Excerpts from "The Black Book" - Electrocution Chamber and Electric Crematorium at Belzec, rivers of blood, jew bone powder used for construction, etc

My favorite is the electric crematorium at Belzec that zapped jews to ashes in an instant.



Wikipedia:

The Black Book was a result of the collaborative effort by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) and members of the American Jewish community to document the anti-Jewish crimes of the Holocaust and the participation of Jews in the fighting and the resistance movement against the Nazis during World War II.

Background

Prominent Jewish Soviet writers and journalists Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman served as war reporters for the Red Army. Grossman's documentary reports of the opening of the Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps were some of the first eyewitness accounts — as early as 1943 — of what later became known as the Shoah. His article The Treblinka Hell (Треблинский ад, 1944) was disseminated at the Nuremberg Trials as a document for the prosecution.

Manuscripts and publications

In 1944–1945, based on their own experiences and on other documents they collected, Ehrenburg and Grossman produced two volumes under the title Murder of the People in Yiddish and handed the manuscript to the JAC. Copies were sent to the United States, Israel (then the British mandate of Palestine) and Romania in 1946, and excerpts were published in the United States in English under the title Black Book that same year. In Romania, a part of the manuscript was also published in 1946. It was also printed in Israel. A handwritten manuscript of the book is held at Yad Vashem.

Purchase

Review:

It's a rare reader who'll be able to get through The Unknown Black Book without having to walk away from it several times. The tragedies it documents are just too horrible to bear except in small doses. Both text and photographs stun the imagination and freeze the heart.

The UBB is a narrative history of Nazi atrocities against the Jews in the German-occupied Soviet territories (Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, The Crimea, and Russia) during WWII. It contains 93 documents, almost half of which are written by eyewitnesses. The rest are compilations of various eyewitness accounts by the editors, a couple of Soviet Jewish journalists, Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, who began collecting material as early as 1942. The eyewitness accounts include diaries, letters, and testimonies of those Russian Jews who managed to survive the wholescale exterminations carried out by the Eastern Front Einsatzgruppen (one of which was commanded by a direct descendant of the composer Franz Schubert).

Excerpts (via website of Carlos Whitlock Porter):

SELECTED LIES FROM THE “BLACK BOOK”

PUBLISHED BY THE JEWISH BLACK BOOK COMMITTEE, 1946

World Jewish Congress, New York
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Moscow
Vaad Leumi (Jewish National Council of Palestine, Jerusalem)
American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists and Scientists, New York.

Inside cover blurb: “The entire manuscript of THE BLACK BOOK was submitted to the juridical authorities of the United Nations War Crimes Commission meeting at Nuremberg, Germany, as evidence of the crimes committed by the Nazis against the Jewish people.”

PAGE 270, BREENDONCK CAMP, BELGIUM: “One man, after having his back burned, was sent outside to work with 600 pounds of wood tied to his bare back… One cell… contained nothing but an air pump with a vent outside. In the wall was a hole through which the Germans forced gas. If the victim was strong enough he could pump in fresh air and keep himself alive for a while. The weak died quickly.”



PAGE 280, FRANCE: “They were poisoned in the camps. In trucks which were meant to hold twenty people, the Germans placed a hundred. Quicklime was placed on the floor about ten inches deep. The doors were sealed hermetically. These people had to pass their water – that would start the lime cooking. Gas and fumes came up and choked them to death. Bodies were thrown into special crematories on the border between Germany and Poland [sic] and burned there.” [Note: this apparently refers to the concentration camp at Gun [?], in Southern France, near the Spanish border, but it is not very clear. Did they really kill them on the Spanish border and then transport them all the way to the Polish border just to burn the bodies?]



Page 281, NATZWEILER: "Cremation of one corpse required fifteen minutes."

PAGE 313, BELZEC: “The Belzec camp is built underground. It is an electric crematorium. There are two halls in the underground buildings. People were taken out of the railway cars into the first hall. Then they were led naked to the second hall. Here the floor resembled an enormous plate. When the crowd of men stood on it, the floor sank deep into a pool of water. The moment the men sank up to their necks, a powerful electric current of millions of volts was passed through, killing them all at once. The floor rose again, and a second electric current was passed through the bodies, burning them until nothing was left of the victims save a few ashes.”

PAGE 339, TATARSK, RUSSIA: “A river of blood flowed from their home…”

PAGE 356, THE UKRAINE: “Children up to the age of fifteen were not shot, but were thrown into ditches and buried alive. For several days the earth trembled above the infants. Their blood seeped up to the surface.”



PAGE 364, SOMEPLACE IN RUSSIA: “On the tenth day we were driven to the Lykyanovka ravine. We stood there – panic-stricken. From beneath the freshly strewn earth streamed rivers of blood, the blood of 56,000 murdered Jews. It cried out to us from beneath the earth. My hair turned gray that morning.”

PAGE 375, SOBIBOR: “Gas was filtered into the ‘bathhouse’ through a hose. The Germans watched the process of asphyxiation through a tiny window. At a signal the supply of gas cut off, the floor of the ‘bathhouse’ opened, and the bodies dropped below. The prisoners working underground had to load the bodies and cart them away.”



PAGE 378, POLAND: “The Nazis organized special workers’ brigades to make powder out of human bones; the powder was taken to the village of Zawada, on the Warta river near Kolo, where it was used in building walls.”

PAGE 408, TREBLINKA: “The second Treblinka camp method, and the most widespread one, consisted of pumping all the air out from the chambers with large special pumps. By this method death ensued from approximately the same causes as from poisoning with carbon monoxide: man was deprived of oxygen. And, finally, the third method, less widespread, was killing by steam, based also on deprivation of oxygen: the steam drove air out of the chamber.”

"The Black Book" is endorsed by the USHMM

Simon Rozenkier's HolyHoax tale - "Mengele cut the hump off a hunchback, Nazis sterilized Jews and Gypsies with X-rays to the genitalia"

Simon claims he was sterilized himself at Auschwitz from repeatedly being injected with chemicals that he was told were vitamin supplements.

The Nazis told him "These shots will give you muscles to work. Do you understand that, you redheaded dog?"

He said the sterilization shots "caused his genitalia to swell and bleed and caused wrenching pain for days."

Before being taken to a concentration camp, Simon escaped the ghetto in his native Poland and slept in a cemetery next to an aunt's grave for several months.

At Auschwitz, Simon says he was spared from the gas chamber "because the Nazi doctors thought he had unusual genes" and "were trying to figure out why this Jew got red hair."

Of Mengele, he says "sometimes he gave people a piece of chocolate, and the next minute he shoots them in the head."

Rozenkier lost his mother, father, four sisters, and a brother in the Holocaust.

Simon Rozenkier, third from left in a dark cap, on the day the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated in 1945. [1]

Survivor of Nazi Experiments Says $8,000 Isn’t Enough

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
Published: November 19, 2003

The medical experiments that Simon Rozenkier says he saw and experienced in Nazi concentration camps strain the imagination.

He saw a hunchback whose hump had been cut off by Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor. He said Dr. Mengele had thrown a Jewish man into a bath of ice and let him freeze to death, in a study intended to help Nazi pilots survive when they were shot down over icy seas.

Mr. Rozenkier, a native of Poland who emigrated to New York in 1947, said he saw Nazi doctors administer intense X-rays to the genitalia of Jews and Gypsies to sterilize them. And he vividly recalled how a Nazi doctor, Horst Schumann, had repeatedly injected him with chemicals — he was told they were vitamin supplements — to sterilize him, all part of a Nazi effort to perfect ways to keep Jews from reproducing.

"They told me, `These shots will give you muscles to work,' " he said. " `Do you understand that, you redheaded dog?'"

When Mr. Rozenkier and his wife encountered problems having children in the early 1950's, he contacted the German consulate in New York. Officials there sent him to a doctor who determined that he was sterile, confirming his own doctor's findings.

This year, Mr. Rozenkier filed a lawsuit accusing two German pharmaceutical giants, Bayer and Schering, of providing experts and drugs to Dr. Mengele and other Nazi doctors for sterilizations.

"What they did to me is beyond right and wrong," said Mr. Rozenkier, who lost his parents and four siblings in the Holocaust. "They should be punished."

His lawsuit, in Federal District Court in Newark, has created a legal and diplomatic tempest because the German government and German companies insist that there is no place for such litigation now. They point to a 2000 agreement between the United States and Germany that created a $5 billion fund to compensate Nazi slave laborers and victims of medical experiments.

German officials and companies say the fund was created partly to prevent lawsuits like Mr. Rozenkier's, which are difficult to litigate and which embarrass the Germans with details about past Nazi horrors.

Mr. Rozenkier, who lives on Staten Island, said that his lawsuit was warranted despite the agreement because, in his view, the $8,000 that the fund awarded him was woefully inadequate. The lawsuit does not seek a specific amount. He further argued that the German foundation that administers the fund had violated the agreement by capping awards to the victims of medical experiments and not individually judging how much each victim should receive.

But Roger Witten, an American lawyer representing Bayer and Schering, said Mr. Rozenkier's lawsuit should be dismissed. "Everybody feels sympathy for the plaintiff here," Mr. Witten said. "These are all people who went through horrible things." But he said creation of the fund should have ended these cases in American courts.

In the agreement, the American government promised that in suits brought in federal court, it would urge the judge to dismiss the cases if there were valid legal reasons for doing so. The government would do so without taking a position on the merits of the complaints.

"The U.S. side embraced the idea of legal peace for German companies," Mr. Witten said. "This was not just in the interests of German companies and Germany, but also in the foreign policy interests of the United States for German companies to be able to put this behind them."

A State Department official said last week that the department would file a statement recommending that the judge in New Jersey dismiss the case if there were any valid legal grounds to do so.

Mr. Rozenkier's lawyer, Carey D'Avino, said, "The State Department apparently plans to file a statement with the court for diplomatic reasons, but the U.S. shouldn't file such a statement because the Germans have failed to live up to the letter and spirit of the agreement and failed to live up to their side of the bargain."

Experts on Holocaust claims disagree about how the federal courts should treat Mr. Rozenkier's case.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former deputy treasury secretary who had helped negotiate the agreement with Germany, said the suit should be dismissed. "If the plaintiff were correct in this case," he said, "it would undercut the entire thrust of the German settlement, which is to put an overall cap on claims, to create a quick claims mechanism and to avoid individualized hearings."

But Lawrence Kill, a New York lawyer who had signed the agreement after representing former slave laborers who sued Germany, said Mr. Rozenkier's case should be allowed to go forward because the Germans had apparently violated the agreement. "A side letter to the agreement called for individual consideration as to the amount medical victims are entitled to," Mr. Kill said. "How can we give someone who was subject to some of the worst kinds of atrocities imaginable the same as somebody else who might have had a toenail removed in a Nazi experiment?"

Mr. Rozenkier said the sterilization shots he had received caused his genitalia to swell and bleed and caused wrenching pain for days. The shots also caused a more lasting anguish. "After the war," he said, "when I finally got in touch with my brother, Aaron, who had escaped to Russia, he said: `I hope you're going to have a big family. Look what we lost.' I said, `O.K., we'll have a family.' But it never happened."

He pulled out an old picture of his brother as a lieutenant in the Soviet Army. Then, choking up, he showed a prewar picture of three primly dressed sisters and a brother, all under 12 at the time. All four died in the war.

After immigrating to New York, Mr. Rozenkier served in the Korean War, earning two Bronze Stars, and then spent 20 years working in Manhattan's garment district. After the war, he and his wife, Joan, were often invited to reunions of death camp survivors.

"I felt like a jackass," he said. "I'd go there, and they all had three or four kids and I didn't have any. I was walking around like an outcast."

Monographs by Nazi doctors and numerous books and treatises have described the sterilization work at labs run by Dr. Mengele and others. Chemicals were injected into the uterus of hundreds of Jewish and Gypsy women, causing blockages in their fallopian tubes that rendered them sterile. The Nazi doctors also X-rayed male inmates to sterilize them, but the X-rays often killed the men or caused such severe burns that they became unfit for work. Mr. Rozenkier said that this must have led the Nazis to begin experimenting with chemical sterilization on men.

Mr. Rozenkier was one of several thousand victims who survived the experiments. "Certainly there was widespread sterilization and castration, and all this was part of a distorted racial vision that sought to destroy the capacity to reproduce in ostensibly inferior races and especially Jews," said Robert Jay Lifton, author of "The Nazi Doctors." Mr. Rozenkier was born in Wroclawek, Poland, 75 years ago. In September 1939, soon after Hitler invaded Poland, German soldiers pounded on his family's apartment door to arrest Mr. Rozenkier's father. When his oldest sister, Helena, stepped outside to protest, a soldier shot her to death.

Wroclawek's Jews were sent to a ghetto on the outskirts of town. Mr. Rozenkier escaped, and for several months slept in a cemetery next to an aunt's grave.

He was arrested when he was 14 and sent to a work camp. There, he loaded sand, nearly died of typhus and was eventually assigned the job of carting away hundreds of Jews who had died of typhus.

One day while transporting the dead he visited a Polish family to beg for potatoes. German soldiers seized him and planned to hang him, but he was spared because the commander of a nearby women's work camp put in a good word for him. Breaking into tears, he said: "My sister, Leah, worked for that commander. She was his cook. But she sold her body to him to save my life."

After more than a year in work camps, he was shipped to Auschwitz in a crammed cattle car. He was tattooed with the number 143511 and assigned to a nearby work camp that made synthetic rubber. One day, an associate of Dr. Mengele saw him and had him sent to the nearby Birkenau camp for experiments.

With reddish-blond hair that made him look less Jewish, Mr. Rozenkier said, he was spared from the gas chamber because the Nazi doctors thought he had unusual genes. He said, "They were trying to figure out why this Jew got red hair."

At Birkenau, while many were starving around him, Mr. Rozenkier was fed an ample diet of buckwheat to help him survive the experiments.

"Sometimes they even gave us chocolate — can you believe it? Chocolate," he said.

"Mengele didn't give a damn if I live or die," he continued. "Sometimes he gave people a piece of chocolate, and the next minute he shoots them in the head."

After Mr. Rozenkier survived the sterilization shots, a doctor who took a liking to him arranged for him to work in a coal mine. From there, he joined the infamous death march to Buchenwald in which the Nazis shot hundreds of stragglers. He was in Buchenwald when American troops liberated it.

Had he known that he was sterile, he said: "I never would have married my wife. It's not fair to her. She's entitled to have children." They adopted a daughter, Allison, who is now 35.

Mr. Rozenkier is seeking money from Schering and Bayer, which was then a division of I. G. Farben, because records show that doctors from Schering participated in the sterilization work at Birkenau and other camps, while drugs Bayer developed were used in sterilizations. His lawsuit also wants the companies to disclose which chemicals were injected into him.

In his eyes, the lawsuit is a way to achieve justice. He says he will donate any money he wins to Israel.

Like many Holocaust survivors, Mr. Rozenkier feels uneasy that he lived while so many family members and other Jews perished. "I'm the only one who suffers right now because I should have been with them," he said. "I feel guilty."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/19/nyregion/19SURV.html


More on Simon, from his obituary:

Simon Rozenkier. Handsome little devil, eh?

Simon Rozenkier, 83

By Maureen Donnelly
SILive.com
May 24, 2009, 5:14AM

Holocaust survivor believed in people

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Simon Rozenkier, a boy who survived the Holocaust, became a man who -- against odds -- believed in people.

Nabbed as a starving teen-ager for accepting a potato from a stranger in his native Poland, he became a man who regularly distributed potatoes (and other staples, from paper towels to cherry pie), to his Charleston neighbors.

Simon Rozenkier, who was sterilized at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Josef Mengele's infamous lab, adopted a daughter to become a loving father and a devoted grandfather.

Mr. Rozenkier died Friday at Staten Island University Hospital, Ocean Breeze. He was 83.

He was born in Wroclawek, Poland, during an era that destined him to a sickening adolescence. He spoke about it nearly every day, his daughter said.

Mr. Rozenkier was 11 when Adolf Hitler's troops invaded his town. As the Gestapo approached his home, a voice outside screamed in Yiddish, "God help us!" Minutes later, soldiers found him and his family hiding in candlelight. They struck his father with a gun, sent him falling down a flight of stairs, then shot dead his eldest sister, Helene Rozenkier, who had grabbed in protest for their machine gun.

SENT TO A GHETTO

Shipped to a Jewish ghetto, he was captured after more than a year in hiding and sent to a German labor camp, where he dug pits for the bodies of Jews -- some 100,000 of them, he estimated-- who had died of typhus.

In 1942, the Gestapo discovered him accepting a potato from a Polish woman whose husband had been killed. They bound his hands with wire.

The following year, at 17, he arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Intrigued by his fair skin, blue eyes and light, red hair, Nazis sent Mr. Rozenkier to the "zoo camp," the laboratory where Mengele conducted diabolic medical experiments.

One of thousands of Jews sterilized there as part of efforts to "purify" the Aryan race, Mr. Rozenkier wrote in a published essay: "I cannot describe the pain and bleeding and suffering. I had no idea what they were doing. ... I was their guinea pig."

After working in the coal mines of Auschwitz and being forced to walk for 20 straight days on the "death march" to the Buchenwald concentration camp, Mr. Rozenkier was rescued by the Allies a year later.

"I was thinking about myself and about my family, if I'm ever going see them," Mr. Rozenkier said in a testimony recorded by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "I says, you know, 'I hope you're alive and I'm coming to see you.' To my mother I was talking. 'I don't know what's going to happen to me, I don't know if I'm ever going to see you again, because all my friends are not coming back.' Tears, you just cry and cry and cry. Family was dear to me, I don't know if I ever going to see them. And I didn't, none of them."

MOST OF FAMILY KILLED

Mr. Rozenkier's mother, father, four sisters, and a brother died in the Shoah; his two brothers who survived the Holocaust died some decades later.

Mr. Rozenkier, who immigrated to the United States at the age of 21, discovered he was sterile when he and his wife, Joan, married in 1953 and tried to start a family.

Over that, he waged a long battle for restitution -- beyond the roughly $700 monthly pension that victims of Nazi persecution have been receiving since shortly after the war.

Mr. Rozenkier refused to accept a check that arrived at his Charleston home: $5,348.36 from the German government that no one pretended would counterbalance his losses.

That strange sum was the flat-rate slice of a $5 billion fund set up in 2000 for hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims, the result of a deal struck by the United States and German governments in exchange for an end to an overwhelming torrent of lawsuits, the Advance reported.

Mr. Rozenkier subsequently brought a failed lawsuit against Bayer AG and Schering AG seeking compensation for the medical experiments he endured.

Shortly after immigrating to Brooklyn, Mr. Rosenkier was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army. He served as a sergeant in the Korean War from 1950 to 1952.

In 1999, he relocated to Charleston.

For many years, Mr. Rozenkier worked in the garment district as a wholesaler and retailer of women's clothing.

Mr. Rozenkier spoke very openly, every day, about the atrocities that he survived.

They shaped his personality, his daughter said, as a charitable, loving person who never took anything for granted.

"He realized life can be over within a minute," said his daughter, Allison Rozenkier-Larson.

While he suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Mr. Rozenkier retained his trust in people.

"He had a way of talking about the most horrible things. He would have this laugh at the end of his stories. It was just a coping mechanism. That's how he got through it," said Ms. Rozenkier-Larson.

He also was exceptionally generous, giving to charities that supported animals and children. He would come home from the grocery store with "extras" for his family and neighbors. He would ring neighborhood doorbells with odd gifts of fruit, potatoes or paper towels -- an ethic that may have been borne of sharing bread in the camps, his daughter said.

And above all, he adored his grandchildren.

Mr. Rozenkier, who spoke to students at Wagner College a few years ago and was very involved with the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., wrote a memoir that his family hopes to have published by the fall.

The feisty survivor wore a shock of dyed red hair.

Surviving Mr. Rozenkier are his wife of 56 years, Joan; his daughter, Allison, and his three grandchildren.

The funeral was scheduled to take place this morning from Menorah Chapels, New Springville, followed by entombment at Beth Israel Cemetery in Woodbridge, N.J.

Elane Geller's Shoah tale - Survived on 400 calories a day, ate toothpaste and drank urine, had rats in hair, fertilizer made from jew bones

Elane claims that the German economy was in trouble, so the Germans opened the concentration and death camps in order to create more jobs. She says "suddenly they had jobs. They were making pillows out of human hair, jewelry out of gold inlays, fertilizer out of the bones."

Dr. Geller addresses Waldorf College about her experiences during the Holocaust. Photo by Sarah Sly.


Holocaust survivor addresses Waldorf College as part of Spring Convocation series

Molly Lumley - Tuesday, March 31, 2009
The Lobbyist

In a rare opportunity, students and community members witnessed a piece of living history on the evening of Mar. 30 in the form of Elane Geller, one the youngest living Holocaust survivors. Geller shared her experiences and reflections on her time in concentration camps as a child.

The convocation took place in a packed Atrium at Waldorf College, and more chairs had to be added to the skywalk to accommodate the number of people who came to hear Geller speak.

Geller and her family were taken captive by the Nazis in Poland when she was only four years old. She spent time until she was eight in a few concentration camps, but most of her time was spent in Bergen-Belsen until she and 60,000 others there were liberated by the British army on Apr. 14, 1945.

Geller recounted many of her experiences before, during and after her time in Bergen-Belsen. She started by emphasizing how many Jewish people had been targeted for killing--over 11 million--and how about half of them died during the Holocaust. 1.5 million of those were children under the age of 17, along with 5.5 million non-Jews.

Geller said that racism can be reduced by teaching children at a young age that they have the power to act decently towards other people, but she doesn’t believe that it can be completely eliminated.

“I believe that racism and bigotry is as catching as AIDS and any other communicable disease,” Geller said. “I believe that we can reduce it. I do not think for one moment that we’re going to magically wipe it out if we all behave really, really well.”

Geller explained only the Jews were targeted for genocide, and that the word “Holocaust” is a Greek word that means “consumed by fire.”

“That’s all [that’s] left is powder. Only the Jews were targeted for genocide,” said Gellar. “I want you to know that I am aware, really aware of the expectations, there were some good Poles, there were some good Germans, there were some good white Americans that helped and some black Americans smuggling a few out in underground tunnels to freedom. We are grateful; the world is grateful as it should be. Not enough however, to make a difference. We are still grateful to those souls who very often endangered their own lives.”

Geller said the Jews had lived around where she was born for hundreds of years, but despite their attempts to do everything they could to be treated as equals, they were never treated as first-class citizens. She also pointed out that Hitler didn’t start the hatred of Jews, he only added to it.

“We knew that if there was going to be a war, that we would be that yellow canary in the coal mine in the test case. We knew it.”

She said that her father tried to hide her with a Christian family when the war started. He hired someone to tutor her in order for her to know the things that a Christian girl should know so she could blend in with a Christian family in case she would have to stay there during the war. She also had false papers made, such as a birth certificate and baptismal papers in case she had to hide with another family if her’s was captured. She said this kind of arrangement was common during the war, and that surviving Jewish family members were supposed to pick up their children after the war. Some did, others did not.

“So the day came, the day came and the Nazis did come to our town,” Geller said. “First thing they did was to gather the records from City Hall and gather the Jews on their knees in the town square.”

She said that wasn’t her first memory of the Holocaust though, her first memory was of her father dressing her in layers of clothing and removing her earrings so the Nazis couldn’t rip them out of her ears. Her father was going to take her to a house to stay with a Christian family, but as they approached the door, the family inside was handing over a child to the Nazis and claiming they had no idea where the child came from.

“My father saw this betrayal and quickly decided to change his mind. He and I turned around and started to walk towards the center of town to locate and join the rest of the family,” Geller said. “By the time we got there, two of my uncles were already dead.”

She went on to describe how the average food intake of a Holocaust prisoner was only 400 calories a day.

“I didn’t get any food officially. I wasn’t working. I wasn’t counted and my aunt shared her food with me,” Geller said.

She said once she got to Bergen-Belsen, she would talk to some of the women there and learn songs in their native language, practice them and sing them back to the women for food.

Her mother and grandparents were shot into graves that the men had been forced to dig in the center of town. After that, she and her remaining family members were sent to a camp outside of the town.

“The very moment that massacre was over, we were quickly, quickly, moved out of the center of town to a small holding camp not far away,” explained Geller. “The camp was surrounded by electrified barbed wire. We were given armbands with the yellow Star of David on them. That was it, that was the end of our freedom”

Her family was separated after that, and Geller wasn’t sure if she would see any of them again. Her 16 year-old sister was sent to Auschwitz, where she fell victim to the oven soon after arriving. She said that the German economy was failing, and that the with the new concentration and death camps opening, that gave more jobs to the economy.

“People in Auschwitz, and the cities could see the smokestacks of Auschwitz, not unlike 9/11, belching out smoke that smelled of human flesh burning,” Geller said. “And suddenly they had jobs. They were making pillows out of human hair, jewelry out of gold inlays, fertilizer out of the bones.”

Geller remembers doing whatever she could while she was in the camps, just trying to stay alive by finding enough to eat.

“During this five year period, I had typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis,” Geller recalled. “Never, never treated in the so-called ‘infirmary.’ What do you think they’d do with a Jewish child if you brought her to an infirmary? They weren’t going to get me well and then kill me,” Geller said. “I had lice and rats in my hair. I stole, I ate toothpaste, I drank urine. I did, I did whatever was necessary to fill my belly and stay alive.”

Geller hopes the students will have a deeper respect for life after hearing her share personal experiences and memories of the Holocaust.

“The fact is that life is something to be respected,” Geller said. “All the bodies I saw piled around the camp would have traded with any of us for one minute of life. There’s a beginning, a middle and the end to life, and you can be the architect of that.”

Waldorf College President Richard Hanson said in the short amount of time he spent with Geller while she visited Waldorf College helped give him a new perspective on life.

“One of the real significant strengths of Waldorf College is that we gather at regular times like this to explore the deepest and most important elements of the human condition,” Hanson said. “Running into Elane Geller…reminds me that I have indeed found someone who has made a lasting and permanent impact on my life because of the stories she shares and the experiences she’s had and the refreshing life-filled perspective that she has on everyday living.”

Geller’s visit was her fifth to Waldorf College. Last year she was awarded an honorary doctorate for her service. She currently resides in southern Calif.

The Lobbyist is a student-run publication of Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa.

Emmaly Reed's incredible HolyHoax tale - Imprisoned 12 yrs, had tattoo removed, slept in mud and feces, weighed 32 pounds at 15 yrs old when liberated

Emmaly has quite a story to tell. She ate vegetation to stay alive and slept in mud and feces. On her last day in the camp, Emmaly "was in a coma, hanging to a wall by the wrists and a chain around her neck. Everyone around her was dead." She was 15 years old and weighed 32 pounds.

RAYMOND HILLEGAS • Hays Daily News
Emmaly Reed, a Holocaust survivor, looks to her friend Albie Stephens of Angelus as she recounts her experiences as a prisoner of a concentration camp Thursday night at St. Nicholas of Myra Catholic Church in Hays. Reed was only 3 years old when she became a prisoner, and she remained a prisoner for 12 years.


A story of pain and survival

Published on -4/3/2008, 1:01 PM
By KALEY LYON
The Hays Daily News
klyon@dailynews

Tears glistened on Emmaly Reed's cheeks as she shared painful experiences about her past -- experiences so awful school textbooks don't divulge all the details.

But with a quiet resolve, Reed got through the tears, even sharing a few chuckles with the crowd of 500 who came to hear her personal account of the Holocaust.

"It will haunt me all the time. My memories of it are very hard and very painful," Reed said. "I might sometimes still smile with you and laugh with you, but the pain never goes away. You have to learn to live with it, or you go down the drain."

Reed, 77, now lives in Salina and was in Hays on Thursday evening to share her story with a large crowd at St. Nicholas of Myra Church.

After 12 years of captivity, Reed, who was incarcerated at age 3 for being Jewish, had plenty of stories to share. The Holocaust began when Hitler seized control of Germany in 1933 -- the year she was arrested.

The first little girl taken, and one of the first prisoners at Dachau Concentration Camp, No. 4 was tattooed on her wrist. That number would be her identifying mark for more than a decade.

"They called you by your number to put you down, but they knew my name," Reed said.

The brand was later removed from her skin by a doctor.

"He said, 'Come to my office, and I'll take care of it. You don't have to suffer anymore,' " she said.

She told stories that made the skin crawl. Stories about eating vegetation to stay alive, sleeping in mud and feces and watching people die every day.

She endured torture of various degrees and often was taken to a laboratory where experiments intended to kill were performed on her.

She remembers a kind German soldier, who was tortured and killed in front of everyone for showing sympathy to children.

The daughter of a French officer and a Jewish mother, she was separated from her parents when she was arrested. Her father vocally opposed Hitler's rule and was one of the first killed in concentration camps, Reed said.

* * *

Upon her liberation at age 15, she eventually was reunited with her mother.

Her last day in the camp, she was in a coma, hanging to a wall by the wrists and a chain around her neck. Everyone around her was dead.

"My last day, I was nailed to the wall. I was supposed to be dead, but I wasn't," she said. "I was just in a coma."

The few survivors were liberated by French soldiers, who were led to the camp by her mother. Upon her liberation, she was rushed to a military hospital in France and remained in a coma for months.

At the time, she was 15 years old and weighed 32 pounds.

She knows the European doctors did all they could for her, but also knows there's another reason she's alive, Reed said.

"But I think something else is the reason," she said. "God was in my sight and always stepping in when they tried to kill me."

Reed's message was one of hope.

She became a Messianic Jew during her time in the camps. She befriended many Christian people who also endured persecution as well.

While no one stayed in the same camp -- or alive -- long enough to form long-lasting friendships, these people taught her how to stay alive. They taught her what plants were safe to eat and tried to educate the child by sound of mouth, she said.

They also taught her something more.

Bibles were strictly forbidden in camps. Those who smuggled one in were put to death. However, many of the Christians she met had a thorough knowledge of the book, she said.

"The Christian people taught me how to pray, how to believe in God, how to have hope," Reed said. "I learned how to pray, and it gave me peace. I wanted to die with a halo on my head."

Reed came to America in the 1970s and, decades later, is able to sleep through the night. She's also able to share her experience and is motivated by her desire to share a story of truth and hope.

"I'd like to tell everybody, keep your eyes open," she said. "Stick to the truth. It's very important."

Reed has learned to forgive the people who stole her childhood.

"You have to learn how to forgive. If you don't, you're only hurting yourself," she said.

Emmaly hanging, chained to the wall on the day of liberation, all 32 pounds of her

Steven Ross' sad Holo tale - "To survive, we were resorting to cannibalism"; Shows kids animal figurines "made from the crushed bones of Jews"

Steve Ross (real name Szmulek Rozental) is the founder of The New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston. He says he survived 10 camps, and that one time he hid from the Nazis in an outhouse submerged up to his neck in human excrement. On the Holo circuit, he shows the kiddies animal figurines allegedly made from the crushed bones of Jews.

Holocaust survivor recalls tale of Kristallnacht

by Alison Pfeffer and Michaela May
News | 11/12/02
The Justice (Independent Student Newspaper of Brandeis University)

Speaking in an event commemorating Kristallnacht, Steven Ross told an audience Thursday that it essential to teach about the Holocaust. "Little kids must know, and if they don't know they won't tell their children and their children's children," Ross said.

Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) the night of Nov. 9, 1938 when mobs in Germany and Austria ransacked Jewish homes, synagogues and stores. The next day, tens of thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps.

Ross came to the United States after the war and was then illiterate. He now works as a psychologist, and has worked to erect the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston. He contributed to the memorial to American soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration campus, which is being built inside the existing Holocaust memorial. It will open in April.

"I cherish America, and I kiss the ground that I walk on," Ross said. "I never forget those men who saved me."

The event, held in Rappaporte Treasure Hall, began as Tali Chess '05 stood behind a podium, ensconced by a dim glow of light and told the audience about her visit to Poland. On that trip, she saw concentration camps, cemeteries where murdered Jews were buried and synagogues ruined by the mobs.

Chess and Leila Belik'05 are the coordinators of the Holocaust Remembrance Committee "This was the first year that the Holocaust Remembrance Committee had a Kristallnacht event in recent memory," Belik said. "Based on the turnout and the positive response, this will be a continued tradition."

Four students — Hope Lebovitz '05, Rachel Suberi '05, Talia Landau '06 and Naomi Baumgarten '06 — clad in black stepped up. Each spoke in turn, assuming the identities of those who experienced Kristallnacht. They sought to convey the fear felt by Jews that night by describing the pieces of shattered windows that covered the beds of little children as Nazis wrecked homes, throwing people into the streets. Recorded sounds of breaking glass pierced the air as the actors presented slides of destroyed synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Poland. A Hebrew prayer was then recited for the remembrance of the souls who were killed at the hands of the Nazis.

Speaking last, Ross periodically shed tears and made the audience cry as well. "I managed to survive by sheer coincidence," he said.

He recounted his survival as well as the deaths of most of his family. He set up displays with the names of six extermination camps, hateful phrases that the Germans used to call Jews and photographs of Holocaust victims, one of which included him.

His address was often graphic, as he described the manner in which he escaped mass killings and death by starvation. "To survive, we were resorting to cannibalism," Ross said. "We were eating each other to survive."

Ross arrived in the United States stricken with tuberculosis at the age of 16. Along with his older brother, he had been sent to 10 Nazi labor and death camps over a span of five years. In his desperation to share as much as he could of what happened, Ross said that he "cannot tell everything; only a fraction of it."

"I was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, (of) the wrong religion," he said.

Ross recalled the death "selection," the experimental death methods of the Nazis and the extreme starvation, along with other abysmal aspects of life in the Nazi concentration camps.

He showed the audience some objects from the camps: The cap he had to wear as part of his uniform; the dish he used to eat, bathe and defecate; prisoners' flimsy shoes; scissors men used to tidy themselves up before "selection"; and animal figurines made from the crushed bones of Jews. He said his mission is to "keep the images of the Holocaust alive" and "give people an inkling of what it means to be a survivor today."

"You knew were going to die, but you didn't want to die," Ross said. "The only thing that kept us alive was our religion."

More of his tale from The New England Holocaust Memorial:

The effort to build the New England Holocaust Memorial began with a Holocaust survivor, Stephan Ross (Szmulek Rozental), who was imprisoned at the age of 9 & whose parents, one brother & 5 sisters were murdered by the Nazi's. Between 1940 & 1945, he survived ten different concentration camps. Like so many others he suffered terribly. His back was broken by a guard who caught him stealing a raw potato. Tuberculosis wracked his body. He once hid in an outhouse, submerged to his neck in human waste, to save himself from being shot. At one time he was hung for eating a raw potato. At age fourteen he was liberated from the infamous torture camp Dachau by American troops. Steve will never forget the soldiers who found him, emaciated & nearly dead. They liberated him from a certain death.

When Steve & his older brother, Harry, the only other surviving family member, were released from the Dachau Camp to seek medical attention, they came upon a U.S. Tank Unit one of the soldiers jumped off his tank, gave Steve & Harry his rations to eat & put his arms around Steve. Steve fell to his knees, kissed the G.I.'s boots & began to cry for the first time in five years. The soldier took out of his pocket a piece of cloth & gave it to Steve to wipe his tears. Steve later found out that it was a small American Flag with 48 stars. This small flag is a treasured item & it will be kept by Steve & his children as a symbol of freedom, life, compassion & love of the American soldiers.

At the age of sixteen he was brought to America in 1948 under the auspices of the U.S. Committee for Orphaned Children. He was illiterate having had minimal education prior to the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939. Over the years, he managed to earn three college degrees. Steve made a new life in the Boston area & has worked for the City of Boston for over forty years. He provides guidance & clinical services to inner-city underprivileged youth & families. He eventually achieved the level of Senior Staff Psychologist. Soon after arriving into his adopted country, he had one dream, one vision & one mission. He wanted to remember, with a memorial, his lost family who were ripped away from him & murdered, the six million Jewish victims, other innocent people who lost their lives, those soldiers who liberated the concentration camps, all the soldiers who helped end the war & to serve as a lesson to future generations.

It was this one survivor with one voice who started the project to build a Holocaust Memorial. With the encouragement of a number of Jewish & Christian fellow employees of the City of Boston a committee was formed to put together a proposal. Steve then spoke with William Carmen, a WWII Veteran, about the memorial proposal & he immediately embraced the dream &, became the Chairman of the Committee. Israel Arbeiter, President of the American Association of Jewish Holocaust survivors of Greater Boston also embraced the dream & became a member of the Committee. It truly turned out to be a Christian-Judaic Project for remembrance of human rights & the dignity of life.

There were several City of Boston Officials, including Mayor Raymond Flynn, who were extremely interested in assisting Steve with this vital task of erecting a Holocaust Memorial on the Freedom Trail. Soon after Thomas Menino became Mayor, he also came on board to join the forces of the committee.

Susan Cernyak-Spatz's Holo tale- Ate "sawdust salami", jews went to gas chambers "willingly", "whole German nation clothed by clothing from dead jews"

Susan is an Austrian jew who became a university Professor and self-styled expert on the Holyhoax.

As the story goes, Susan was taken to Auschwitz at 18 years old, where she ate "sawdust salami", and had to eat and poop out the same bowl. Sometimes, she ate grass and frogs.

She claims the Nazis had killed 2 million Polish jews by 1941, and that holocausting jews by bullets was too costly because they needed the bullets for the war, so the Germans built the "death camps."

Cernyak-Spatz says the Germans were so determined to kill every last jew that "trains carrying Jews to the death camps were given priority even over troop trains carrying soldiers to battle." Is that a contradiction from her claim about not holocausting by bullets due to the priority of the war effort?...moving on.

The Germans told the Jews to wear lots of clothes for work, and then they gassed them, and stole the Jews' clothes. According to Susan, "for the years during the war, the whole German nation was clothed from the clothing of dead Jews."

Death in the Birkenau gas chambers took only 8 minutes, says Susan, and the Nazis used jew hair to "stuff mattresses, for insulation, and wove it into cloth." Between 1,500 and 2,000 Jews died in the chambers at Birkenau every day. Some jews even volunteered and went to the gas chambers willingly!

Then Susan almost died from typhus. Susan also survived scabies, scarlet fever, and hepatitis. It's a miracle she survived. Because the Nazis gassed everyone who got sick.

When they abandoned the camp with the Soviets advancing, for some reason Susan can not explain, the camp commandant opened up the warehouse, and told the Jews to take the warmest clothes they could find. Even though the Germans were trying to kill all the Jews.

Then they Death Marched Susan to Berlin. But Susan didn't die, so they Death Marched her again. Then the Nazi's turned the Jews over to the Allies.

Susan tells us the sacred 6 million will "die again if they are forgotten."

Woman captivates students with tales of life in Nazi death camp

BY SCOTT JENKINS
Salisbury Post
May 13, 2000

LANDIS — “My number is 34042.”

Dr. Susan Cernyak-Spatz can never forget that number. Living through two years in a Nazi death camp during World War II carved it on her mind like Adolf Hitler’s Nazis tattooed it in blue on her left forearm.

Cernyak-Spatz survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of Germany’s five death camps, where Hitler’s soldiers carried out what they called “The Final Solution” and what the world knows as the Holocaust.

Six million European Jews died at the hands of Hitler’s minions. At Birkenau, one of three main camps at Auschwitz, they perished mostly in gas chambers made up to look like large shower buildings, their bodies burned in one of four crematoria.

The Nazis killed 5.5 million non-Jews as well, including gypsies, homosexuals and Christians who opposed Hitler. But with no group did they deal so calculatedly as Jews.

Cernyak-Spatz was, she says, lucky. When she arrived at Birkenau in 1943, she was 18 years old and childless, good for labor. Preteen girls, women past their mid-30s and women with children went straight to the gas chamber, she said.

It began on a platform where the Nazis forced Jews out of train box cars into which they’d been packed like cattle for travel to the camp. There, Jews experienced the first of what they would come to know and fear as daily “selections.”

To the sixth-graders to whom she spoke at Corriher-Lipe Middle School on Thursday, the Holocaust may seem as historically distant as this country’s Civil War, Cernyak-Spatz said. But in her memory, the horror of it is “just like yesterday.”

No reason

Cernyak-Spatz, a small woman with a big voice and short-cropped brown hair, is a retired language professor. She still teaches one course a year on the Holocaust at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and travels extensively speaking about it.

She stressed to Corriher-Lipe students on Thursday that the Holocaust was not a single event, but an efficiently conceived and executed process that began “the minute Adolf Hitler came to power” as Germany’s dictator in 1933.

To rally the German people, pull the country out of depression and set the nation on a path toward realizing his own dreams of Aryan conquest, Hitler needed a scapegoat, she said. He chose the Jews, who he called a race, not the religious group they are.

“He didn’t exterminate a race,” Cernyak-Spatz said of Hitler. “He exterminated innocent babies, old people, young people, brilliant writers, brilliant artists, brilliant scientists ... for no other reason than he wanted it.”

The label didn’t matter. Hitler had found his sacrifice. And beginning with a propaganda machine that cranked out anti-Semitic tracts emblazoned with the motto “The Jews Are Our Undoing,” he set out to slaughter that scapegoat.

Because they were Jews

Cernyak-Spatz lived with her family in Vienna, Austria, until 1938, when the Nazis marched into the city. The invading army “mercilessly beat and mistreated the Jews,” she said. Eventually, the Germans told the Jews to leave immediately.

The family fled, leaving almost everything they owned behind — from the clothes in their closets to the food in their refrigerator. They landed in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

But the Germans followed. And this time, they had a list of every Jew in the city and had begun the mass killings, murdering nearly 2 million Jews in Poland by 1941, Cernyak-Spatz said.

The invaders ordered the Jews in Prague to turn over their property, because “from the Jews, they could rob without anybody stopping them,” Cernyak-Spatz said. And they robbed them of everything, down to gold fillings.

Then the soldiers started killing them. At first, German SS soldiers forced Jews to dig a pit, then lined them up and knocked them into the pit with bullets from their machine guns — line after line of Jews.

“But that got a little too traumatic for the poor SS men,” Cernyak-Spatz said, her slightly-drawn mouth curling sarcastically. “I felt very sorry for them.”

It also cost a lot of ammunition, which the German army decided it couldn’t afford with a war going on. So the Nazis looked for a more efficient means of mass murder.

They settled first on trucks, into which they packed Jews and ran carbon monoxide exhaust. But they could only kill about 150 people at a time that way, so they built the death camps.

The first selection

So fierce was Hitler’s hatred, trains carrying Jews to the death camps were given priority even over troop trains carrying soldiers to battle, Cernyak-Spatz said. When she stepped off the train and onto the platform at Birkenau, the results assaulted her senses.

“The first thing you noticed was an absolutely incredible stink,” she said. The noxious, sickly sweet odor hung in the air with a dusky vapor billowing from smokestacks and staining the distant sky, she said.

Then, the selection began. The Nazis separated families, those who could work to one side, those who couldn’t to another. The second group loaded onto trucks.

The women on the trucks asked where they were going. Don’t worry the drivers told them, you will be reunited with your families.

After a nice hot shower.

“Then they took them directly in the direction of that smoke,” Cernyak-Spatz said. Soon, those who survived learned what burned in those buildings.

Guards led prisoners into the large buildings, told them to take off their clothes, hang them on hooks. And remember, tie your shoe laces together, they said, so you don’t lose a shoe.

The Nazis had told Jews to dress in their warmest clothes for the journey to the “work” camps, Cernyak-Spatz said. After the gas chambers, they gathered those clothes for their own use.

For the years during the war, “that is how the whole German nation was clothed ... in the clothing and property of dead Jews,” she said.

Inside Birkenau

The mass killings in the gas chambers took only about eight minutes, Cernyak-Spatz said. For those not selected to die right away, death could come more slowly, usually after a couple of months of hard labor and near starvation.

At Birkenau, the Nazis took their prisoners’ clothes and gave them the uniforms of dead Russian soldiers to wear. The uniforms had bullet holes in them and were spattered with blood.

They gave them one pair of shoes that, like the uniform, would be the only pair most got. Unlucky women got clogs, Cernyak-Spatz said, because those were easily lost in the always-muddy camp and tended to rub blisters that became infected sores.

“Infection in Birkenau went directly into gangrene,” she said. “And you were ready for the gas.”

The Nazis shaved their prisoners and stuffed the hair into mattresses, used it for insulation and wove it into cloth.

Then they tattooed the Jews’ forearms with the numbers that replaced their names, became their identities.

Newly arrived prisoners got a bowl — only a bowl, no utensils. They used it to eat and drink. And when they had to, when a guard wouldn’t let them use a bucket outside at night, to eliminate their own bodily waste.

When they had to do that, they dumped the waste out beside their bunks, which were stacked three high. Cernyak-Spatz said one of the first lessons at Birkenau was “to find a top bunk.”

The barracks were built to hold 300 women, but at any given time they housed between 600 and 800, sleeping two or three to a bunk, she said. If they could sleep through the constant moaning, crying, screaming and pain.

The camps provided a steady flow of slave labor for factories that German companies convinced the army to build near the camps, she said. When one worker gave out, he or she went straight to the gas chamber, and another took his or her place.

Men or women, it usually took two to three months for a person to give out under the strain of the labor, little sleep, sickness and near starvation.

Prisoners got a meager bread ration, “sawdust salami” and little else. “Interesting things looked edible ... some grasses, some weeds, live frogs,” Cernyak-Spatz recalled.

‘Dying was easy’

Each day, the prisoners lined up outside their barracks. Each day brought a new selection. The sick and prisoners too weak to march in line went to the gas chamber.

Between 1,500 and 2,000 Jews died in the chambers at Birkenau every day. Some went willingly, Cernyak-Spatz said.

“Dying was so easy,” she said.

But she was determined not to die. Other women carried her when she couldn’t walk with typhoid fever. All she could do was keep her eyes wide open, because the Nazis looked for “apathetic eyes” in the selections.

She also survived scabies, hepatitis, scarlet fever and probably other illnesses, she said.

She met a woman in her barracks who worked inside the camp’s administrative building. She helped Cernyak-Spatz get a job there, too.

Because the officers didn’t want to be exposed to the vermin and disease rampant in the camp, they gave the women who worked for them a set of clothes once a month and let them shower a couple of times a week, she said.

It also kept the women from walking through the selection every morning, she said. And that gave them hope.

“Maybe another month, another month, the war would end,” she said. “Regardless, if you didn’t have to walk through the selection in the morning, you were possible for survival.”

She worked in the offices for two years, from January 1943 until January 1945, when the Nazis told all the prisoners they were leaving the camp. With the Russian army advancing, they went on a forced march through deep snow and no roads deeper into Germany.

“The order of the day for that march was a bullet in the head for anyone who couldn’t walk,” she said.

For a reason Cernyak-Spatz can’t explain, the camp commandant told the prisoners to take the warmest clothes they could find from the warehouse for the march. About 500 prisoners survived.

Cernyak-Spatz also survived a second march from another camp near Berlin, where the Nazis turned her over with other Jews to the advancing Allied armies.

Remember

After the war, she found her father in Brussels, Belgium. He had been protected by a camp commandant because of his status as a World War I officer in the German army, she said.

Her mother did not survive the death camps.

In 1946, she came to the United States and began a new life. But she’ll never forget the life she led, and the death she escaped, in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

She doesn’t want others to forget the horrors of the Holocaust.

That’s why, though some survivors of Auschwitz had their tattoos removed, she never will.

That’s why she stood patiently on Thursday pulling up her shirt sleeve to show the sixth-graders the blue tattoo on her left forearm: 34042.

“We can’t allow them to be forgotten,” she said of the 6 million, “and die again by being forgotten.”

Yitzchak Ganon's hoaxacaust tale - Kidney removed without anaesthetic at Auschwitz, last seen "pulsating in the hand of Dr. Mengele"

Mengele then sent him back to work without painkillers.

Also, poor Yitzchak he had to spend the whole night in a bath of ice-cold water because Mengele wanted to test his lung function. Jews are immune to hypothermia.

Altogether, Ganon says he spent six and a half months in the hospital...at the Auschwitz "death camp."

His mother and five siblings were sent to the gas chambers.

He was later slated to go to the gas chambers, but was the 201st man and the gas chamber was full after 200. A miracle!

Yitzhak Ganon survived Auschwitz SS doctor Josef Mengele's medical experiments -- and swore never to set foot in a hospital again.

Dr. Mengele's Victim

Why One Auschwitz Survivor Avoided Doctors for 65 Years

12/10/2009
By Christoph Schult
SPIEGEL

Sixty-five years ago, infamous Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele removed Yitzhak Ganon's kidney without anesthesia. The Greek-born Jew swore never to see a doctor again -- until a heart attack last month brought his horrific tale into the open.

He is a thin man. His wine-red cardigan is a little too big, and his legs are like matchsticks in his brown pants. Yitzhak Ganon takes care of himself. He's freshly shaven, his white mustache neatly trimmed. The 85-year-old sits on a gray sofa, with a cushion supporting his back. He is too weak to stand by himself, but he still greets a guest in German: "Guten Tag."

Speaking is hard for him. "Slowly, Abba," his daughter Iris says, and brings him a glass of water. Her father has never in his life complained of any pain, she says.

A month ago he came back from his morning walk and lay down. "Are you sick, Papa?" Iris asked. "No, just a little tired," Yitzhak Ganon answered, before going to sleep. But after a few hours he was still tired. "I don't need a doctor," he told his daughter.

The next morning things were even worse. Ganon's wife and daughter called a doctor, who diagnosed a viral infection and told him to go to the hospital. Ganon resisted, but finally realized his life was in danger. At some point he stopped fighting the doctor's orders.

'Just One Kidney'

His family brought him to the hospital in his home town of Petach Tikva near Tel Aviv. He had hardly been admitted when he lost consciousness. Heart attack, the doctor said. The blood clots were cleared with the help of tiny balloons, and the doctors put five stents in him. "We thought he wouldn't survive the operation," said Eli Lev, the doctor. "Especially since he had just one kidney."

When Yitzhak Ganon came to, he told the doctors where he lost the other kidney -- and why he had avoided doctors for 65 years. A reporter from the Israeli paper Maariv heard about the story. And now, weeks after the operation, Ganon is ready to tell his story to a German reporter for the first time.

He stretches his back and looks at a photo on the living room wall. It shows the Acropolis in Athens. "I come from Arta, a small city in northern Greece. It happened on Saturday, March 25, 1944. We had just lit the candles to celebrate the Sabbath when an SS officer and a Greek policeman burst into the house. They told us we should get ourselves ready for a big trip."

The 85-year-old slides the sleeve of his shirt up and uncovers his left forearm. The number 182558 is tattooed there in dark-blue ink.

Tied Down

The transport to Auschwitz took two weeks. His sick father died on the journey. Upon arrival, they had to strip and submit to an inspection. Ganon's mother and five siblings were then sent to the gas chambers.

Yitzhak Ganon was taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau hospital, where Josef Mengele, the so-called "Angel of Death," conducted grisly experiments on Jewish prisoners.

Ganon had to lie down on a table and was tied down. Without any anesthetics, Mengele cut him open and removed his kidney. "I saw the kidney pulsing in his hand and cried like a crazy man," Ganon says. "I screamed the 'Shema Yisrael.' I begged for death, to stop the suffering."

After the "operation," he had to work in the Auschwitz sewing room without painkillers. Among other things, he had to clean bloody medical instruments. Once, he had to spend the whole night in a bath of ice-cold water because Mengele wanted to "test" his lung function. Altogether, Ganon spent six and a half months in the concentration camp's hospital.

'Just Fatigue'

When they had no more use for him, the Nazis sent him to the gas chamber. He survived only by chance: The gas chamber held only 200 people. Ganon was number 201.

On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops. Yitzhak Ganon made it back to Greece and found his surviving siblings -- a brother and a sister -- and emigrated to Israel in 1949. He got married. And he swore never to go to a doctor again. "Whenever he was sick, even when it was really bad," his wife Ahuva says, "he told me it was just fatigue."

But now Ganon is happy he finally went to the hospital after his heart attack. One week later, he had another heart attack, and was given a pacemaker. "If the doctors hadn't been there," he says, smiling for the first time, "I would be dead now." Yitzhak Ganon has survived, again.

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2009

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,666327,00.html


More Preposterous Holohoax Tales

William Lowenberg's astounding Holy Hoax tale - Had a magic thirst-quenching pebble, did not drink water, survived on his saliva for 3 years

Vhat? You don't believe my Holocaust tale?


Another one for the Hall of Fame. It hits 11 of the 12 stages.

This tale is certified kosher from "Telling Their Stories", and archived here in an interview from 2003.

William Lowenberg

Date: April 3, 2003, San Francisco, California
Interviewers: Oral History Class (whole class group interview), with Howard Levin and Deborah Dent-Samake

Date: May 8, 2003, San Francisco, California
Interviewers: Matthew G. ('05), Marisa S. ('05), Molly K ('05), Jason G. ('05), Eve M. ('05), with Howard Levin and Deborah Dent-Samake

William "Bill" Lowenberg was born in Ochtrup, Germany. He was the only survivor of his immediate family – his father, mother and sister all perished in Auschwitz. His family fled Germany to Holland in 1936 after experiencing an increasing amount of anti-Semitism. Bill's family was sent to the Westerbork concentration camp in Holland in 1942. He was then sent by himself to Auschwitz-Birkenau at the end of 1942 where he stayed until the spring of 1943. He was then sent to the Warsaw Ghetto after the uprising where he was forced to do slave labor destroying buildings, burning bodies and searching for valuables for the German army. From Warsaw Bill was then sent to Dachau and then to the Kauffering camp. He was liberated on April 30, 1945 by the American army. Feeling a great debt to the U.S. Army, Bill later went on to serve in the Army during the Korean War. After starting with only ten dollars in his pocket when arriving to the United States, Bill went on to create a successful real estate company in San Francisco. He now dedicates his life to Holocaust remembrance and education, and is a co-founder of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Lowenberg also is now a Freemason in California, and was "one of five individuals to spearhead the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C."


Summary of William's tale:

William was only 15 when the evil Germans gathered up William and his family and put them in a box car. The box car went to Auschwitz. William and his fellow Jews would use the dead Jews in the box cars as benches. The Jews would poop on the dead Jews. When the train arrived at Auschwitz, 1/3 of the people had suffocated.

The Nazis gave priority to the trains full of Jews. Trains full of food going to the troops would have to wait, because the Nazis priority was to kill all the Jews.

Dr. Mengele greeted the transports. Mengele had a whip and a white coat. Little William was only 15, but he told Mengele that he was 18. This spared his life, because the Nazis gassed all the Jews who couldn’t work. William had to work by moving rocks from one place to the other, then back again.

The Jews got only 200 calories a day for food. In the morning, they had no breakfast for breakfast –only tea. For lunch, 4 people had to eat a single bowl of soup. The Jews got a slice of bread for dinner. If you didn’t eat your bread right away, the rats would steal it from you.

The camp commander had a motorcycle that he would drive down the main street. He would shoot at anything that moved from his motorcycle. If he saw you, he would use you for target practice.

There was typhus at Auschwitz. A friend, the magician, told William not to drink the water. The friend put a pebble in William’s mouth to make saliva. So William didn’t have to drink any water for 3 years, but was never thirsty. William would clean himself by rolling in the snow.

William saw his own mother, father, and sister go into the gas chamber. The Germans had crews of Jews who would work in the gas chambers. Every 90 days, the Nazis shot the Jews who worked in the gas chamber, because they didn’t want anyone alive to testify about what the Nazis were doing.

At Auschwitz, there was a team of Jews that had wheelbarrows. Every morning the Jews would walk around the fence with their wheelbarrows, and pick up the dead Jews who had died on the electric fence.

Dr. Mengele would perform experiments on the Jews. He castrated the big Jews. He injected animal semen into some other Jews.

One day a wheelbarrow ran over William, and he couldn’t work. So his friend, the magician, hid William in the rafters. The magician would have been killed in the first transport, but the Nazis needed a magician.

Then William and the magician volunteered for a transport that said “Destination Unknown.” The Nazis killed all the Jews at Auschwitz, so William is lucky the Nazis let him and the magician volunteer for this transport. The transport went to the Warsaw ghetto. William worked on the dynamite team. The Nazis made the Jews dynamite the buildings.

Then William built an underground factory. The Jews would pile rocks up 100 feet high and very long. The Nazis poured 4-5 feet of concrete over this mountain of rocks, and then took a firehouse and blew out the rocks underneath. So the Nazis then had an underground tunnel that they built the V2 rockets in.

The Germans made William salvage electrical transformers from the ruins of Warsaw. William and his friends saw diamonds, gold and money lying in the ruins. But they didn’t take any, because you couldn’t eat diamonds.

One Jew traded another Jew, a greenhorn, the diamonds for his bread for 3 days. The Jew who took the diamonds died of starvation. After 3 days.

The Holocaust™ was the biggest money maker ever for the Germans. The Nazis had whole teams of people working in the gas chamber to take the gold from the dead Jews. If you had gold fillings, you were gassed immediately. Then the Nazis sold all the shoes and clothing from the dead Jews to South America. The Nazis financed the war for 2 years by selling the Jew’s gold fillings, and shoes, and clothing.

Then the Nazis were going to kill all the Jews in Warsaw, but the resistance leader warned the Germans not to. So the Germans death marched the Jews instead. They made the Jews death march all week. Then the Jews wanted to drink at the river. So the Nazis machine gunned them. They used dogs to get the Jews back into line for the machine guns. The river turned into blood, all red.

Then the Nazis put the Jews on a train to Dachau. Then they told the Jews they were going to march to Switzerland, but the Nazis fooled them, and death marched them again. William was certain to die on this death march, but the Americans came. Then an American soldier gave William a cigarette. William took 1 puff and fainted.

Then William and his friends robbed the nearby German houses and killed the SS men. Then William went to Holland, but the Nazis had stolen all the cows.

by Yehuda Abraham

Highlights from the interview:

The 15-year old Lowenberg travels to Auschwitz in a box car "like cattle." He's says the German plans of "killing all the jews" even took precedence over the war on the eastern front against the Russians, so the box cars carrying the jews to Auschwitz was given priority over troop transports and supplies for the German Army.

Can you describe the transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz?

When we got to Auschwitz in the box cars from Holland which lasted about a week to get there...and by the way, the Germans were so determined to kill people that while they were fighting a war on the Russian side, in Eastern Europe, the railroads–planes weren't used in those days–the railroads had priority, the boxcars going to Auschwitz had priority on the rail lines to Auschwitz, before the army troops were supplied on the Eastern Front. You can see how obsessed they were with killing people.

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William meets Mengele himself when arriving at Auschwitz:

Then we were in Auschwitz, in Birkenau. Then they started screaming, "Out, out, out," so we went out. And we were standing in line to be selected. You have heard of Mengele, a famous doctor? And he stood in front of the line, there were about eight, nine people in each row, and he said to me, I remember quite well, in German, he said, "How old?" So, for some reason, God made me say 18. I was only 15 but I was chubby, with a coat on. I looked kind of not very thin. And, I said eighteen, and he goes like this [flicks arm to the right]. And, I see people who went, and the others go like that, with his whip [flicks arm to the left]. The ones who went there [left] went on trucks. I figured as I'm standing there, I said, "Why did I lie? Now I have to walk, and God knows how far. These people are all going on trucks. I could have been on the trucks if I didn't lie." But the ones who went on the trucks went to the gas chambers. Out of the four thousand they took about maybe four or five hundred who had to work. And that depended on if they needed a work force.

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He says he saw his parents and sister go to the gas chambers, and that the Auschwitz gas chambers operated 24 hrs a day. He survived on 200 calories a day:

And I saw my parents and my sister marching by, but they were marching into the gas chambers and I was working in front of the building. And I stopped working, I fainted almost, and I was beaten up, I still have scars on my back. Now then we knew that the gas chambers were working 24 hours a day. It went on for years and years until about the end of '44.

The food intake was about 200 calories. You got a piece of bread in the evening. The next morning you got some what they called "tea" with some warm water, whatever color. At lunch you got a bowl of soup and every four people had a bowl, so you never had your own. So four people ate out of the bowl. That was our food. At night the bread you had to eat immediately because if you didn't, either you couldn't keep it all night because the rats would eat it if you had it under your hat, or they would steal it from you, people were so hungry.

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William says the camp commander would ride on his motorcycle on the main street of the camp and shoot at jews for target practice:

The beatings were horrible with the dogs, they all had dogs, those Germans, the SS men, the dogs and the beatings. I remember the camp commander–that I remember vividly–had a motorcycle and he used to go on the main street of the camp in Birkenau. He had a pistol in his hand and anything he saw moving, human beings, he shot, he used you for target practice. Life was absolutely, totally worthless to these people. That I remember.

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According to Lowenberg, if you got sick or injured at Auschwitz, you were immediately gassed. One time he was injured by a whellbarrow and "hid in the rafters" of the barracks by his magician friend:

Did you ever get sick at Auschwitz?

If you got really sick you go to "Barracks 13" they called it, and the next day you'd be gassed. I once got run over by a lorry, they called it—you know, one of those wheelbarrows, those heavy double wheelbarrows—and I was destined to go to "Barracks 13." My friend again, the magician, he hid me in the rafters in his barracks and shared his food with me. That's when we got out. He said, "We're getting out of here." And we volunteered, he volunteered me and him on a "transport unknown," I don't know if I talked about it [before]. He says, "Either we go on the 'transport unknown' and we'll get killed tomorrow morning or we really go to somewhere," because they did take people out of Auschwitz for work details and other factories, other cities, wherever. "And if we stay here, we'll be dead in three weeks anyhow or maybe next week. So, let's take a chance. There's no one who gets out alive out of Auschwitz." And I was in the rafters up there and we went on this transport, and that's how we got to Warsaw because it was "transport unknown" but nobody told us where we were going. We were in the boxcars about two, three days then, we were in Warsaw seeing the ghetto burning.

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When doing work outside the camps, William claims he saw diamonds, gold, valuable artwork, and money just lying in the streets or in the rubble of the bombed out buildings. But he didn't take any of the valuables because "you couldn't eat money or diamonds":

We always saw money on the streets constantly. People just lying there. Valuable art, whatever art people had. And money on the streets, sure, diamonds and gold. We found them in the rubble sometimes, on the dead bodies. What are you going to do with it? You can't eat a piece of metal, you can't eat diamonds. That didn't mean anything, there was no value. That's why there's no one who came out of the camp who brought any value with them because there was nothing, we didn't have anything. And you couldn't use it, it wasn't trading material.

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Lowenberg says the Nazis financed the war, extending it by two years, from selling all the gold tooth fillings, shoes, and ratty old lice-infested clothing from the "six million holocuasted jews." William forgot about the "five million" holocausted non-jews. Maybe they didn't have gold fillings or clothes that were re-sellable. He says that all jews who had gold fillings were immediately sent to the gas chambers:

And let's remember one thing, the biggest money maker for the German government was the Holocaust because we take six million people, they have wedding rings, they have gold teeth, they have clothing, they have money in their pockets, a little bit, and then all these buildings to demolish. That was the biggest moneymaker. I would venture to say that the Second World War would have been finished within a year and a half to two years had it not been for the Holocaust because that financed the Germans. That's why you hear today about all this gold they took to Switzerland. That's why the insurance companies, are the biggest thieves on earth because they sold the insurance companies [policies], and people came after the war and said, "My father had insurance, I know that." They said, "Where's your death certificate?" Well Auschwitz didn't give death certificates. So, this is still going on now.

The Holocaust was the biggest money making event for the Germans. If you had gold fillings, you were destined to be killed immediately because there were whole teams who did nothing else in the gas chambers after the Germans gassed them to take the gold out. Bags, and bags, and bags of gold. And the clothing – six million people, there're six million shoes. That's a lot of shoes for a country. The clothing, they sold them all over the world including South America. This was a big, big money making event for the Germans. That extended the war, in my opinion, by probably two years. Nobody talks about it but believe me.

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Lowenberg claims at Auschwitz the Germans castrated men and injected semen from animals into the women:

The men they did castrations, a lot – middle size, regular size, big size – they castrated men and they had the worst time, they couldn't live much longer. I knew quite a few who were picked. They picked certain individuals who looked like they were "macho-macho" or whatever. They castrated and injected them. But the women were worse. In Auschwitz it was prevalent, big operation, what they did to women there you can't even talk about what they did to them. Inject them with semen from animals, you name it. Anything you can think of that you wouldn't want to talk about, they did it the people.

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After being "liberated" from Dachau by the American Army, Lowenberg and his friends murdered every German guard they could get their hands on:

Damn right. Were we angry? Yeah, all of that. We didn't kill anybody. German guards yes, we killed all we could find the German guards who had done it to us, but not German civilians.

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What did you do the first day you were liberated?

[...]

Then all of a sudden the Americans came with the tanks. We had to scream at them, "Don't touch the wires!" because the wires were all high voltage – 2000 volts of electricity. Then they had to bring in the Corps of Engineers to take the electricity off those wires. Then they opened up. I got out with about five or six of us immediately and we took over a German barracks and we killed a bunch of Germans – the SS, the guards. I could walk at that time, not all could. We then were told we had to get back in the camp because the American army knew there was a typhoid epidemic and other diseases at that point. They closed the camp up again, but they gave us food. They were very good.

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Lowenberg was a vice-chairman of the founding of the Holy Hoax Museum in Washington, D.C.:

Have you kept in contact with your liberators?

No. Except some twenty years ago – no, it's not, it's ten years ago, pardon me – when we opened the museum in Washington – some of you may have seen it, the Holocaust Museum, I was the vice-chairman of it – we invited some people who had liberated the camps.

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William says he rolled in the snow to keep clean:

I remember more in Warsaw, which was the same situation, but we had a long period of snow there, because it's colder in Poland. I used to sneak out, and others too, sometimes, whenever we could and go out in the snow and roll ourselves in the snow, and wash ourselves down with the snow. If you had enough strength, you did that, as long as the Germans didn't see that. But if you didn't have enough strength, people died because of hygiene. Hygiene, to me – and I talk about it even outside of this milieu – people don't realize how important hygiene is. It saved my life.

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His magician friend tells him to put a pebble in his mouth to avoid having to drink the water at Auschwitz:

Someone was interviewing you and they asked, "What was your will for staying alive?" You responded that you "kept clean." What was your reason?

Good question. I happen to believe very strongly in hygiene which I learned from my mother. She was very clean, I mean "household-wise" scrubbing all of the time and washing all of the time. When I got to Auschwitz somebody said to me, the same friend, he said, "Don't drink the water, the water has typhoid in it." So, what do you do? So he said, "Pick up a pebble," there was a pebble in the street, a little stone pebble. I picked up that pebble, I wiped it and I put it in my mouth. I had it all the way through the camps and that created enough saliva that I didn't get dehydrated. But we never drank the water there was an enormous amount of typhoid. The other thing, which was very prevalent, that's why a lot of people died, too, because of the type of food we got and the water we drank, diarrhea was a big killer.

[...]

The other thing that saved me, probably - there was - the water had typhoid in it. We knew that. By having that you also got immediately - and it happened a lot - a lot of people had diarrhea. My friend - the one I mentioned, the magician again - he had some experience, and he said, "Don't drink the water." What do you do? Cause you need [water]. He said, "Pick up a pebble." I picked up a pebble off the street, a little stone. I had that stone for three years. I had it in my mouth, all day long. It activated my saliva gland. He taught me that. That's why I never got that thirsty. That helps. Why do you think you guys take to chewing gum, right? What's the reason you take chewing gum? To activate your saliva gland, but they don't tell you that. They tell you it tastes good. It's because you activate your saliva gland. It's probably healthy. I don't like chewing gum, it's personal, I don't know, it doesn't mean anything to me. But young people, you see it more than older people. That pebble saved my life, I believe, because I didn't drink the water. If you drank the water you got typhoid and there was lots and lots of typhoid. Hygiene. I feel very strong about that.

Did you keep the pebble?

No, I lost it. When the war was over, we were liberated, I wanted to get rid of everything that reminded me of it. No. I wish I had. I thought about it. I wished I kept that pebble. It was a little stone and it worked. Others did too, I wasn't the only one. But not everybody did, apparently.

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