to do was to stay quiet, go to work, and shut up.
And why didn't external powers (UK and US in particular) put a stop to Hitler in 1933? Well again, hindsight is 20/20 but prediction is more difficult because it's about the future. As of 1933 nobody would have guessed that these folks were anything but your ordinary European gangster government with a strong anti-Semitic streak. Austria had them; France had them; Britain had them. Against the normal background levels of bigotry and misgovernment, it's a bit hard to tell when you have something different on your hands. And to address a2burns and Dynisty, it's not like the US or UK was "controlled by Jews." Stop believing all of that recycled Nazi (or modern) propaganda. Williamson, with all due respect to a man of the cloth, can eat my shit. I have no time for this.
Even after the war, so I'm told, my own grandfather (Austrian Catholic but emigrated at a very young age) couldn't believe that his own cousins had done this. My memories of him were as a kind and civilized man, and his modern-day relatives in Austria are very similar. But yes, they did do this. I have seen the photos of them in SS uniforms (which they showed me accidentally as they showed me photos from the late '30s and the late '40s) and the slaughterhouses which they had built and operated. That is what unnerved me the most about that whole trip, actually. Yes. They. Did. Do. This. And it isn't some abstract 'They' who live in a world of grainy black and white films. The line between 'They' and 'We' is very thin, and we understand a lot less about it than we should.
Sorry again for hogging so many of your pixels, but this really hit a nerve. Good job, Chris.
-Another Chris
Edit! Stopped reading after the first 1000 words.
scough, you can read?
Charlie Smyth, a man with a port-wine stain covering half his face, told me at age 5, "They killed people like me in the gas chambers". Anyone not deemed to be perfect physically, genetically, racially was damned.
I will never again believe in the idea of the Christian Hell. They created their own in Germany, and I will never trust a Christian or German.
Thank you, Mr. Buckley, for keeping reality in front of us all.
Well! Stay clear of papal audiences, then. They have makeup for that condition now. You and Mikhail Gorbachev need to keep up.
oh gods. what bothers me most after drying my eyes here... is that there will be those who read this witness-ing with some thing other than heart rendering grief and shock, shock again and again. but read it must be. this clarity is so vital. it keeps changing you to read and witness as the author does. and i feel bad to read 'littlepitcher' because it's an absence of trust that such a schism of basic humanity can be born.
Thank you, Mr. Buckley, for reminding us that mankind is truly capable of unimaginable depravity. The films and documentaries don't tell the entire story. What an incredible experience you had with your visit. This ought to be required reading for all high school students.
And it was only 60 plus years ago that such barbarism existed. We must never forget we do evil things as humans, and we must remind ourselves of it.
I know it is not healthy, but this makes me want to take a time machine back 65 years, save some lives and settle some scores. If ever there was a time to exact revenge, this would be it. I'm pissed when I read this shit , and I wasn't even alive then, unless you count reincarnation.
Thanks. We don't count reincarnation. Just go back 65 years and leave us alone.
Mr. Buckley, thank you for deciding to share this...being able to reflect on a past we didn't experience ourselves through such clear and profound writing like this is invaluable as we struggle to reflect (and, I hope, to act) on how this tragedy translates to the immense suffering of people who live this very morning in fear of civil unrest, ethnic strife, slavery, and genocide. Your story and the stories of all who visit this place do well to remind us that human history is a living history, and that past must live in our hearts and minds.
The breadth of the Holocaust is almost unfathomable when one realizes that Extermination Camps like Auschwitz were merely the last refinement in a policy that claimed millions more who were never part of the mechanized death you bear witness to here.
Christopher, I'd love to suggest to you and your readers taking a look at the book "The Holocaust By Bullets," by Father Patrick Desbois. He's a Catholic priest from France (who definitely ISN'T of the Lefebvre sort) who's dedicated a huge amount of his life to documenting the murders carried out by Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine -- before the Nazis tried to sanitize the process with remote Concentration Camps and gas chambers.
It is an incredibly powerful read, not just historically, but spiritually. I'm a lapsed half-jew, and now a staunch atheist, but it's a wonderful to be reminded that there are thoughtful, inquisitive people who do amazing and compassionate things in the name of faith.
At the same time, it's horrific to think of almost every one of these small rural towns across eastern europe harboring, like dark secrets, mass graves, collaborators, and a wealth of humanity that often gets overlooked in our view of the holocaust that's centered so much more on the few tangible places like Auschwitz we can memorialize.
Beautiful and moving piece -- and yet amazingly, only the tip of the iceberg.
One of the other things I learned reading "The Holocaust by Bullets" was the importance of memory. Just KNOWING that these people had lived -- knowing that millions of lives were snuffed out -- denies the architects of the "Final Solution" a victory. As long as we remember, the past, and the dead, are not erased!
It seems that you went to Auschwitz without doing any research in advance, and then you accepted everything that your guide told you without question.
The "numbered hooks in the dressing room" comes from the memoirs of Rudolf Hoess. (When you spell his name without using an umlaut, you have to insert an e into his name; Hoss is incorrect and this shows that you did do any research to prepare for your trip.)
The swimming pool was already there in the main Auschwitz camp because it had previously been used as a garrison for Polish soldiers. It was not installed to impress the Red Cross.
The expression "through the chimney," was used by the prisoners, not by the SS man who greeted incoming prisoners. This would have been inconsistent with the story of the numbered hooks in the undressing room for the gas chamber.
"60,000 out of 1.5 million survived" There were 60,000 prisoners marched out of the three camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau when the camp was abandoned. The prisoners were given a choice of whether or not they wanted to join the march; there were 7,500 who decided to remain behind. However, the number of prisoners brought to Auschwitz is unknown because the train records have never been found. There are more than 60,000 survivors of Auschwitz still alive today because many of them were sent to other camps to work. No records were kept for those who were gassed since they were not registered. The prisoners who were immediately sent to another camp were also not registered.
"Two years later, with the construction of the much larger Birkenau..."
Birkenau was constructed in 1941, one year after the main camp opened in 1940.
"The method for murdering the Soviets was in many cases simple," Jarek says. "Put them in a field, surround them with barbed wire and leave them."
The Soviet POWs were put into a field immediately after they surrendered on the battlefield because they didn't have POW camps nearby. The Soviet POWs were not kept very long in a field. Birkenau was set up as a POW camp for them.
"Every death-murder-was written down." Except for the murders in the gas chamber, which were not recorded unless the prisoner had been in the camp for awhile and then their death in the gas chamber was coded "Special Handling."
"Here are the minutes from the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin on January 20, 1942, the meeting of the board of directors of the corporation in charge of the Final Solution. These are free of euphemism."
The minutes of the Wannsee Conference were written with euphemisms. If there were no euphemisms in the minutes shown at Auschwitz, this means that they had been translated into what the Jews thought the real meaning of the euphemism were. This is what is presented at the Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
"The hair was shorn after the gassings, then efficiently dried in the crematoria so it could be industrially spun into carpeting."
This was extremely inefficient.If the hair had been shorn before the gassing, it would still have had to have been disinfected to kill the lice that spreads typhus. But, if they had shorn the hair before the gassings, they would not have had to wash and dry it. It is obvious that the hair has been subjected to Zyklon-B, so this is given as the proof that the Jews were gassed.
"It appears from the tops that they refined the process of opening the cans. Some are jagged, others have been smoothly cut, as if in one motion by a machine. Exposed to oxygen, the pellets gave off prussic acid..."
If the Zyklon-B pellets gave off prussic acid when exposed to oxygen, what kept the man who was opening the can from being killed. Gas masks, of course, but this would have been extremely dangerous. Actually, the pellets had to be heated before they gave off prussic acid. Did you see any way to heat the pellets in the gas chamber in the main camp?
"Still they didn't open the doors for half an hour, just in case. After that it was safe for the Sonderkommando, the prisoner work crews, to wade into the tangle of bodies, vomit, and excrement to get the hair and the gold teeth and drag the bodies next door to the crematorium."
So they didn't have to turn on a ventilator to dissipate the gas? It's a good thing that the gas chamber did not have to be ventilated because there was no ventilator in the Auschwitz main camp gas chamber.
"Prisoners who had been tried by the SS, for trying to escape, taking food, for whatever reason, were taken out into the courtyard naked, in twos."
The prisoners who shot at the "wall of death" at Auschwitz were brought there, from some other location, to to be tried by the Gestapo Summary Court. The prisoners who stole food or tried to escape were punished without being put on trial by the Gestapo.
"A former prisoner, a Dr. Boleslaw Zbozien, described what he witnessed here one day:"
Dr. Zbozien might have been just a tad biased. There were no babies shot at the wall of death because there were no babies put on trial by the Gestapo.
"Jarek remarks that the SS officer who sentenced 5,000 Poles here to die was still alive last year, living in Germany, age 92. We ask why. He shrugs."
It is not against the Geneva Convention for a judge to sentence prisoners after a trial, so this man had not committed any war crimes.
"The SS dynamited the other four at Birkenau as the Red Army was closing in."
Krema IV, one of the crematoria at Birkenau was blown up by the prisoners.
"Through the door at the end are the ovens."
You apparently visited Auschwitz before the staff at the Auschwitz Museum admitted that the gas chamber in the main camp was a reconstruction. So you entered through a door that wasn't there when this room was a gas chamber. Now the entrance is at the other end of the room.
"Soup for the prisoners consisted of nettles and water. Morning tea was brewed from oak leaves. For dinner, wormy bread, perhaps with a smear of lard. Some of the survivors weighed 60 pounds."
The prisoners ate soup made from root vegetables, such as potatoes, carrots, turnips and rutabagas, which were stored in root cellars. The morning drink was ersatz coffee. There was a war going on and coffee was very scarce and expensive because it does not grow in Germany. Even in America, people were drinking substitute coffee. The prisoners ate margarine on their bread, the same as people in America because butter and lard were too expensive. Most of the survivors had chubby cheeks and a double chin because they were eating too much chocolate from the Red Cross packages.
"From May to October 1944, 600,000 Hungarian Jews-a line of numbers in the Wannsee document-came through here." Not all of the Hungarian Jews were deported. The number usually given today is 437,402.
"Jarek gets a key to the gate"
Apparently, you visited Birkenau when very few people went there. All that has changed and now there is a huge crowd of people there because over a million people visit each year.
"About 80 percent of the arrivals, those unfit for work, the older men and women, women with babies, children under 14 were immediately murdered in the gas chambers."
Most of the survivors who now speak at schools and public events were under 14 when they arrived at the camp. They all have a reason why they weren't gassed: they lied about their age, or they jumped off the truck taking them to the gas chamber, or the gas chamber was locked the day they were sent there.
"On one side of the rail platform was the women's camp. 'When the trains came,' Jarek says, 'women would shout to the women arriving, 'Give the baby to the granny.' That way you might not be selected for the gas chamber. This was the choice.' "
The women were too far away to be heard by the prisoners who were arriving. It was the SS officers who told the young women to give their babies to the older women so the younger women could be selected for work.
You mentioned the plaques at Birkenau which say that 1.5 million were killed there, but you didn't mention that the plaques originally said that 4 million were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
"Most of the survivors had chubby cheeks and a double chin because they were eating too much chocolate from the Red Cross packages."
Take your Holocaust denial revisionist bullshit back to David Irving or to some other neo-Nazi site. Trying to claim that survivors were chubby would be laughable if it weren't vulgar and despicable. What you are trying to do is deplorable, and no one even cares what your motives are. In any case, it's not working. You may as well piss in the wind, for you're only staining yourself.
Oh, gosh. Thanks for clearing that whole thing up. It just sounds like a big misunderstanding now. If the Red Cross had access to Power Bars at that time, they probably could have saved some prisoners from unsightly weight gains.
Thank you.
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