Eddie Weinstein's harrowing Holocaust story: Jews murdered in "death showers" w/ carbon monoxide, Survived gunshot through lung, no medical treatment

Eddie is another Polish jew with a harrowing Hollowhoax tale, and miraculous story of survival.

At the "death camps" created by the Germans, Weinstein says jews were lured into gas chambers disguised as showers. But water didn't come out. Nor Zyklon B. Nor diesel engine gas. No, carbon monoxide. Eddie calls them "death showers."

At Treblinka, Weinstein was shot in the right side of his chest, piercing his lung. Eddie didn't go to a hospital or receive any medical treatment. He just hid out in a building at the camp for 3 days, was healed, then went back to work dragging bodies. Another miracle of the Holocaust!

Eddie Weinstein speaks about his experience surviving the Treblinka death camp

Survivor details escape from Holocaust camp

By Sheryl McCabe
The Acorn
Published: Friday, March 19, 2010

An open class of Perspectives on the Holocaust taught by professor Ann Saltzman presented Holocaust survivor Eddie Weinstein in a section of their curriculum titled “Fighting back: the Jewish Resistance” last Tuesday. Weinstein’s presentation, titled “My Story: An Escape from Treblinka,” taught the class about being Jewish while living in German-occupied Poland.

Saltzman started the class by explaining types of Jewish resistance during World War II. While active resistance, like arms and weapons, could not be used, using sabotage was a popular method to undermine German activities. Saltzman gave examples such as Jewish workers putting straw in bullets so they wouldn’t go off. She also described how Jewish women blew up the crematorium in Auschwitz by putting gun powder in their skirts.

“You are the last generation to hear voices of the Holocaust,” Weinstein said. “My story is about daring to resist and fearing to die.”

He lived in a town 75 miles east of Warsaw with his parents and his brother, Israel. When the Germans invaded Poland, they asked the Jews in his village to create a council, have their own police and own schools. Like many other Jewish people of the time, Weinstein’s village had to wear arm bands bearing the Star of David. “Every few days new orders would be issued against Jews,” Weinstein said.

In August 1940, Weinstein started working on the rail road with 400 other Jewish men. In Feb. 1941, he was sent to build barracks. The Germans were planning to invade Russia. In the spring, the Germans took Weinstein and 50 other men to Warsaw to finish a railroad. He worked the night shift, but decided to escape and walked 60 miles back home.

That June, Russia was invaded. Einsetzgruppen soldiers killed multiple Russians, including Jews, communists and other intellectuals in Russia. Weinstein said that 34,000 Jews were killed in the operation.

Weinstein explained that, by November, his family still had no income because they all worked without pay for Germans. In order to attain food, the family had to sell their items to survive.

The Germans established a ghetto in town where overcrowding was a huge problem. “People slept in attics, basements, hallways, stairs, anywhere,” Weinstein said. They were forbidden to leave the ghetto or they would be executed.

The next year, in 1942, 50 German senior officials met in order to plan a way to systematically murder the Jewish population. Adolf Hitler called it “the final solution to the Jewish question.” The Germans created 6 death camps near railroads. Jewish people would be told that they were needed for work and had to shower in order to disinfect themselves. The shower heads would then release carbon monoxide.

In March of the same year, Weinstein was among 200 young men taken on a train to a concentration camp. They were working on the fields in the snow with little food and no heat. Lung disease, sores and lice were rampant. When Weinstein ran away from the camp, the Jewish police were sent to arrest him. When the police arrived at his house, his mother was arrested instead. His father gave himself in to be arrested for Weinstein and was sent to a concentration camp.

That August, a list of Jews was read by the Jewish Police and taken to the railroad. “As we marched, German soldiers shot at the crowd to speed them up,” Weinstein said.

He talked about how it was a hot day—over 100 degrees—but for 2 days they were given no water. Cattle cars came and all the people were put inside them. Many people died of suffocation and those who jumped off the cars to escape were shot.The train stopped in Treblinka, 62 miles away from Warsaw. “In 2 hours, 20 cattle cars filled with people would die [in Treblinka],” Weinstein said. After 3 and half days with no water, Weinstein and other Jewish men were finally given water. But the scene became chaotic, and the Germans started shooting. Weinstein was shot in the right side of his chest, piercing his lung. His brother hid him between packages in a building in the camp. Weinstein waited 3 days until he went outside. He helped drag bodies and received water as a reward for doing the deed.

He found out that those who stayed alive to maintain the death camp wore red patches on the side of their pants and stuck one on his pants. The sick and wounded were shot then burned in with the garbage. Weinstein recalled that he once went over to the garbage and a group of babies were sitting near the fire. He heard that all the babies were shot and burnt as well. “It’s been more than 67 years, I’ll never forget their beautiful faces,” he said.

One day, the clothing was being put onto a train and Weinstein hid on the train. As the train was moving, he broke open a window, jumped out and went back to his town. No one believed the story of the death shower or camp.Weinstein found his father and went into hiding with him. They hid for 17 months. Two months later, July 29, 1944, the Germans began pulling back from Russia, and the front lines were near the forest Weinstein and his father was hiding in. They left it and the next day, they were liberated from the Russians. Weinstein later joined the Polish army and fought on the front lines for four months to win back Warsaw.

http://www.drewacorn.com/news/survivor-details-escape-from-holocaust-camp-1.1272767

A true Holocaust horror story - Sidney Glucksman "witnessed homicidal gas chambers, babies stuffed in bags & bashed against walls"

Sidney Glucksman is a Polish-born Jew, and has one hellavu Holohaux tale.

He lives by the motto "Never Forget."

Glucksman spent time at the Gross Rosen and Dachau "death camps."

He claims he "witnessed" people being "murdered in homicidal gas chambers disguised as showers."

Sidney says the crematoriums ran all day and night non-stop, filling the air with the smell of burning flesh.

He claims that the evil Germans would put babies in bags and bash them to death against concrete walls.

He can still hear the babies crying sometimes.

Sidney assures us "he saw this with his own eyes."

Glucksman now lives in Connecticut and travels around traumatizing young children with his tales of horror, reminding them to never forget, and that the Germans were "monsters."

The children sit in stunned silence as Sidney tells his tale.

As Sidney says, "whenever a school or university calls, I drop everything at my business and leave just to tell the story that other generations should never forget."

Survivor tells of Holocaust horrors

Abbe Smith, New Haven Register, Conn.
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
March 26, 2009

Mar. 26--WEST HAVEN -- At the age most kids enter high school, Polish-born Sidney Glucksman instead witnessed unspeakable atrocities from within the walls of a Nazi death camp.

One of the few Holocaust survivors left to tell firsthand the story of the extermination of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II, Glucksman lives by the mantra: "Never forget."

At Notre Dame High School Wednesday, Glucksman shared horrific tales of watching women and children marched off to gas chambers, never to be seen again, and babies stuffed in bags and brutally murdered.

He survived typhoid, near starvation and brushes with death in two concentration camps.

While Notre Dame High School can't give Glucksman back his teenage years, on Wednesday, they gave him a symbol of the years he lost.

"If we could only have been at that school door to take you with us and save you, we would have," said Notre Dame President Brother James Branigan. "You are a brother to us and I want to honor you with a diploma from our high school."

And a little something extra from his friend, New Haven police Lt. Leo Bombalicki, a Notre Dame alumnus.

"Sidney never had a chance to go to high school, so I think he should have a varsity jacket from Notre Dame High School," Bombalicki said.

Glucksman beamed as he took the jacket and tried it on. "That's really worth more than a hundred million dollars. Thank you so much," he said.

The entire Notre Dame student body rose for a standing ovation and rolling applause.

The presentation of the diploma and varsity jacket were a surprise.

When he was invited to speak at Notre Dame, Glucksman did not hesitate before answering "yes."

"Whenever a school or university calls, I drop everything at my business and leave just to tell the story that other generations should never forget about," he said.

That story, for Glucksman, is a very personal one.

At 12 years old, Glucksman was a student at a school in Chrzanow, Poland, when Nazi soldiers invaded his school and rounded up the Jewish children. The year was 1940. The students were loaded onto trucks and taken away.

"They told us we would be back with our parents in the evening. That evening never came," he said.

The children slept outside and ate soup that consisted of slivers of potato floating in warm water.

He and the others were taken to Gross Rosen concentration camp where he was forced into labor and later transferred to Dachau concentration camp.

A young Glucksman watched as trains rolled in with box cars full of women and children packed tight as sardines.

"If you had to go to the bathroom, you did it standing up. If people died, they died standing up," he said.

He described for the students what he considers the worst scene he has witnessed in his lifetime. Nazi soldiers shaved the heads of women and children and told them they were going to take a shower. They were led to a gray building with two large doors. Brushes and soap sat on a shelf.

"We were waiting 15 minutes and they never came out. That's when we knew that was the first batch of the dead gassed people," he recalled.

The crematorium went day and night without interruption. Smoke came out of it all the time and the camp stunk of burning human bones and flesh.

Glucksman saw babies stuffed into bags and soldiers swinging the bags against concrete walls, killing the babies.

"They were crying. Many times, I still hear them cry," he said.

The gymnasium was silent at Glucksman told his story.

"Just monsters could do something I saw with my own eyes," he said.

Despite the horrific images etched into Glucksman's memory, he managed to make a happy life with wife, Libby, who he met after being liberated from Dachau in 1945.

Four years later, he and Libby moved to New Haven where Glucksman opened Sidney's Tailoring & Cleaning on Chapel Street in New Haven. The couple raised two daughters.

Then in 2000, Glucksman helped the United States testify against one of his former prison guards Theodor Szehinskyj, a retired machinist in Philadelphia, who the U.S. Department of Justice said worked as a former SS guard at the Gross Rosen concentration camp.

Now Glucksman is recording his life history in a documentary called "Threads" by James Campbell.

As the last generation of Holocaust survivors begins to fade, Glucksman wants to ensure his story and the stories of millions of Jews who lived through or died during history's worst genocide are remembered forever.

"You just never forget. I'd like to say to all the children, all the people, they should never forget. There are less and less of us alive," he said.

Notre Dame history teacher Richard Antonetti is doing his part to keep the story alive. Antonetti teaches a Holocaust class that as many as 150 students take each year.

"We have to remember because what's happening today in parts of the world -- Darfur, Rwanda, Cambodia -- the events that took place are forgotten unless we read and learn about them," he said.

-----

To see more of New Haven Register, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.nhregister.com.

Copyright (c) 2009, New Haven Register, Conn.

http://www.cjp.org/page.aspx?id=197307


Sidney now has his "documentary" about his tale out, called "Threads" [1]



Related:
Dachau - The fraudulent stories of "extermination" and "homicidal gas chambers"

Max Edelman's sad Holocaust™ tale: "Blind Jew in a Death Camp" - Miraculously survived 8 days without water, escaped being holocausted though blind

Polish jew Max Edelman says he spent time in several German camps during the war.

He claims he was blinded due to a vicious beating from camp guards, who beat him for no other reason than pure "sport."

Even though, as the story goes, a blind inmate would have been immediately sent to the ovens, "somehow" Edelman managed to survive. It was a miracle.

Just prior to his liberation, Max was taken on an eight-day forced death march without food or water. Miraculously, he survived this too.

The one harrowing experience Max can't get rid of is one night when the Germans had a party, and for entertainment had a German shepherd attack and kill a camp inmate by tearing his throat to pieces.

From then on, Max was deathly afraid of dogs. This prevented him from getting a guide dog for years until he finally mustered the courage and got his own guide dog, Calvin, a chocolate Lab.

After the war, Max experienced guilt "for his survival." But somehow he coped.

Edelman emigrated to the United States in 1951, found a job as a X-ray darkroom technician, and now, of course, tells his Holocaust story to young children. He speaks two or more times a week, after decades of silence.

Max Edelman, 87, speaks to a group of eighth-grade students [1]

Blinded by Nazis, guided by a dog

8/12/2009
By Sharon L. Peters, Special for USA TODAY

Max Edelman, a sprightly gentleman with a potent laugh, huge social network and vast array of interests, surges through life. At 86, he figures he's got too much to do to slow down. Blind for decades, he receives a little help from Tobin, a placid black Lab.

Like each of the thousands of service dogs, Tobin has been bred and trained to help keep his owner safe and independent. And like the thousands of people who are paired without charge with a dog, Edelman has undergone training to make the most of the union.

But Edelman was far from typical when, in 1990, he traveled from his home in Lyndhurst, Ohio, to Guiding Eyes for the Blind in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., to get his first-ever guide dog. For one thing, he was nearly 70. Back then, says Guiding Eyes' Graham Buck, almost all clients were much younger, mostly kids blind as a result of premature births.

But it wasn't Edelman's age that was the biggest challenge. It was his back story.

The things he'd seen and endured would have destroyed most men — and did, in fact, kill millions. He suffered years of starvation and beatings and spirit-crushing cruelty, including an eight-day forced march just before the U.S. Army arrived to liberate the German camps. He spent 192 grueling hours without food or water, during which 1,700 of the 2,500 prisoners collapsed and were shot by the side of the road.

Somehow Edelman, a Jew sent to Nazi concentration camps when he was 17 and freed at 22, managed to survive. He was blinded in a vicious beating by guards —"for no real reason. It was sport for them, they enjoyed inflicting pain" — months before his rescue.

He was trained as a physical therapist, married and immigrated to the USA in 1951. He landed a job in the X-ray department at the Cleveland Clinic and built a life — more or less successfully moving beyond the memories of the camps, including the death of his father.

He coped reasonably well with survivor guilt and was largely able, except at night when nightmares invaded his sleep, to deflect the awful images that were the last he would actually see.

There was one thing he couldn't vanquish: the memory of one night in the camp.

The commandant was holding a party for like-minded people. As part of the evening's entertainment, he ordered that several prisoners be lined up. Edelman was among them. The commandant eyed the men, made a decision about who would die and ordered his massive German shepherd to attack. The dog lunged, grabbed the prisoner by the throat and killed him.

From that night forward, Edelman's fear of dogs was intractable.

But when he retired, he wanted to relieve his wife of the job of taking him everywhere he wanted to go. A guide dog would be ideal.

He mustered his courage, attended the 26-day Guiding Eyes training, was coached patiently through his dog phobia, and went home with Calvin, a chocolate Lab.

The two had the skills to mesh as a team, but Edelman couldn't connect, didn't really know how to trust the animal. He was appreciative of Calvin as a "tool to get around," he says, but formed no bond. Guiding Eyes experts provided additional help.

"If I failed at this, it would not be for lack of effort," he says.

But Calvin knew something was off. The dog had been around people all of his two years; he knew how things were supposed to be, and this wasn't it. He lost weight and was depressed. The vet said he sensed Edelman's emotional distance.

One day, at a crosswalk, Edelman heard the traffic stop and gave Calvin the "forward" command. A driver made a sudden, sharp right turn and was upon the two without warning.

Watchful Calvin stopped instantly, and the two returned to the sidewalk. "He had saved both of us from serious injury," Edelman says. He hugged Calvin, and the barrier dissolved. "From that day on it was love. We both blossomed."

Calvin served him well for nine years and retired with an adoptive family. Then came Silas, a yellow Lab who forged a solid bond with Edelman; he died last year. Edelman misses Silas deeply. "When we were on our 3-mile walks and I'd get lost in thought and have no idea where we were, he'd get me home."

But he and Tobin, who were paired earlier this month, are bonding. Last week, the dog accompanied Edelman to a college campus where he spoke about the Holocaust. Edelman accepts two or more such invitations most weeks, after decades of silence. "Survivors are few in number now," he says, "so we have to bear a larger load."

Tobin eases the way.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-07-28-guide-dog-holocaust_N.htm


judicial's thoughts...

A Blind Jew In A Death Camp

I sort of think that if you were a blind Jew in a 'Death Camp', you would be in an oven in 15 seconds. So maybe Max is stretching the truth, or maybe there were no 'Death Camps', or both.

Extended version of Max's tale

Rosalie Simon's Holocaust™ tale - Another jew took her place in gas chamber, at 12 yrs old just "ran away" from Auschwitz, "somehow" escaped

Dr. Mengele personally sentenced Rosalie, then 12 years old, to die.

Rosalie still has a vision of Mengele, and saw her mother sent to the gas chamber.

When Rosalie was set to go to the gas chamber, another jewish woman volunteered to take Rosalie's place.

But that wasn't good enough for Rosalie. A jewish camp worker told her to run. So she did. And it worked. She escaped!

Her mother and brother were holocausted at Auschwitz. But her four older sisters and father survived the Holocaust.

It vas a miracle!

Holocaust survivors and their friends and family dance during a Hanukkah-time luncheon Dec. 16 at Jewish Family Services of Atlantic County in Margate. The luncheons have been held monthly for about the past eight years.

Holocaust survivors gather monthly to avoid topic

Many go years without talking about experiences during World War II, peers, family members say

By MARTIN DeANGELIS, Staff Writer | Posted: Saturday, December 26, 2009
Atlantic

MARGATE - Six million murders don't really make for great light lunchtime talk.

So the few dozen people who usually come to the monthly lunches at Jewish Family Services of Atlantic County mostly do not talk about the one key thing they have in common: They all survived the Holocaust, the Nazi murders of those estimated 6 million Jews in World War II.

Bethanie Gorny, of Linwood, who helped start the "survivor socials" eight or so years ago, remembers asking the group if they would like to invite a poet who writes about the Holocaust to be the speaker at one of their lunches.

"They said, 'No - too sad. ... Too depressing,'" Gorny said at this month's lunch. "They want to be together, ... but they don't want to relive it."

So the December get-together was far from sad, featuring a long string of Hanukkah songs led by Bob Seltzer and his guitar. The Hanukkah party also featured some of the elderly survivors dancing their way around the JFS boardroom, linking arms and twirling in a circle that grew as more dancers joined in.

Some survivors never talked about what they went through for decades after they were liberated, their children say. They apparently tried to leave their pasts in the past and not tell friends or even family in their new country how close they had come to being added to the tragic count of one of history's worst crimes.

Jack Gorny, Bethanie's husband, says he knew little of what his parents went through in the war because they did not talk about it to him or his brother. Only after his wife started getting together regularly with his mother - by then, Eva, Jack's mother, was in her mid-80s - did he start hearing his mom's Holocaust story.

"I learned it through Bethanie, because she'd come back and tell me," Jack Gorny said.

Silent no more

Gail Rosenthal, director of the Holocaust Resource Center at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and one of the regulars at the monthly lunches, says Jack Gorny's story comes with many names in many versions.

"Even today, there are people who don't want (anybody) to know that they're survivors," Rosenthal said.

But many of the people at these lunches went public as Jews who lived through the Holocaust after a coalition from Rosenthal's center and the JFS put out a call about 10 years ago for survivors. The mission then was to keep the survivors up to date on the possibility of reparations payments for them. But during their search, the searchers learned that there were desperately poor people who had been through the concentration camps living right around Atlantic County.

That led to a fundraising campaign to help those needy survivors, which raised $125,000 on short notice. And that fund led, in part, to these lunches - although the guests generally pay for their own meals.

And even if the Holocaust is not the standard topic of talk at their get-togethers, all the guests of honor have stories burned into their memories of how they survived the Nazi extermination efforts - and painfully often, how their loved ones did not.

Rosalie Simon, of Margate, put down her turkey sandwich at the latest lunch to talk about Dr. Josef Mengele - the infamous "Angel of Death" to inmates of the equally infamous Auschwitz concentration camp - personally sentencing her to die.

"I was too young," said Simon, 78. "In his opinion, I was unable to work because I was just 12 years old."

Simon saw Mengele's face and acknowledged that "I still have a vision of him." She also saw her mother sent to the gas chamber. Rosalie was "hysterically shaken" and crying, and another woman - whose child also had been sentenced to die - volunteered to take Rosalie's place in the gas chamber. The woman apparently chose dying with her child over living without.

"I was let off. A Jewish girl (forced to work at the camp) ... told me to run," Simon said, and somehow, through luck, she met up with her four older sisters. They all managed to survive the war, and her father did also. But her mother "was killed that same day, along with my brother," Rosalie said. Her brother was just 13, apparently also considered too young to work.

Rosalie never was one of the secret survivors, the people who tried to hide their Holocaust experiences when they got to their adopted country. There were parts that were too painful for her to talk about, especially to her own children, but after she told her story to a documentary crew, the kids learned the details that way. Still, she knows it would have been pointless to try to suppress or ignore the memories.

"This is going to live with us forever," she said, before going calmly back to her sandwich. "We cannot leave it behind. We live with it every day."

Always a reunion

The lunch group acts as a monthly reunion for its members now, but the hosts say they have seen some of their guests shocked into tears when they ran into people they haven't seen for years. That can be 65 or even 70 years for those reunions - since the Nazis drove the people from their homes in eastern Europe, or since they were forced together after that in the death camps.

Joe Rosenberg, 80, moved to Margate last year, but he lived most of his life around Bridgeport, Conn., after being liberated from Auschwitz - he can still recite from memory the camp serial number tatooed on his arm. He knew some Holocaust survivors in Connecticut, he said, but he had never heard of them holding regular gatherings until he moved down here.

He can tell his story to the people he meets at the JFS lunches and know they will understand, or he can listen to their tales and know what they went through. But, he said, he likes the fact that for the most part, "These lunches are just to get together," not to go back over the worst days of their lives.

Cyla Kowenski, of Atlantic City, one of the unofficial leaders of the group, also is happy just to be able to talk to people who share her experience. But because that shared background ended so long ago, the crowd for these lunches is already old, and getting older every month.

"You know, it's getting to be less and less Holocaust survivors," said Kowenski, who still prefers speaking Yiddish over English when she has the chance. "And this lunch is getting less and less (guests). But they say that if there's just one survivor left, they'll still have the lunches."

But of course, nobody in the group looks forward to being that last person at the table. Because it's the chance to be among other survivors that is the main draw of the monthly meals - even if the people don't care to spend that much time in the present talking about the horrors they shared in their pasts.

Contact Martin DeAngelis:

609-272-7237

[email protected]

Rachel Levy's Holocaust tale - Escaped the Auschwitz gas chamber by hiding behind people carrying soup

The story is that Rachel's mother, brother, and two sisters were immediately gassed upon arriving at Auschwitz.

Then one day Mengele payed her a visit and picked her for the gas chamber.

But the gas chamber was right next to the kitchen, so Rachel managed to sneak behind some people carrying soup and escape.

The Germans then apparantly just forgot to gas Rachel.

It was a miracle.

Rachel did not speak of her tale for 50 years. Now she tells her story to youngsters in England.

Holocaust survivor Rachel Levi tells Brindishe School pupils, about her harrowing experiences in Auschwitz LC6494

The nightmares never go away

News Shopper
Sunday 21st January 2007
By Louise Tweddell

THE Holocaust may be history but as the annual remembrance day approaches, mental wounds remain open for one survivor.

BEFORE German and Hungarian forces invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939, life was idyllic for Rachel Levy, her parents and four siblings.

The Orthodox Jewish family, whose village nestled in the Carpathan Mountains, had little idea of the trauma to come.

Restrictions were imposed on Jewish families. Schooling and property ownership was banned.

In 1942, Rachel's father Solomon, then aged 40, was torn from the family and sent to work for the occupying forces.

Two years later Rachel - who now lives in Bromley - was captured along with her mother Shlima, aged 37, her elder brother Chaskel, 16, younger brother Ben-Zvi, three, and two younger sisters, Eta, eight and Rivka, 10.

With 100 other Jewish villagers they were herded on to trains destined for the infamous Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland.

Calmly recalling events leading to her capture, the grandmother-of-two, who was 14 at the time, said: "Our neighbours had been hiding us in the woodland but they were threatened with execution and forced to give us up.

"The troops were terrifying. We were crammed into trucks with no food, drink or sanitation.

"When we got off the train, the Gestapo officers were waiting.

"They separated children and older women and my older brother was taken to the men's camp.

"It was the last time I ever saw my mother, sisters and younger brother.

"They were taken straight to the gas chambers. I was totally alone."

Now 76, the mother-of-two added: "It's still painful and fresh in my mind after all these years.

"I was just bewildered. I didn't know what was going on."

During her imprisonment, Rachel was visited by the 'Angel of Death', Dr Josef Mengele, who chose which people would be sent to the gas chambers, and which would be sent to work.

Rachel said: "He picked me (for the gas chamber).

"I was numb and then I was outside the chamber knowing it would end beyond the gates.

"It was next to the camp's kitchen and I managed to get behind people carrying soup and escaped back to camp."

There was little to do in camp and Rachel added: "We talked about food mainly, because we were so hungry."

In January 1945, the Soviet Army forced the Germans to retreat from Poland, so Auschwitz was cleared and prisoners were marched to Belsen, Germany.

Rachel said: "We marched for 21 days without food and we scavenged the fields for things to eat.

"People died on the way. Some were shot for not keeping up and others could not continue.

"When we reached the camp, it was the worst thing I've seen."

At Belsen, Rachel found her mother's younger sister, also called Rachel, but she was severely ill.

She remembered: "We were lying on the floor covered in lice and picking them off our skin.

"There were dead bodies all over the ground. Nobody was buried, they just threw the new bodies on top of the old ones."

A devastated Rachel watched as her aunt was added to the piles a few days after their reunion.

In April 1945, the British Army liberated Belsen and eventually Rachel was taken to Prague, then Bratislava, where she finally found some reason for hope.

She said: "One day I heard footsteps and sat up in bed and my brother came in.

"I was stunned; it was such a special moment."

With the help of the Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief, Rachel and Chaskel were among 700 youngsters flown to the UK.

The pair were taken to Belfast in February 1946 and shortly afterwards moved to south London.

Rachel, who married Phin, a Jew from Brixton, in 1953, trained as a dressmaker and worked in London's West End.

Chaskel trained as an accountant and became director of a financial company before he died of tuberculosis in 1976, aged 48.

Rachel never discovered what happened to her father.

As part of Holocaust Memorial Day next Saturday, Rachel has told her story to youngsters from Brindishe Primary School, Wantage Road, Lee Green.

The pupils will perform a drama about her life next Sunday at The Broadway Theatre, Catford Broadway, Catford.

Children from Lewisham schools including John Stainer, Ashmead, Fairlawn and Rushey Green will also perform.

Rachel did not speak of her experience for almost 50 years and said: "The nightmares don't go away, but they lessen slightly.

"There are so few of us left to talk about it and it's important people know what happened."

A memorial service will be held next Saturday at Catford Synagogue, Crantock Road, Catford, between noon and 1pm.

For tickets to the theatre performance, call 020 8690 0002.

Tickets to the memorial service are free. Call 020 8314 8636.

For more information, visit hmd.org.uk

http://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/1135935.the_nightmares_never_go_away/

Hunter of "Torah scrolls that survived the Holocaust", Rabbi Menachem Youlus, exposed as a fraud- Not a single name, date, document to support claims

Rabbi Menachem Youlus, so-called "The Indiana Jones of Torah Scribes," claims he has rescued over 1,000 sacred Torah scrolls that "survived the Holocaust" -- including scrolls he claims he dug up from mass graves in the Ukraine, unearthed at Auschwitz, and even one he stumbled upon while on a tour of Bergen-Belsen when he fell into a hole in the corner of the floorboards of one of the buildings, and felt around with his hands finding a scroll.

The scrolls are always remarkably in good condition despite allegedly being buried in the ground for over 60 years. And the Rabbi is unable to provide a single name, date, photograph or document to support the claims of the origin of any of his scrolls.

The jews who bought Torah scrolls from Rabbi Youlus have now discovered that he is a fraud, and are pissed they were conned out of thousands of dollars. If Rabbi Youlus was swindling the "goyim", the jews probably wouldn't have said a word, but he was swindling his own people. Jewry wrestled with whether to expose the Rabbi as a con artist, or suppress the truth and "serve the greater good" of supporting the official Holocaust story. They have apparantly figured the case of Rabbi Youlus is too glaring of a hoax, and it would be better to announce through their press that the Rabbi is a fraud, than to suppress it and have their enemies expose the truth.

Rabbi Menachem Youlus regales believers with dramatic stories of Holocaust-era scrolls he says he has rescued and restored. But are his tales true?

Rabbi to the Rescue: Menachem Youlus is called the Indiana Jones of Torah recovery and restoration. But there are doubts about his thrilling tales.

By Martha Wexler and Jeff Lunden
Sunday, January 31, 2010
The Washington Post

In October of 2001, Robert Kushner of Pittsburgh received an e-mail that got his heart racing. His nephew had come across a notice in a Jewish genealogical newsletter about a mass grave discovered outside the Ukrainian town of Kamenets-Podolsk. Along with the remains of Jews killed in the Holocaust, the grave contained two sacred Torah scrolls, one of them wrapped in a "Gestapo body bag." A Maryland man had bought one Torah, the newsletter said, but the second scroll needed a home.

Kamenets-Podolsk was the town from which Kushner's father had emigrated in 1920. One of his father's sisters never left, and Kushner, 74, wondered, "Could her body be one of those buried in that mass grave?" He contacted the man who had made this horrific yet miraculous find: Rabbi Menachem Youlus, co-owner of the Jewish Bookstore of Greater Washington. Kushner and his wife traveled to the bookstore in Wheaton and found themselves charmed by the slightly built, chatty Orthodox rabbi.

"We literally fell in love with him," Kushner says. "He exudes honesty, integrity. He's as pleasant as could be."

Youlus showed the Kushners the antique scroll and recounted his adventure: While traveling in Ukraine, Youlus was approached by an unnamed farmer who offered to sell him a handwritten map. As Kushner remembers the story, the farmer said he had been told by his father that if he ever encountered anyone wearing a skullcap, he should show him the map. The farmer led Youlus to his land, which had a pigsty built on a foundation of Jewish gravestones. Seeing Hebrew writing on the map, Youlus bought it and went off with the farmer to a spot marked on it. The rabbi started digging and uncovered a mass grave containing the bones of more than 200 people, as well as two relatively intact Torahs. He and his driver reburied the human remains and marked each individual grave with verses from the Book of Psalms. Months later, Youlus -- who is also a Torah scribe -- restored the Torahs to kosher condition so they could once again be read in synagogues.

Hearing this story, Kushner felt moved to buy the Torah, which was still for sale. He'd grown up poor. His immigrant father couldn't afford the big donation some synagogues used to request for the privilege of reciting Torah blessings during the High Holy Days. Choking up, Kushner recalls: "When this Torah became available, I said, 'You know what? I can't think of a better way to honor my father's memory.' " Youlus told the Kushners that several people had expressed interest in the Torah, but the scribe wanted them to have it, because "that's where your father was born; that's where his siblings were born." Kushner paid $15,000 for the scroll, which he donated to his synagogue, Beth El Congregation in Pittsburgh. He fondly remembers the dedication. "It was a beautiful ceremony. I spoke, my son spoke, through tears." Later, his grandson read from the Torah at his bar mitzvah.

For something buried underground for 60 years, the Torah was in remarkably good condition. The rabbi never showed Kushner any photos of the excavation or of the scroll before its restoration, or the farmer's map. Kushner, a retired lawyer, acknowledges that he was initially skeptical. "You know, the story itself is so bizarre. ... I did not know Menachem at that time, and I guess there was something in my voice," Kushner says. At Youlus's suggestion, Kushner called an Orthodox rabbi in Pittsburgh for a character reference. Kushner's sister called family friends in Maryland who also vouched for Youlus. When Kushner told his own rabbi about the background checks, the rabbi's reaction was: "You know what? You've done far more than you need to do. If a sofer [Torah scribe] tells you a story, you can believe him."

***

Rabbi Menachem Youlus has found scores of enthusiastic believers and willing buyers. Dubbed "The Indiana Jones of Torah Scribes," Youlus has regaled congregations and the media (including this newspaper in 2004) with tales of cloak-and-dagger adventures in Central and Eastern Europe. The 48-year-old rabbi from Baltimore says he has found Torahs hidden in walls, buried in the ground, piled in basements of monasteries, even under the floorboards of a concentration camp barracks. He says he has been beaten up, threatened with jail in Siberia, and has had to smuggle out Torahs in false-bottom suitcases.

"I guess you can say I'm on a mission," explains Youlus, who wears a neatly trimmed beard and the white shirt, black trousers and black yarmulke favored by the ultra-Orthodox. His stated mission, supported by the nonprofit Save a Torah Inc., is to recover, repair and resettle sacred scrolls from Jewish communities destroyed by the Nazis. His rescued Torahs have found their way into more than three dozen congregations in the Washington area and beyond. Billionaire investor David Rubenstein, 60, co-founder and managing director of the Carlyle Group, purchased two of these scrolls. He says, via e-mail, "I donated these Torahs to the synagogues so their congregants could have the sacred experience of reading scripture from scrolls that had survived the Holocaust."

The Torah is Judaism's most sacred text -- the first five books of the Hebrew Bible -- painstakingly handwritten on animal-skin parchment according to a strict set of rules. It is venerated as the core of Jewish worship and the basis for centuries of Jewish scholarship. Jews treat the Torah with the respect due an important person, standing when it is taken out of its ark and is carried in a synagogue. There's a tradition among some Jews of ransoming stolen Torahs, and scrolls damaged beyond repair are buried in a cemetery.

The stories Youlus has told over the years resonate so powerfully because they meld this centerpiece of the Jewish religion with the cataclysm of the Holocaust, providing a reassuring sense of continuity and hope. As survivors, Youlus's Torahs are brought out for Holocaust Remembrance Day, they're used to teach lessons in religious schools, and for many people, such as Robert Kushner, they have become part of a deeply personal family narrative. Youlus says in a video on the Save a Torah Web site: "Every single Torah that I rescued has a story."

At her white clapboard home in Somers, N.Y., Rabbi Shoshana Hantman, 51, takes a large scroll out of a custom-made, portable ark in her living room, rolls it out on her dining room table and shoos away her Siamese cat as it threatens to tread on the sacred parchment. "This is our old guy," Hantman says, as she prepares to tell the story of the Torah that Youlus sold to her congregation at the time, the Reconstructionist Group of Southern Westchester.

Her tale is almost identical to the one Kushner says Youlus told him. Hantman says she got in touch with Youlus in the summer of 2001 as she was preparing for her small worship group's first High Holy Day services. The member needed a Torah but couldn't afford the $25,000 or more for a new one. So she phoned Youlus and soon found herself captivated by his "angelic presence." "This was an Orthodox rabbi, you understand. Orthodox rabbis don't normally even speak to the likes of me," the clergywoman says. "He didn't only talk to me, he referred to me as 'rabbi.' So I already knew this was a special guy."

Youlus recounted how he had rescued the Torah -- one of a pair, Hantman recalls, that he discovered in the Ukrainian mass grave. The scribe offered the scroll to Hantman's congregation for $6,000. Hantman recalls that Youlus was finishing the Torah's restoration on Sept. 11. She remembers Youlus telling her that he was a member of a Jewish burial society and had to rush to the Pentagon to retrieve the remains of Jewish victims. "And in the middle of it, he [finished] this Torah," Hantman marvels.

The story of that Torah's rescue from the ashes of the Holocaust had special resonance that Rosh Hashanah, when smoke was still rising from Ground Zero. Several members of Hantman's worship group worked at the World Trade Center. Some would find an even closer connection to the story. Hantman recalls: "Once a gentleman came up and said his father was from Kamenets-Podolsk, and he just wanted to touch the scroll because it might have been his father's, and he had [lost] people. People have said that they felt -- you know, very mystical people -- that they felt emanations. ..."

Seated at a laminate table covered with scrolls in his bookstore -- the headquarters for his operation -- Youlus explains the spiritual charge he gets from supplying Torahs, new and restored, to congregations around the United States and overseas. "I've been to so many Torah dedications, and it never gets old," he explains, "because it's a chance to establish a special bond between God's chosen people and God." Around him, the Wheaton shop's two rooms overflow with books and Judaica: prayer shawls, menorahs, children's games, stickers and tchochkes. In the rear, several dozen antique Torah scrolls, many wrapped in black trash bags, lie on a set of shelves awaiting repair.

Customers, including local Jewish clergy, frequently interrupt Youlus, in person and over the phone. He greets everyone with a cheery, high-pitched "Hello" and punctuates the air with emphatic hand gestures. His life outside the bookstore is just as busy, he says: "Last week, I was in Europe once and on the West Coast twice."

As the store's clerk takes scrolls off the shelf and lays them gently on a table, Youlus eagerly describes the mechanics of being a scribe. He shows off turkey quills, used to write Torahs, bits of klaf (parchment) and explains the intense spiritual concentration required of his profession. Youlus says he uses high-tech infrared equipment to inspect the condition of the scrolls and "climate-controlled" ink to restore them. Touting his expertise in dating parchment, Youlus says he has studied with curators "in Europe," but pressed to say with whom he has studied, he won't give names. Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore confirms that Youlus graduated with a degree in Talmudic Law and was ordained in 1983. He also studied accounting at Towson State University.

On his Save a Torah promotional video, posted on the Web in 2007, Youlus says he has rescued 500 Torahs since he began his mission a quarter-century ago. The number Youlus gives on this spring afternoon in 2009 has soared to 1,100.

The fundraising video describes Youlus's rescue operation in dramatic fashion. While a violin plays a mournful tune, supporters give testimonials. The screen flashes archival photos of concentration camp barracks and piles of desecrated Torah scrolls. The message is clear: Make a donation so Youlus can parachute in, rescue these fragile survivors and breathe new life into the ancient text known as the Tree of Life.

One testimonial comes from Rabbi Leila Gal Berner of Kol Ami, a Reconstructionist community in Northern Virginia. Cradling a Torah from Youlus, Gal Berner, 59, relates its remarkable history. "There was a legend of a Torah scroll that had been hidden under the floorboards at Bergen-Belsen [the German concentration camp]. Menachem came to Bergen-Belsen on a tour and literally fell into a hole in the corner of the floorboards, felt something strange, suspected that this might be where it was. It was dug up. Indeed it was the Torah, fully there. After some negotiations, Rabbi Youlus was able to purchase the Torah." For Gal Berner, rescuing a scroll like hers means "that community didn't die when Hitler tried to kill it."

But Youlus's discovery at Bergen-Belsen comes as news to the historian at the camp museum. "I can definitely exclude that there could have been a find of the Torah scroll on the grounds of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial" in recent years, writes Thomas Rahe. In 1945, British troops burned down all the barracks to stop the spread of typhus.

Asked in the shop about his Bergen-Belsen adventure, Youlus at first jokes about his dumb luck -- being a "schlemiel" and literally stumbling on a holy treasure. Confronted with the camp historian's denial, he shoots back: "It's not Bergen-Belsen. ... She [Gal Berner] says it was Bergen-Belsen." Which camp was it? He can't remember: He says he has toured so many concentration camp sites. Why did he allow Gal Berner to tell this story on the video? He says he's never watched it.

Gal Berner -- a historian who has taught at leading universities -- stands by Youlus even after being informed of the facts and of Youlus's denial. In an e-mail, she skirts the question of what the scribe told her about the Torah's origins. "I believe that Rabbi Youlus is an honest man who is doing holy work," she says. "I believe that he must navigate complicated territory in order to find and rescue the Torah scrolls he finds."

***

In the spring of 2008, Central Synagogue, a prominent temple in Manhattan, dedicated another of Youlus's rescued Torahs. This one came with an iconic name attached. Youlus says he secretly unearthed it in Oswiecim -- the Polish town made infamous by its German name, Auschwitz. Oswiecim Jews, Youlus said, buried this Torah in a metal box in their cemetery to save it from the Nazis. More than six decades later, he told the New York Times, he located the scroll with a metal detector and dug it up. But it was missing four parchment panels. The local Jews removed these panels, he said, before burying the Torah, and later somehow spirited the fragments into the camp. Youlus says he placed an ad in a local newspaper offering to pay for parchment with Hebrew writing on it. Miraculously, a priest -- a former Auschwitz prisoner -- responded the very next day and sold him four panels that proved to be an exact match.

Central Synagogue's rabbi, Peter Rubinstein, acknowledges that he was initially baffled as to how the parchment had come into the camp. But he did not seek an independent appraisal or ask for documentation. Rubinstein says he ultimately trusted Youlus, and he trusted the man who had purchased the Torah and wanted to donate it to Central Synagogue.

That donor was David Rubenstein (no relation to the rabbi) of the Carlyle Group, the D.C.-based private equity firm. The billionaire philanthropist -- who has lent a copy of the Magna Carta to the National Archives -- was not a member of Central Synagogue. But he came well recommended by a congregant: Arthur Levitt, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman. "That's how the connection was made," Rabbi Rubinstein recalls. "That's how the world works." As he remembers, donor David Rubenstein "said he wanted exposure for the scroll in New York."

So with great fanfare, the Torah from Auschwitz was dedicated in New York on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2008. Months later, on the Jewish New Year, the congregation again took the Torah down from its imposing two-tiered ark. In his sermon, Rabbi Rubinstein repeated the story of the Torah's wondrous rescue from the killing fields of Oswiecim. Reflecting back on that homily, he says: "Remember, this was two days after the market dropped 700 points, and I was trying to talk about retrenching, not financial retrenching, [but] what are the things that are the anchors of our lives."

Reached for comment about the Auschwitz Torah, Poland's chief rabbi, American Michael Schudrich, responds in an e-mail: "I cannot confirm anything that Menachem has written. I do not know the people he is referring to." Youlus's discovery is also a mystery to Tomasz Kuncewicz, director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center, which cares for the Oswiecim cemetery, and to Dorota Wiewiora, head of the tiny Jewish community still living in the region. She is dismayed at the idea that someone would dig among human remains. And, Wiewiora adds, if such a Torah really was dug up, it would rightfully be the property of her community. "No one would sell it. It's not ethical."

Asked why no one in Oswiecim knew about his ad hoc archaeological dig, Youlus changes major details of the story he told Central Synagogue and the New York Times. He says the box containing the Torah was not made of metal, though he can't say exactly what the material was. Youlus says he simply took an educated guess as to where it was buried, hired a crew to dig and found it in the ground beyond the old cemetery walls. As for the priest who supplied the missing parchment panels, Youlus didn't find him through a classified ad. He says his great aunt -- friends with an unidentified Polish cardinal -- helped find the priest. What was the priest's name? "I have no idea," Youlus says. According to the Archdiocese of Krakow, the last local priest who survived Auschwitz died years before Youlus says he arrived on the scene in 2004.

In a 3-hour interview, Youlus is unable to provide a single name, date, place, photograph or document to back up the Auschwitz stories or any of the others. He says that until Save a Torah was founded in 2004, he kept no records. He refers all requests for documentation since then to the foundation's president, investment banker Rick Zitelman of Rockville.

But in a late December meeting at The Washington Post, Zitelman, 54, shows no documentation for any of the scrolls, despite requests. Zitelman says the only paperwork he gets from Youlus is an invoice the rabbi himself writes up for each Torah. He says Youlus does not submit any airline tickets or hotel receipts for overseas missions. So where does he think Youlus finds the Torahs? "It's my understanding these Torahs come from various locations, including monasteries, museums, antique shops, private owners and other places like that," he says.

Eastern European countries consider the scrolls their cultural property and severely restrict their export. Zitelman says, in a follow-up e-mail: "These Torahs do not belong to the people/organizations/museums/churches that hold them. They belonged to synagogues or Jewish communities or families that were destroyed or killed during the Holocaust. ... These stolen Torahs are no different than art that was stolen from Jews by the Nazis and others, and is now being returned to its rightful owners."

Many state museums and archives in Eastern Europe -- including some in former monasteries -- do hold hundreds of scrolls. And half a dozen major Jewish organizations, backed by the U.S. State Department, have been pressing governments in the region to return them to Jewish hands in an orderly fashion. Wesley Fisher, director of research for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, is working on the issue. He acknowledges that the slow pace of negotiations "leads many people to think, 'Well, they should just be taken.' " But he says he believes the Jewish people should not "repeat theft," and with the revival of Jewish life in the region, it's "not a matter for individuals to decide in cowboy-like fashion" who should have these scrolls. Such decisions should be made in consultation with local communities, he says. Fisher adds: "I'm not aware that Save a Torah is actually trying to deal with Torahs that are held in government hands in the countries of Eastern Europe."

Jews in Ukraine report that Torahs periodically disappear from museum shelves -- sold privately by corrupt curators -- and end up overseas. Youlus is aware of these shadowy dealings: "I think that there is a gray market in some of these areas. And I am very, very careful whom I deal with." But he won't name the people with whom he deals, so, for now, the source of his old Torahs remains murky.

It's not hard to determine where most Holocaust Torahs in American synagogues come from. Most are on loan from a collection of Czech Judaica gathered at the Jewish Museum in Prague during World War II and later sold to a philanthropist in London. The wartime curators meticulously labeled the town of origin of each of those Torahs. Establishing the provenance of other scrolls, though, can be tricky. The text of the Torah is immutable. Scribes never sign their name, the date or the place where they have penned the scroll. Judging by the calligraphy, the parchment and sometimes the penmanship, experts can estimate within a few decades a scroll's age and region of origin. But even if a Torah is determined to have been written in Europe before the Holocaust, there is no way to tell simply by looking at it where it has been since it was written. It's not hard to find old Torahs for sale: Synagogues close; congregations consolidate and sell off scrolls. And many of the old scrolls come from either Eastern Europe or scribes who trained there. EBay has pages of listings. Some old scrolls for sale, indeed, may be survivors of vanished Jewish communities, but it's hard to say for sure.

***

What's also hard to ascertain is how the two Torahs Youlus says he found in a mass grave in Ukraine wound up in the hands of five different buyers.

The first was Martin Ingall, 50, of Potomac, who reported Youlus's discovery to the Jewish genealogical newsletter. Its August, 2001, issue states that Ingall, president of Technology Information in Rockville, bought one of the two Torahs and suggested that someone else might want the second. After reading this, Kushner then purchased what Youlus told him was the second scroll. But another Pennsylvania couple, Phyllis and David Malinov, also read the notice and felt a tug on their heartstrings. Phyllis, 71, knew her mother had immigrated from Kamenets-Podolsk. So the couple, a teacher and a physician, headed off to the Wheaton bookstore. After they told Youlus about their family connection to the town, David Malinov, 72, recalls, the scribe "was in favor of our receiving the Torah." They paid about $10,000, they say, for what Youlus told them was one of two Torahs, and took it back to their Jewish fellowship group in Pike County, Pa. Around the same time, the Pearlstone Conference and Retreat Center outside Baltimore, which caters to Jewish organizations, was looking for a Torah. The center's executive director, Carol Pristoop, wrote down the incredible story that Youlus told the Pearlstone donors, who paid $10,000 for the scroll. She saved her notes, which state the Pearlstone Torah is one of two found in a mass grave.

Hantman also remembers Youlus telling her that her Westchester County congregation was receiving one of two Torahs from the mass grave. Youlus declines to explain how five parties believed they had one of these two Torahs. But Zitelman says: "There's a total of eight Torahs -- two that were in the mass grave and six that were from the general community. I don't know what Rabbi Youlus said specifically to anybody."

When Hantman hears about the mystically multiplying Torahs, she pauses and says she has to gather her thoughts: "I hope you've read 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' At the end, a truth is concealed for the better good of the community. ... If there is any deception going on ... also think about what he's done that's good." She wrestles with what she has heard. "Destroying this man, if he is guilty of what you suspect, may very well be in service of the truth but in disservice of a greater truth," Hantman says. What, for Hantman, is the greater truth? "The Jewish reverence for the past, for heritage and for those who suffered and died because of the Nazis."

Clark University professor Deborah Dwork, co-author of a history of Auschwitz, says she has an "allergic reaction" to the notion of a greater truth, because, she says, such tales can play into the hands of Holocaust deniers. For her, the historical record must be "absolutely crystal clear. Anything that deviates from that one whit does the memory of the Holocaust a huge disservice," she says.

So why have so many of Youlus's customers accepted his dramatic rescue stories without evidence? Is it because he carries the title "Rabbi"? Or is it because so many unimaginable things did happen during the Holocaust? Perhaps, as sociologist Samuel Heilman says: "There's a sensitivity because of Holocaust denial. If you say some stories aren't true, you may have to say that all stories are not true. So best not to touch on a sensitive topic." Heilman -- who has written numerous books about Jewish communities and is a professor at City University of New York -- suggests that some American Jews feel guilty: "They didn't manage to rescue the people, so they rescue the Torahs." Dwork has her own theory: "The loss was so devastating that we crave tales of survival."

***

David Rubenstein does not want any lingering doubts about provenance to taint the Torah he donated to New York's Central Synagogue, or another scroll he donated to the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in downtown Washington. Youlus said that Torah was read by inmates at the Dachau concentration camp. But the archivist at Dachau, Albert Knoll, says he has no record of a Torah being smuggled into the camp. After Rubenstein was told that experts questioned the stories about the Torahs, he hired noted Holocaust historian Michael Berenbaum, 64, to investigate. Berenbaum, a former director of the research institute at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, spent an hour and a half with Youlus, spoke with people in Poland and searched through archives and oral histories. "Based on Dr. Berenbaum's investigation," Rubenstein wrote in a September e-mail, "we cannot fully and unquestionably establish that the Torahs are what I had been led to believe." Rubenstein asked Berenbaum to find Torahs "whose Holocaust provenance is not in question. When such Torahs are located and secured, I will donate them to the synagogues -- to ensure they will have what I originally intended them to have." Since then, Berenbaum says, he has secured a replacement Torah for Central Synagogue from a Romanian collection recently transferred to Israel. Sixth & I will receive a scroll from Poland. The Carlyle Group reports that Rubenstein is also paying for the restoration of a historic building for Jewish youth in Poland "as a sign of goodwill and appreciation."

As for Youlus's Torah rescue stories, Berenbaum came to his own conclusion. "A psychiatrist might say they are delusional. A historian might say they are counter-factual. A pious Jew might call them midrash -- the stories we tell to underscore the deepest truths we live," he says. Midrash, in this context, refers to the ancient tradition of rabbis telling anecdotes and fables to convey a moral lesson. "Myth underscores the deepest truth we live," Berenbaum says.

But for Kushner, who to honor his father bought a Torah he believed was from a mass grave, "It's better that I should know the truth than I should go on the rest of my life believing in a myth."

Martha Wexler was the Europe editor for National Public Radio and a senior editor of NPR's "All Things Considered." Jeff Lunden is a freelance journalist and an award-winning radio producer. His stories and documentaries have been heard on NPR, PRI and American Public Media. They can be reached at [email protected].

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/22/AR2010012203257.html?sid=ST2010012500035

Oskar Klausenstock's amazing Holocaust™ fairytale

Klausenstock's tale reads like a Hollywood script.

Oskar survived many close calls. Every four or five days, he had an experience where he thought he was going to die, but he miraculously survived.

The closest was when a Nazi soldier was counting off every 10th Jew to kill, and he was mistakenly counted as No. 10, but the Nazi guard caught the mistake, and Oskar was actually only number 9.

Another time he escaped and travelled hundreds of miles eastward through the Polish forests, crossed a heavily guarded river, and was rescued by Soviet soldiers.

He was once strafed by British Spitfire planes along with other laborers at an airfield.

Another time he escaped from the Germans by hiding in a hay bale.

Then another time he snuck into a group of American POWs being marched to a camp, falling behind the last guy in the line. When he tapped the man on the shoulder, he responded 'Holy sh--!,' The Americans gave him a coat to blend in.

After the war was over, Klausenstock served as an interpreter for the occupying U.S. Army, he even spent some time working for Gen. George Patton.

Klausenstock was the only one of 38 family members to survive the Holocaust.

Oskar Klausenstock served as a doctor in the U.S. Army from 1955-57.

Tiburon man recounts escapes during Holocaust

Marin Independent Journal
Brent Ainsworth
Posted: 01/26/2010

Wednesday is International Holocaust Memorial Day, which marks the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

Dr. Oskar Klausenstock of Tiburon never spent time in Auschwitz, but he vividly remembers the names of five camps where he did spend time: Plaszow, Gross-Rosen, Ganacker, Flossenburg and Dachau.

"There were several others," said Klausenstock, 87.

A retired radiologist/oncologist, Klausenstock sits in his comfortable Reed Ranch home and marvels that he survived so many close calls. The closest: when a Nazi soldier was counting off every 10th Jew to kill, and Klausenstock - then in his late teens - was No. 10.

"He counted sieben, acht, neun ... and then for some reason he looked at me and said neun again," Klausenstock said. "And the man next to me had to step out and be No. 10."

Klausenstock was the only one of 38 known family members that survived the war. Two aunts and one uncle escaped to Palestine before the war broke out.

"Dad's an amazing man," said Dan Klausenstock, 48, son of Oskar and Judy Klausenstock, who were married in 1952. "To overcome what he has experienced and still have a positive attitude and be upbeat about humanity at all, it amazes me."

Klausenstock was born in a tiny village in southern Poland. "My shtetl made the one in 'Fiddler on the Roof' look like a metropolis," he said. As a teen he apprenticed to a weaver and a furrier and played goalie for his school soccer team. All that changed on Sept. 1, 1939, when World War II began with the German blitzkrieg.
The area was quickly overrun and the apartment he shared with his mother and stepfather was ransacked. Jews were rounded up and detained.

In the first of his many escapes, Klausenstock received a break from an old soccer friend who had been recruited to work for the Germans. A planted note from the friend told him to scale a wall at midnight, so young Oskar did just that, slicing his hands on the glass shards protruding from the top. He fled with a younger cousin hundreds of miles eastward through the Polish forests, forded a heavily guarded river and was welcomed by Soviet soldiers.

He assumed the life of a Ukrainian farm boy but was overrun again by the Nazi forces. His first concentration camp was Plaszow, made famous by "Schindler's List" - a film Klausenstock is forbidden to see by order of his wife. He was often transferred to other camps and worked in quarries, as a blacksmith and as a welder.

At Flossenburg, he was detained along with the son of Soviet premier Jozef Stalin. He narrowly missed being assigned to an unexploded bomb detonation detail in which many Jews were killed.

He was once strafed by British Spitfire planes along with other laborers at an airfield where the Nazis were testing the first jet plane, the Messerschmidt Me-262.

"Somehow my luck followed me the entire war, and I don't know why," Klausenstock said. "Every four or five days, I had an experience where I thought I was going to die."

In May 1945, he was being marched outside of a camp with a group that had started as 800 emaciated and exhausted prisoners. Anyone who stumbled and fell was shot. The group, down to about 45 survivors, was stopped for a rest at a barn. Klausenstock hid in a hay bale and was stunned that no German soldiers checked the bales with a pitchfork.

When he came out the next day, he saw in the distance American POWs being marched under guard toward a camp. He sneaked behind the group while wearing his prison camp striped pajamas and tapped the shoulder of the last man in line.

"He said two words I'll never forget: 'Holy sh--,'" said Klausenstock, who knew enough English to understand.

He was given a coat to blend in with the marchers. Arriving at the camp, the prisoners cleaned up their new mascot by soaping him up in a pigs' trough. "That was my baptism," Klausenstock said.

A few days later, an Allied victory was declared. Within weeks, Klausenstock was serving as an interpreter for the occupying U.S. Army, and that fall he spent some time working for Gen. George Patton just before the general died from injuries in a traffic accident.

When the Allies were staking European claims in the months after the war, the Soviets had eyes for the famed Lipizzaner Stallions, which had been moved from Vienna to Simbach, Germany. As far as the Soviets were concerned, the show horses were property of the Hungarian military and thus could be turned into cavalry horses. Klausenstock orchestrated a transfer of the horses into American hands and later learned to ride the stallions himself.

Klausenstock studied medicine in Frankfurt, Germany, before coming to the United States in 1949 with the aid of U.S. Army contacts. He had $1.90 to his name when he was accepted at Boston University.

He laughs as he recounts the three years he worked as a doctor at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. "Imagine me, after what I had been through, a captain in the U.S. Army right next to Tombstone, Ariz.," he said. He finished his studies at Stanford, worked at two hospitals and then opened his practice in San Francisco in 1959.

Klausenstock has soothed himself by writing his memoirs, mostly unpublished, and immersing himself in poetry. He has never attended a Holocaust survivors meeting.

"When it was all over, foremost in my mind was to forget it," Klausenstock said. "Some people have more difficulty than others in doing that. My healing was that I was not a Holocaust survivor, I was a human being. In a way, I have become a stranger to myself, but it is a good estrangement."

source: http://www.marinij.com/tiburonbelvedere/ci_14273825?source=rss

Holyhoaxer extraordinaire Thomas Blatt - At Sobibor "250,000 people roasted on huge pyres made from iron rails, fueled with diesel oil"

Blatt says he survived the gas chambers on the whim of the SS commandant, who said to him, "Come, little one", as a selection was made of so-called "work Jews."

The Nazis needed Thomas to work as a "fireman", burning the clothes and personal effects of those gassed upon arrival at the camp.

He eventually escaped after an inmate uprising at Sobibor, surviving in the forest. He claims he survived being shot in the face, and has a bullet lodged in his jaw.

Blatt is now one of the primary "eyewitnesses" "testifying" against John Demjanjuk.

Thomas Blatt holds up a newspaper showing himself along with Karl August Frenzel, a member of the Nazi S.S. staff at the Sobibor extermination camp, where Blatt was part of a revolt that led to his escape from the camp in 1943. [1]

Holocaust survivor, 82, tells of grim role as 'fireman' in Nazi death camp

20 January 2010
The Scotsman
By Allan Hall in Munich

THE lights dimmed in a Munich court yesterday as the survivor of a Nazi death camp where 250,000 people died described how he stayed alive amid the carnage.

Thomas Blatt, 82, using the tip of his ballpoint pen on a map of the camp projected on to the walls of the court, transported a generation far removed from the horrors of the Holocaust back 67 years to a place called Sobibor in Poland.

Metres away from him, lying on a specially constructed bed and apparently asleep for the whole of his testimony, was the man prosecutors allege may have driven Mr Blatt's parents at bayonet-point into the gas chamber at Sobibor in April 1943.

He does not remember John Demjanjuk from the murder factory hidden in a pine forest, and cannot say if he is guilty as charged of aiding in the murders of 27,900 Dutch Jews who were gassed during his alleged tenure there.

But Mr Blatt was the first witness at 89-year-old Demjanjuk's trial able to take the judge, lawyers and relatives of the dead back to those dark days.

As relatives of those killed in Sobibor during the six months Demjanjuk allegedly worked as a guard there wept in court, Mr Blatt said: "I survived the murder project of the Nazis, and the Ukrainians, like Demjanjuk, were the worst of the worst in the camp."

Shipped off to Sobibor from his home only 43 miles away, his mother, father and ten-year-old brother were gassed and burned within an hour of arrival.

He survived on the whim of the SS commandant, who said to him, "Come, little one", as a selection was made of so-called "work Jews" who were needed by the guards to keep the camp functioning.

He told of his various tasks. "I became what was known as the 'fireman'," he said.

After sorting through the clothes of arriving victims, he was left with piles of passports, love letters, birth certificates, bank account statements and greeting cards taken from those about to die. He burned them in a pit, as the people they once belonged to burned on the "roasts" – huge funeral pyres constructed on iron rails and fuelled with diesel oil that sat next to the gas chamber.

After the victims were undressed, they went along the "Road to Heaven" – a path lined with barbed wire fences interwoven with fir boughs that made it invisible to the rest of the camp.

Asked by Judge Ralph Alt if he could recognise Demjanjuk as a guard there, he said wistfully: "Was he there? More than 60 years have passed. I cannot even remember the faces of my parents.

"The court must decide if he was there. If he was there when I was there, then I can imagine he shoved Jews forward at bayonet point to the gas chambers. Without the 100 or so Ukrainians who were there, the Germans would never have managed to kill 250,000 Jews."

Demjanjuk claims he was a prisoner of the Germans for the whole of the war and questions the authenticity of a key piece of evidence – an SS identity card that prosecutors say features a photo of a young Demjanjuk and says he worked at Sobibor.

Arrested, tried and sentenced to death by an Israeli court nearly 20 years ago for being a guard in another camp, he was cleared after new evidence surfaced. He was extradited from the US to Germany last year to stand trial for being in Sobibor. He has not said a word since the trial began last month.

source: http://news.scotsman.com/world/Holocaust-survivor-82-tells-of.5995937.jp


HolocaustDenialVidoes.com has an excellent detailed breakdown of Blatt's fraudulent story here.


2009 interview with Blatt by Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: And how did you get through the remaining year and a half until the end of the war?

Blatt: Freedom was difficult. If I had been a Christian boy, I'd have had a better chance. People would have taken care of me. But where could I go? There was no Jewish community anymore in my hometown of Izbica, and the Polish farmers saw us mainly as Christ's murderers. A farmer hid me and some others at first, in exchange for money we'd taken with us from Sobibor. Later he tried to shoot us. I still have the bullet in my jaw. After that I hid in the woods or in abandoned buildings.

Blatt speaking to students [2]

"Vhat part of my story don't you believe?" [3]

Edie Eger's Holohoax tale - danced for Mengele, never knew if water or gas would come out of showers, weighed 40 lbs at 17 yrs-old when liberated

Edith is a superstar on the Holyco$t circuit, and a consummate storyteller.

She says she danced for Dr. Mengele, and saw the black smoke from the gas chamber (not the crematorium), which likely contained the ashes of her mother.

Whenever Edie and her sister Magda showered at Auschwitz, "they never knew if they would receive water or gas."

Eventually an emaciated and thought-dead Edie was thrown in a mass grave in the woods behind a camp, but an American GI spotted her hand move and she was pulled from the pile of corpses. A miracle!

She weighed 40 lbs at 17 yrs-old when liberated.

Edie now travels all over telling her story.

Edie's Heroic Story

Edie's story began in Kassa, Hungry where she grew up with her parents and older sisters, Magda and Klara. In May of 1944 at the age of 16 her life changed forever. Edie was sent by the Germans to Auschwitz concentration camp along with her parents and sister Magda. (Her sister Klara was smuggled out of the country by her music teacher and was the only one in her family to escape the concentration camp.)

When Edie and her family arrived in Auschwitz, her father was immediately separated from the rest of them and sent to the men's camp. They never saw him again. While Edie, her mother, and sister Magda stood in line to await their fate, Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death" approached them. He directed her mother to the left and Edie and her sister to the right. Edie tried to go to the left with her mother, but Dr. Mengele told her she had to go to the right and that she would see her mother later after her mother's shower. Edie waited for her mother, but later learned from another inmate that her mother had been sent to the gas chamber.

Later that same day the guards found out from other inmates that Edie had been a ballerina in Hungry. They told Dr. Mengele, who liked to be entertained by the inmates. He sent for Edie to dance for him. As Edie was onstage dancing for Dr. Mengele, she saw the black smoke from the gas chamber, which likely contained the ashes of her mother, drift upward toward heaven. Edie remembered her mother's words while on the train to Auschwitz, "No one can take from you what you put in your mind."

Edie said as she continued to dance, "Dr. Mengele discussed with the guards who should die next. I prayed. Not for myself, but for Dr. Mengele, so he would not have to kill me. It was then that I began to pity the Nazis; they were more imprisoned than I. Somehow I would survive, but they would always have to live with what they had done."

Edie and her sister Magda were close to death many times. Whenever they showered, they never knew if they would receive water or gas. They had to carry ammunitions for the Nazis on the infamous "death march." They were used as human shields on top of a train full of ammunitions. The Nazis thought that the allies would not drop bombs on a train carrying prisoners, but they were wrong. The bombs killed others around them, but Edie and her sister survived.

From June 1944 to May 1945 Edie and Magda were moved from camp to camp, eventually ending up in Gunskirchen Larger camp. They were becoming exhausted and emaciated with hunger. Edie became so weak that she went in and out of consciousness. Even her sister's vigilance as a caretaker couldn't revive Edie. She was unconscious when guards thought she was dead and they tossed her in a mass grave in the woods behind the camp.

Then in May of 1945 Edie's miracle came. Almost a year to the day from when she arrived in Auschwitz, she was pulled from the pile of corpses in the woods by an American GI who was there with the 71st Infantry to liberate the Gunskirchen Larger camp. He saw her hand move. She weighed 40 pounds and had a broken back, but she was alive!

After her recovery, Edie married a Czech freedom-fighter and eventually moved to the United States where she raised three children. She believes she was saved for a reason. It is her life's work is to spread the message that it is possible to love and forgive, even in the midst of life's greatest adversities. Edie says, "Contrary to popular belief, there are no victims in this world - only willing participants. Each of us have the opportunity to transform our lives. You may not control your circumstances, but you can control how you respond to them. Everyone has the power to change at any time."

Edie is an amazing person beyond her story! Being in the presence of someone with this level of love and compassion is life changing.

source: http://www.heroicjourney.com/pages/about/edieeger.htm

Testimony from the Eichmann Trial by Leon Wells - Dug up and burned bodies, used bone-grinding machine, ate lunch on top of corpses

Leon says he worked in the "Death Brigade", the Sonderkommando 1005, at the Janowska camp in Poland.

The job of the Death Brigade was to dig up bodies of people murdered by the Nazis and erase all traces of the evidence.

They piled the bodies in heaps like a pyramid, sometimes up to 2,000 bodies.

The Nazi in charge of the Death Brigade would lead the jews to work in the morning dressed in a devil's costume, with a hook on his hand. He would force Jews to make up songs as they marched to work. He also had an orchestra made up of Jewish prisoners march alongside the Jews, and accompany them as they sang their songs.

After burning the bodies, they put the bones into a bone-grinding machine, and then they would make the ashes disappear by tossing them into the air.

While at work, they ate lunch on top of the corpses.

No word if Leon slept or hid in feces.

The USHMM claims this is a bone-crushing machine used to grind human bones in order to obtain fertilizer in the Janowska concentration camp. Poland, August 1944.[1]

kosher source: Nizkor

The Trial of Adolf Eichmann
Session 23
(Part 2 of 5)

(2 May 1961)

[...]

Q. Now you were back at the Janowska camp?

A. We marched in, to music played by a big orchestra.

Q. What orchestra?

A. We had, in the concentration camp - also in the Julag we had an orchestra playing every morning and every evening, when we went out to work and when we returned from work and also when people were taken to be shot - the orchestra used to have to play. It was made up of Jewish prisoners in the concentration camp and the orchestra at Janowska once amounted to sixty people, sixty musicians.

Q. Who ordered this orchestra to be organized and to play?

A. I believe that in general, it was something more than an order given by a single man because it happened that also in the Julag - also afterwards in the Death Brigade, in the concentration camp where there were different leaders, in every place an orchestra was formed, so I don't believe it was a specific idea...due to a Wilhaus or some other, when they came and started at this time.

Q. Dr. Wells, before we go on, tell me - now you had seen all your family dead, you were now back in the Janowska camp - how could you stand it? How could you survive it? What gave you the will to go on?

A. It was the will of responsibility, that somebody had to remain to tell the world that it was the idea of the Nazis to kill all the Jews - so we had a responsibility somehow to withstand this idea and to be alive. There was not one of us, as will be shown later, that had any interest whether it was he or the second man; it was always: who will be the best to survive and the others will go to death - so as to feel that one man or at least somebody would survive out of all of this.

Q. Now on 15 June 1943, forty people were taken out of the Janowska camp allegedly for road-building. You were among them?

A. Yes.

Q. But this was not for road-building. It was the Death Brigade. The Sonderkommando 1005 (Special Commando).

A. Yes.

Q. What was the job of this Sonderkommando?

A. The job was to remove at any time traces of the murdering of the people by the Nazis.

Q. What did you have to do?

A. We used to uncover all the graves where there were people who had been killed during the past three years, take out the bodies, pile them up in tiers and burn these bodies; grind the bones, take out all the valuables in the ashes such as gold teeth, rings and so on - separate them. After grinding the bones we used to throw the ashes up in the air so that they would disappear, replace the earth on the graves and plant seeds, so that nobody could recognize that there ever was a grave there.

In addition to this they used to bring new people - new victims; they were shot there - undressed beforehand - we had to burn these new bodies too.

Q. There was a Brandmeister - (Chief Fireman) what did he do?

A. The Brigade was divided into different corps. There were, in the beginning one, afterwards two Brandmeister, there were two Zaehler (Counters), there was an ash commander, there were carriers and there were pullers, and also there were cleaners. The Brandmeister was in charge of the fire. When they put up a heap like a pyramid, sometimes up to 2,000 bodies - one had to watch out so that the fire didn't go out. He was in charge of this fire, while the Zaehler was keeping a count of how many bodies were burnt to check out with the original list - how many were killed, because sometimes if we uncovered a grave we were looking sometimes for hours for one body or more because it was buried on the side; there was an exact list of how many people were killed. So he kept the number of bodies burned and taken out of each grave.

Attorney General: And in the evening a report had to be given to the Untersturmfuehrer - is that so?

Witness Wells: Yes, to Untersturmfuehrer Scherlack and, in his absence, it was Hauptscharfuehrer Rauch.

Q. How was the form of the report?

A. The report was given over with the pencil and paper - because we couldn't have with us anything left - and it was forbidden for anybody to tell the number, and he had himself to forget. So that if the Hauptscharfuehrer or Untersturmfuehrer next morning asked: "How many were burned yesterday?", he couldn't any more tell. He had to say: "I forgot."

Q. Tell me, how many hours did you work - burning corpses like that? How many hours a day?

A. Some days - eight; some days - ten hours; but normally it was an eight-hour day because here, all the Schutzpolizei and the SD men had to be on the job with us all day. When they finished work - we could go back.

Q. Were you fed while you were working? Did you get any food?

A. We got a lot of food.

Q. Where did you eat? Amongst the corpses?

A. On the corpses.

Q. On the corpses themselves?

A. Yes, on the corpses.

Q. Now 21st May, do you remember? This year...gravestones from the Jewish cemetery arrived - the Jewish cemetery of Lvov. Do you remember?

A. It wasn't 21st May.

Q. 21st June. I'm sorry - 21st June, 1943.

A. There arrived from the gravestones - we weighed them out and made a place for the Brandstelle (Burning Site) and the Aschkolonne (Ash Column).

Q. What was the work of the...no - we'll leave that. You tell me that you collected the gold and so on - can you give the Court an idea how much it came to a day?

A. Some days it came up to 8-10 kilos gold, when it was only from bodies. But when they used to bring new people - like if they brought 2,000 or 1,500 people - the amount of gold and rings and also money would be much more. But on some days, only from corpses, we used to get about eight to ten kilos a day.

Q. How was the murder of those who arrived alive at the fires carried out?

A. It depends. For example - at one time there arrived only two or three hundred people, or at other times there arrived 1,500 or 2,000 or 2,500 people. When, for example, arrived 24 of the girls from the concentration camp - on 26 August 1943 - after the night that they spent with the SS people - they were picked from the concentration camp. When they were offered to stay with the SS people - some of the girls started to run away and were taken this time right away to the fires. This time they were standing on the trucks; the trucks backed up to the fires and they were standing at the edge of the truck. Every one of them got a shot in the neck and was then kicked so that she fell straight into the fire.

Q. Who shot them?

A. One of the SS people always - whoever was available that morning.

When on Tuesday, 29 June, 275 people came in they were shot by setting them up in 25 with the machine gun. After the first 25 stepped in, the next 25 stepped in. With these 275 that were shot on 29 June 1943, on Tuesday, it explained one thing that we found before some graves where it didn't seem to us that the people were shot...but with their tongues out and open mouths it was more like suffocated people and it told us how these people were buried alive. Because when we came out to burn the bodies we found that some of them were only slightly injured due to the machine gun taking 25 people in one shot...so some of them were slightly injured in the arm and they fell down and above them the other people. So it happened at this night when we picked up a body and put it in the fire, at the last moments these bodies started to scream - yell aloud because it was still alive.

Q. So you were provided with hooks by the commanders of the Commando?

A. Yes.

Q. And with gasoline and oil?

A. Gasoline and oil and wood, piles of wood, and a grinding machine.

Q. And you had to do your job very carefully and very efficiently so that nothing should be left of the bodies?

A. Yes, it was necessary to look on the ground for any hair, a piece of bone that was left and even a piece of paper, everything was burned.

Presiding Judge: What was a grinding machine?

Witness Wells: It was like a cement machine that was running and in it big heavy steel balls and the bones were put in from one way and when these balls were...

Presiding Judge: The bones or the bodies?

Witness Wells: So the steel balls were hitting bones. First the fire burned the bones and some of the parts of the body were burned to ashes. These went to the ash column and the ash column sifted through what was remaining in the sieves. The sieves were like sieves we use for flour, to sift flour. And what was left in these sieves was put into the grinding machine and the grinding machine ground them and again got out what was left over, and gold or platinum was in it. These were picked up and afterwards went to the grinding machine. It was a year and a month later when I uncovered also the grave where they looked for the 182nd body which had to be there.

Attorney General: May I ask the Court for the witness' book. I should like him to identify a number of pictures.

Presiding Judge: I didn't understand your last reply, Dr. Wells.

Witness Wells: It was in July, at the end of June 1943 I dug up the grave where I had to be buried the year ahead when I escaped among the 182 people.

Presiding Judge: I see.

Witness Wells: And they were looking that they were missing a body, and we looked about two days for a missing body.

Attorney General: Who had lists of the bodies?

Witness Wells: I don't know who had the list, but it always came. They often, one of the SD people will uncover, it will be exactly the location of the grave...and we will even go and it will be said from this corner you will have to measure six steps, right, south, east and so on. We measured and here we started to make the grave. It was also written how many people had to be in this grave.

Q. And they knew how many bodies were there exactly?

A. Exactly, because we were looking to fit this number with the Zaehler.

Q. There are some illustrations in your book, some pictures taken of the brigade during its work - how did you get those pictures?

A. These pictures weren't supplied by me - they were supplied by the Historical Commission in Poland...

Presiding Judge: But that's how it looked - just look at it.

Witness Wells: That's how it looked.

Presiding Judge: Do you know how the photographs got to this Commission?

Witness Wells: No.

Attorney General: Now, when you went to work in the morning and came back in the evening, you say you had to sing?

Witness Wells: We had to make up songs and sing while we were going to work, and also the Brandmeister would march in front, he was clothed like a devil; he had a special uniform with the hook in his hand and we had to march after him and sing. Afterwards we were also joined by an orchestra which would play as we sang and accompany us on our march to work.

Q. Sometimes people in the brigade identified bodies of their relatives?

A. Yes. Even more - I remember the name Mr. Brill - he was in his late forties at this time...He was taken to the concentration camp, to the Death Brigade; and he was brought together with his two young daughters, one of sixteen and one of eighteen. They were shot and he was put into the Death Brigade, and an hour later, while they were still warm, he himself had to put them in the fire.

Q. Let us continue. Do you remember Tuesday, 29th June?

A. Yes, I mentioned those 275...

Q. Now tell me - how long did a man in such a brigade usually live?

A. Normally, by order... we were told that after eight to ten days we had to be exchanged - we would be shot and another group would come; so when visiting SD men came over to the Death Brigade and asked us how long we had been there it was forbidden for us to say that we had been longer than six, eight, up to eight or ten days - no longer...