THE HOLOCAUST: PAGE II
"Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international
Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should again succeed in
plunging the nations into a world war, the result will be not the
bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the
annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe."
Adolf Hitler
speaking before the Reichstag, 1939
LAST UPDATED:
January 26, 2000
Note: This webpage is broken up into 2 pages due to file size. This is a
continuation from page 1
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MY HOLOCAUST WEBSITE INDEX:
Eyewitness accounts of Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) actions on Russian Jews
Chaim Rumkowski's "Give Me Your Children!" Speech
A Speech by Himmler to SS Officers in Poznan, Poland: Encouraging Genocide of the Jews
A Speech by Hans Frank, Governor of Occupied Poland Informing Subordinates that Genocide Must Begin
Rosa Robota: Jewish Heroine of Auschwitz
Alicia Appleman-Jurman: Survival & Heroism of a Young Girl During the Holocaust
The Mechanisms of Extermination: - how the gas chambers and crematories of Auschwitz-Birkeneau operated. Excerpted from Olga Lengyel's book ,"Five Chimneys".
Excerpt from the book, Berlin Diary: - some of the sociological reasons Germany slid into the abyss.
Holocaust Poetry & Art: Your contributions are welcome.
References: Some of the books on the Holocaust I have read and recommend. These books served as data sources for the Holocaust pages within this website.
OTHER HOLOCAUST SITES:
Alexander Kimel's Holocaust Website This is a link to a complete Holocaust site on the Net in my opinion. Mr. Kimel is a survivor.
The Nizkor Project One of the long-standing websites on the Holocaust and the fight against "revisionism".
The Concentration Camps Loads of info on the camps, the system, the forgotten camps, etc.
Thanks for continuing with me...
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AGAIN
Let's go back to the loading platform months earlier. You are now the little sister.
You have just been wrenched away from your older brother. An SS woman is shoving you away from
your big brother - your protector. This mean woman in uniform eyes you with indifference. As
you are pushed "left" - towards a group of old people and women with children - lot's of other children,
you hear one of the old women call your name. It is your grandmother and you run to her and
clutch at her skirts. After what seems like forever, your group slowly start walking. Voices
keep saying "All is well, please move along. You will be deloused, be given clothes and be
assigned to work details...this I personally assure you!" Everybody seems a bit relieved.
So, the terrible ghetto and the awful train ride was the worst of it, then!, you think.
After a few hundred yards, people are going down some stairs, to a level below ground.
You have no choice but to follow them. . Ash is lightly floating down from the sky . The air
smells strange. You are only a child and you don't know it - but what you smell is the smell
of human slaughter , the odor of extermination. Nearly everyone who has been in a
concentration camp knows of this smell. A few people are glancing to the sky, noting that the giant smoking chimney is part of the structure of buildings being descended into. Being a child, you have not come to the conclusion that many in this group have mistakenly come to: They are going to burn us! In the large room, persons are in different stages of being "processed". Some are being searched, some disrobed, many are undressing themselves, and still others are surrendering dentures, spectacles and prosthetics. You are now naked & sobbing - because no one seems to be able to do anything about these terrible people who seem to be controlling what's going on here, treating everyone so coldly. You are then told to wait with a large group. Only a few people murmur. Most are praying. Some are trembling with fright. Every "reassuring" word the Germans say helps to stall the panic - for everyone wants so desperately to live - they are willing to take hold of these untruths coming through load-speakers and from the guards and hope that maybe, somehow, the Germans are surely not about to murder them all! Some older men are telling the guards how they are veterans of the German army of WWI, they pathetically sing songs from the trenches to the older German guards, showing them Iron Crosses & other medals - other people are struggling to figure out if there is a way, an angle, to save themselves. Each person old enough to know tries to fend off the reality of the question: Are we about to be mass murdered in some terrible way? You are finally led with your group into large room full of more naked people. There are shower nozzles above. The voice that has never stopped still says "Move along, please be ready for a shower and disinfection".
So here you are, a child of about 12, naked, silent, inwardly terrified. The doors are closed, but then they are opened and several small children are hurled, screaming & crying, onto the tops of the people. It is the worst that we could think of, then! They do plan to kill us! It is happening to us! Screams and wails of Please! No! Help Me! Please, God! Oh God save us! The doors are closed for the final time. You hear some hatches slide open above you, the lights go out, there is another wail from the crowd. In a moment, people begin shoving and trampling you. You yell as you are knocked onto the floor - in the dark. A terrible burning gas enters your mouth and nostrils - in the dark. You wail out loud as you are trampled, stepped upon & crushed as people fall all about in mass confusion...a hysterical death - in the dark. The truth, finally laid bare - the answer to the Jewish question. The agenda of the Nazi Party at work. The anti-Semitism of Germany made manifest.
Meanwhile, in Munich, men and women keenly dressed smile and are holding drinks toasting each other at a birthday party for an SS officer...Yes the old major looks great for his age!. But you are dying in a slaughterhouse.
In Nuremburg, an SS adjutant is at the hospital pacing the floor...a grinning nurse rushes up to tell him something. He bellows, Aaaah! Finally the good news! It is a boy! But at that moment, you are being exterminated.
In the jungles of Brazil, a chieftain's daughter is being prepared for her marriage ceremony; I hope this necklace does not break again!, she worries. But far, far away, people she will never ever hear about are at that moment being mass-murdered.
In New York, the typical 1944 bustle to get to work...one woman thinks as she enters her office building, I hope they got the coffee pot fixed! I also hope nobody can tell that I am gaining weight!" ...but here in Poland, a few miles from the sleepy town of Osweicm, you and thousands of others are being annihilated. You and your people are being exterminated. You are being rubbed-out to make room for Germany's future. Germany's lebensraum (living space). Yet the world revolves on, the sun still shines and more will follow you tomorrow. Why the heavens did not darken is a haunting question.
As your consciousness ebbs, the hysteria around you only compounds the tragedy of your
death in the inky blackness of a gas chamber. Everyone is now in their death-throes...only half
conscious of grabbing and being grabbed, of scratching and being scratched, of biting and being
bitten, the last to succumb are at the top of the pile, for that is where the air is less
tainted. After 15 or so minutes, the lights are turned on, the SS doctor looks through the
peephole and is satisfied. Another perfect pyramid all the way to the ceiling, he thinks
to himself. The children and old at the bottom of the heap, as usual. The ventilators are
switched on. Your journey is complete. Starting as a child in the family comforts of urban life
in with music, education, food and material things, you end up a poor, emaciated terrified child
with everything taken away from you that is possible, then as if that weren't enough:
mass-murdered in an inky-black sealed room. Finally, before your lifeless body is
dragged
away by the Jewish slaves of the sonderkommando,, your hair is shorn and your teeth
are checked for gold. There is one gold filling and with your mouth pried open, that tooth is
yanked-out with pliers and thrown in a tray of pulled teeth. You then are thrown onto a lorry,
then up an elevator and pushed into the crematory with several other corpses to go up the
chimney as did countless thousands before you.
FINALLY
Finally, the little brother: Yes, you always had that spot in your eyes. The girls thought it was cute. The SS doctor performing selections sees you, smiles and pulls you to one side. He is so handsome and polite, with his white gloves, he cradles your face and smiles - his front teeth are gapped a bit, and you are drawn to him. The Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele, has chosen you. You wave to your brother. You don't know why, but you feel that they have seen something special about you. You are taken to a special barrack and processed accordingly as all inmates are...tattooed, completely shaved, issued striped clothes. You are brought to the hospital and ushered into an examination room. The SS and prisoner doctors immediately begin inspecting your eye. How can a blue-eyed child have a brown spot? If we can figure this out, maybe we can genetically engineer blue-eyed Aryans! They chart your eye color. You submit to test after test day after day, week after week - some of them painful. They actually inject blue dye into your eye, trying to see if the brown spot will stay blue. You are eventually partially blinded by these tests. Yes, even doctors, people who are supposed to be healers participated in the torture and murder and overall lack of regard to humanity and human life - but they were Nazi doctors. Then one day, you are escorted into a small room, your shirt is removed and you're told to lie down. An SS doctor comes in and says "Hands uber stirn!" (hands above your head!). An assistant holds you down as the SS doctor walks up with a large syringe. Your eyes meet his and what you see in his eyes a cold detachment that frightens you. You watch his every move with imploring, pleading eyes. The syringe is so large, you cannot control yourself, for you are only a child. You begin sobbing, tears flowing, hitting the floor and you break the rules to ask, " Herr Doktor...what are you going to do? What are you going to do?" Silent, but with a strange look on his face, he approaches you as you are being held in place by the assistant with your naked chest thrust forward. You begin to struggle and cry out, you mouth is covered by the assistant's palm and you are subdued. He feels for the space between the ribs over the heart, he quickly inserts the needle to the hilt, injects, withdraws and then steps back. The assistant has a grip on you as you flail into hysterics but within 15 seconds it is all over.
The power of an injection! To think..I can separate the soul from the body!, the SS doctor thinks. It is more humane than the gas & I never miss the heart! I have perfected this to the point that I always enter an auricle and the process is most expedient! They are going to die anyway - they are lucky that I am the one doing it to them! Some of the other doctors are clumsy. A few even do it into a vein in the arm; for they haven't the inner strength and devotion to do it right! Few people on earth have done what I am doing! I have the strength to look into the eyes of each person as I take their life! It is so God-like! Yet, I'm only obeying orders, this is the agenda of the party, of my country - everyone knows that! These genetically & socially inferior people must be eliminated and we are doing the awful, yet glorious work of preparing a future world - where Nordic race will bring mankind to it's true destiny. To see these emaciated, shaven, sick people - why, they really are subhuman! To see how pitiful they look. No, I am doing them and the Reich justice!
Phenol injection - a very common "special handling". Intimate murder. What does it take to murder a child, only inches from his questioning, innocent eyes with a needle straight into the heart. Any person who has done this with freewill to another (especially a child) does not deserve freedom to live on this earth. Thousands & thousands were killed in this way.
While refilling the syringe, he matter-of-factly tells his assistant, "Make sure the eyes are removed and sent to my colleagues in Munich for further testing...Ok, bring me the next one, for I have to get this all done before the next transport arrives - it's my turn to be at the selections". The assistant replies, "Well, there are only about 50 that have to be done this morning - you should be OK!".
Yes it's true, at Auschwitz, under the veil of secrecy from the world, the SS and their accomplices were gods...but they were gods in Dantes' Inferno and they scattered and hid when the camps were liberated. Many committed suicide after the war rather than be brought to light and held accountable for their actions. All this is proof that deep down, they knew they were actually servants at the altar of evil - yet they did so out of an age-old ground-in uneducated antisemite ideology shared by most of Europe during those times. Last but not least, the true sadistic beast (within each of us) could be let loose unchecked in this camp atmosphere. It was a sadist's paradise. Sadists were sought out and groomed to actually make sure the camp "operated". Death factories operated thusly: The brainwork by the SS elite. Regular SS & Ukranian/Lithuanian guards to interface between the SS elite and upper echelon prisoners (mainly true criminals from the Reich). Corpse handling and menial work to done by the prisoner-slaves in exchange for life as long as it was convenient. Somewhere, among the upper echelon prisoners (kapos, block leaders, etc) and the regular SS & Ukranian guards (and guards imported from other occupied territories) were the real monsters (also included must be most all the SS doctors ). They greased the wheel: they physically made sure it turned and produced slaughter. They jumped off the fence, as it were, into the cesspool they had created and waded in it with rods in their hands, making sure that not a single head bobbed to the surface for a gulp of air unless it was their decision to allow it. Gods in a cesspool of human carnage. Yet at night, these guards might write a love-note to their families back home and the SS man would drive out of camp to his small housing unit and play with his children and relax with his wife after supper. An only too-real example of the duality capable within us. The result of hidden hatreds that we are capable of, that, for the most part, stay controlled & and hidden with the help of religion, laws, education and organized society - but nonetheless are within us. The extreme anti-Semitism prevalent at the time in the German people, coupled with the belief that the Jews were a separate and inferior race are things that made genocide possible. Finally, the Jews in the ghettos were so starved, so pyschologically broken, so brutalized that after being shaved and dressed in prisoner clothing, it was thus a stage set by the Germans to make it easy to kill them!!!!
When it is allowed, hatreds and ideologies can grow out of check and actually feed upon itself and become an obsession - this can happen to anyone. Therefore, before you place our own selves on pedestals, make sure you remember that as the SS man was once a baby sucking on his bottle cooing at his loving mother, so you once did the same. Now you may thank God that you were not born in Germany in the 1920's to grow up to be the best SS man in your squad. Conversely, you may also thank God that you were not born in Warsaw, Poland during the 1920's only to see yourself and your people made to suffer and then be annihilated. It is simply fate. As a human being, you are no better than they....but no worse. You have the pure grace of seeing this tragic event in history in hindsight. You have the advantage of more thorough education...of knowing that there is no such thing as "inferior" humans. Yet look inside yourself...do you see any hates and prejudices?? They my friends, are the seeds...the same seeds that bore the fruit of Germany's Holocaust on the Jews. Here is something that I think you should internalize: there is a common phrase that people normally attribute to the Holocaust, as if to close the issue and make them feel better about being a member of the human race. The phrase is: "It was those dirty Nazis who did it! This will never happen again!" If you believe it, then you are in a dream-world. Whenever and wherever factions and groups can get away with it, genocide has occurred and will continue. Christian church-sanctioned actions & inquisitions on "savages" and "heretics". The Spanish on the Incas and Aztecs. The European-descended American colonists and settlers on the American Indian. The Japanese on the Chinese. Cambodia. South Africa. Now, in the 1990's it's Bosnia and Kosovo, where concentration camps came back to life and Einsatzgruppen-styled mass shootings again shall grace the pages of our history books.
DON'T DISTANCE YOURSELF
For the first time on Earth, millions of people found themselves snared in a trap, with little
chance for escape - the object of extermination by a highly technical and militarized regime
who turned the act of mass killing to it's most efficient means possible - practically making
genocide an art. How could those people do that? Easy. Those people???
(I hear the old clich‚s from the unknowing: "Good God! I could never do that! -
how pathetic this is.). We must accept that we are those people. We are also those that
were killed. We are also those that stood by and did nothing...we are all of those people
because we are people. We are the product of our upbringing. It can happen anywhere.
When the right ingredients exist, it repeats (as in Bosnia & Cambodia) With the right
ingredients, you could find yourself part of one of the three groups: 1) the killers 2)
the victims 3) the bystanders. You are in effect, already a remote bystander to the genocide
in Croatia, South Africa, Rwanda & Cambodia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
Plenty. Learn about what happened and remember. Ignore revisionists, read actual Nazi documents and learn how it all evolved. Browse the website of famed Nazi-hunter/Holocaust memorialist Simon Wiesenthal. Tell your children. Remember those who have perished. Learn some of their names. Learn the places. Look at photographs. Read the stories of the survivors, these stories are compelling. Read the protocols established at Wannsee by Heydrich and Eichmann. Try to imagine what the victims endured, to put yourself there...to love your freedom and appreciate all things in life and when you are having the most fun, to pause for one second and think of them, then their deaths will be meaningful and you will then survive for them, as they did not survive. You can live for them, since they did not live. You can remember them, for they probably thought of you in their last minutes. They probably thought of the world of tomorrow, of the people who will live in that place of tomorrow. In their final seconds on earth, they probably asked: "Doesn't anyone know what is happening here? Doesn't anyone care that they are exterminating us? Will anyone really know what they did to me? Will anyone remember me?" Now , you know what you must do. Learn of them, love them, remember them...then live fully and offer a moment or to of your joy up as a memorial to them.
Celmno (Kulmhof) - killing center for liquidation of Lodz Ghetto Jews who walked into an old, large castle straight into gas vans. 250,000 deaths, only 4 known survivors.
Sobibor* - East camp. Liquidation of Czech Jews. Blown up by prisoner uprising. 250,000 murdered.
Belzec* - Eastern killing center. Liquidation of Lublin area Jews. Early camp, using exhaust from captured soviet submarine diesel engines to gas the victims. 600,000 killed. Camp dismantled.
Madjanek - often not considered a major camp, but I consider it such. Served as killing-center and also for slave labor to repair aircraft as well as other industries. 17,000 killed on November 5, 1943 during Operation Erntefest. Camp abandoned as Russian forces approached, over half of the inmates died on the subsequent death march to Dachau. The happy note is that this death march was intercepted enroute by the American forces.
Treblinka* - Greatest of the "Operation Reinhard" killing-centers. 2nd only to Auschwitz (Birkenau) in number killed. Initially shot thousands immediately after disembarking by herding them to an open "shooting area". Used captured Soviet tank (T-34) 500HP diesel engines to suffocate the victims. Liquidation of Warsaw ghetto. Nearly 800,000 murdered. 46 known survivors. Leveled in 1943 after prisoner uprising.
Auschwitz-Birkenau - the largest concentration camp the world has ever seen. Named "Anus Mundi" (anus of the world) by one of the camp prisoner doctors (Dr. Thilo). Also Birkenau (Auschwitz II) and Monowitz (Auschwitz III). 46,000 killed and processed on July 24, 1944. Estimates of around 4,OOO,OOO total deaths. 2 million Jews, 2 million Russian POWs and others. Liberated by the Soviet forces. 1000's of survivors.
*Operation Rienhard Camp
note: of the estimated 50,000 people who help run these camps, only about 250 were actually
executed.
INCEPTION OF THE CAMPS:
On March 21, 1933, this announcement appeared in the newspaper Munchner Neuesten Nachrichten:
On Wed., March 22, 1933, the first concentration camp will be opened in the vicinity of Dachau. It can accomodate 5000 persons. We have adopted this measure, undeterred by paltry scruples, in the conviction that our action will help to restore calm to our country and is in the best interests of the people.
Heinrich Himmler
Commissioner of Munich Police
So it all started as a "simple" police order. The Nazi regime came up with the concept of
concentration camps as locations to keep people in "protective custody". The camps were
controlled by the SS's security service: the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) run by
Reinhard Heydrich
(assassinated by Czech Resistance early in 1942). Located initially only in Germany, the
Germans used pre-existing facilities, e.g. former factories. However the
concentration camp
network that they were to spawn became the eventual labor and death camps of Poland that
are so well-known today. Among the most well-known of these early camps
were Dachau and
Buchenwald. Such camps were very organized in the early years. A prisoner could send/receive
mail and even ransom his freedom. Some camps even had their own currency.
This "money token"
for 2 Reichsmarks issued by the SS. This bill was allocated to be used in the mess hall at the Buchenwald
Concentration Camp. My grand-Uncle, Bobby Fontenelle was with the Allied forces which liberated
the camp and he found this in one of the camp buildings and brought it back from the war.
Only when the war (and the Holocaust) started did these
camps morph into what they are primarily known as today. For example, it was not until the
arrival of Commandant Eicke at the onset of the war, did severe treatment really begin in Dachau.
These early camps were eventually outfitted with crematoria, but not necessarily with gas
chambers. Their original intent was not to be a killing center - whereas Belzec, Sobibor &
Treblinka's only mission was extermination of humans and this occurred after the war
started and the German racial/ethnic agenda made more clear. Other camps were designed
primarily to provide slave labor (under horrendous conditions). However, the most perfect camp
would be a combination prison, labor camp and killing center: Auschwitz: the ultimate
concentration camp. In the concentration camps, not only were Jews slaughtered, but also
x gypsies, Russian POW's and thousands of other non-Jews.
In 1934, Himmler handed control of these camps totally to the SS. Inmates in the camps were
normally 1 of 3 classes: Politicals, Asocials & Inferiors. Triangles with serial numbers were
sewn onto prisoner-striped clothing with the point of the triangle facing down. Red was for
Politicals (communists, etc.), green for criminals, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, pink for
homosexuals , Jews had yellow,
except inverted, combined with one of the other triangles, the six-pointed star could be
achieved. This should not be confused with the standard six-pointed star used in the ghettos
(e.g. Warsaw, Lodz, etc). Besides the triangles, there were insignia sewn above or below these
triangles to indicate, i.e., senior camp inmate, block leader, kapo, etc. The early camps were
only "half-run" by the SS. Actual organization within the camp itself was done by an inmate
"Camp Senior" normally a "green" who would interface with the SS Camp Leader. The camp senior
would assign the workings of the camp to prisoner leaders beneath himself...block seniors,
kapos, etc. Political skirmishes for control of the camp was never-ending, mainly between the
Reds and the Greens. Normally, camps ran smoother (more humanitarian) under a Red regime.
Example: Polish Criminal Serving a
Second Sentence
Each morning at daybreak, inmates assembled in the "parade
ground" (Appelplatz) for roll call with heads down and caps doffed. If there were any discrepancies, the roll call could last for hours - or all day. if needed. After roll-call, persons not called out of line for sonderbehandlung and/or punishment would hastily assemble with their work details, each with it's inmate supervisor and/or kapo accompanied by a couple of camp guards. A break from work at mid-day for food would be the only stopping point. The guards usually would spend the day harassing the work details and looking for any excuse to brutalize the inmates. In the early days, it was illegal to kill an inmate without just cause. Therefore, many tricks were devised, e.g., throwing a prisoner's cap across the "sentry line" of which no prisoner cross. The prisoner would then be shot for either disobeying an order, or for crossing the sentry line.
After 1939, things began to take shape as to how the camps are perceived by most people today. The caloric intake verses the caloric expenditure for the average prisoner was by no means equal. This meant that all prisoners incapable of "organizing" efficiently would eventually succumb. It must be noted that, in and around and thereafter 1942, it was the intent in the koncentrationlagers (concentration camps) not to sustain life, but to waste it away and tap the energy from the life-force within the victims before they expire - a modus operandi perfected at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There were several "common" ways that people were killed:
1) ) gassed
2) shot
3) lack of health (starvation/sickness/disease purposely brought about )
3) worked to death, or killed while working
4) lethal injection (phenol, benzene, evipan)
5) Executed or murdered (hanging, tortured, beaten, murdered in barracks block, chased into sentry lines, etc.)
However it occurred, it has been collectively referred to in many ways: genocide, annihilation, extermination, ethnic cleansing - whatever you call it - it was mass murder on a scale never seen on this planet before. That which compels one to commit genocide is one of the darkest evils that dwells in the heart of man.
There is a glorious gift that can be obtained within the exploration of the Holocaust - if you have the strength to do it...to go deeper into it and in this way, internalize the Holocaust. My journey took me into essentially a clinical depression before I came out on the other side the better for it all. I would love to let you know for free what I now know but paid for in mental anguish. I did not know that I was going to be putting myself through a personal Holocaust in my quest to thoroughly understand this event. So that I would know the answer to "How" and "Why". But I had to know...in order to understand how people could be capable of conducting mass slaughter. To figure out whether it truly might ever happen again. Then to answer my true questions: Would I have allowed myself and my children to be rounded up and slaughtered? What would have been my choices? Would I have put up a fight at the doors of the gas chamber? Would I have had the guts to become a partisan? Would I have been brave enough to set up my house as a "safe house"? Then even a more horrible exploration inside of me: Could I have been a guard chasing them into the chambers? Could I have been a doctor, experimenting on the prisoners? Was I capable of standing at the edge of the pits with a rifle, shooting hundreds one-by-one in the neck all day long? Would I have helped to gass them? I now know an answer to all of these questions.
I have cried more times than I can count over this. I see those children...I placed myself with them in my mind and went to the slaughter with them. I immersed myself in it and internalized it - not realizing how psychologically dangerous this can be if you are not truly prepared for the weight of it. I began to see life and this world differently. I saw the "Goths" (Gothic Culture) in the mall -all these silly kids dressed in black with white makeup, black finger-nails and that "I wish I were dead" attitude - and thought about these kids realizing that they are actually playing a game with a concept that is so utterly horrible...that these little rich kids don't even know what it really is to truly have death hanging over them every hour of the day as did the children of the ghettos and the camps. In my mind's eye, I accompanied the Jews again and again, in the ghetto, at the shooting pits, and in the gas chambers. I starved. I suffered. I joined partisans. I fled to the woods. I committed suicide with them. I survived with them. As I read the hundreds of accounts and biographies, I too, went with them. Not only did I place myself as a victim over and over, but I also shot, I also herded, I also slammed doors shut full of people. I dragged corpses. I told groups to remain calm and led them to the chambers all the while smiling. I called names at roll-call. I watched with curiosity from my guard-tower as someone threw himself onto the electric fence. I stood at attention in my fresh black uniform with utmost awe as Himmler walked by, nodding to me as he toured our camp. I put myself on both sides of the fence so that I would truly have the knowledge of "How" and "Why". We attitudes are simply products of our upbringing , education and the popular culturals sentiments of the day.
If, after reading all I have written, you still do not know the entire gist of this webpage, then I do not know what more I can say to you. However, maybe it is better for you to be where you are. There is a danger in exploring too much within your mind concerning the horrors of our age and how we fit into it. There are secrets that we all harbour....sometimes monstrous ones, sometimes extremely taboo. Secrets that show or have shown extreme "dark" capabilities - maybe they were just thoughts, but often enough, these secrets are actions from the past and plans for the future. Secrets easily hidden because we push them deep....in effect, burying them into our psyches. What I am trying to say is that we all have certain "capabilities" that we usually never act on. They are sometimes just thoughts that will never materialize, thanks to morality, laws, religion and our education and upbringing. What if we succumbed to all of our little rages? How many times have I heard people talk about inflicting damage on another when they are gripped by rage. What are you really capable of? Remove religion, your preconceptions and notions, ego, pride and falsities within you. Strip them back, and lay bare your true "self" . Can you see that the capability is within you? It is within us all. If you had lived during WWII in or near Germany, it would have been simply Fate to decide if you would be a Jew heading for the gas or a member of the Nazi party helping the genocide along. No, I am sorry, there is no tiny gold emblem stamped on your soul saying that YOU are better than the people who lived back then. You are a lucky product of the age in which you now live...your upbringing and education. Fate and luck separates you from them and that is all.
Now accept the concept that anything persons have done in the past is what we are likewise, as individuals, also capable of. It is not a natural thing to accept this concept, I must admit. However, be it the most selfless act of love and sacrifice - or the most horrendous murder -we are all members of the same species and again, what one is capable of, then so we are also capable
It takes bravery to admit to this. It takes bravery to actually try to understand why the German people succumbed to utter evil and yet, allow them to stay human, as you are. It hurts to accept that we are capable of this. Yes, I realize that most people who read about the Holocaust will read only so much, they get too horrified and they feel they've learned enough and they stop reading for their own sake. To keep from hurting or bruising themselves They sum it all up in their minds: "Yes, 6 million...it must have been awful! Hitler was awful! It will never happen again." (by the way, Hitler himself never murdered a single Jew by his own hands that I am aware of - it was people, regular people like us who did it for him).
I have studied the Holocaust to the point of hurting myself. I chose to actually live it inside of myself...but it was an awful thing to do. My wife worried for me...she said more than once, "You are reading too much about that and it is affecting you." I would be depressed for weeks but would hide it as best I could from my wife, my children, friends and co-workers. The minute I could find a place to be alone, especially during my long drive to work, I would again go to the chambers and pits in my mind and cry, cry & cry -trying to understand. I would look at my children and wonder, why is there such beauty in the world and simultaneously, so much horror? It was too much to bear. I was too ashamed to be a human. I wished I had never learned so much about what we can do to our own kind. I didn't deserve happiness and neither did anyone else in the world because as humans, we are capable of the most terrible things. What was the answer? From the perspective of the 1940's...are WE here in the future responsible for doing something to show we care? If so, what is that something? Once I asked myself these questions, I began to see the light.
What could I do to make up for what was done to them? Teaching my children about love, teaching them to detest prejudices and at all times, conducting them & myself according to the Golden Rule just did not seem to be enough. I was still depressed and ashamed.
Then, finally a revelation occurred. As if in a dream, I imagined those children and people coming to me, broken psychologically as I was, and handing me a symbolic flower. I imagined they said, "Thank you for going with us to die. Thank you for making space inside of you for us to live, even though we are long dead and it is now only the memory of us that can live. It hurt your mind and soul to clear that space out for us. In you, we are not just numbers and facts. Thank you for going as far as one from our future can go with us from the past - for you chose to feel the pain and agony we felt. You have honored our last wishes as we died...that we, the individuals, be not forgotten and that what was done to us be known and told to the world....Now, here is a gift for you - an internalized appreciation of life and freedom - it will strengthen you for the rest of your life." Thanks to this revelation, my life has been forever changed.
Now I live happily and I will never ever forget the deaths of the innocents and the gift I now possess. My heart was torn apart but now mended. I now live in utter joy, watching my children grow strong. I see them more like a grandparent sees a grandchild than as a father sees a child. Oh...what was the gift again?....I am sorry, it's just that it is so obvious to me and I had just figured that you have thought it out for yourself by now. No? It's a cliche' actually...one that I'd heard a million times, but the gift of internalizing the message was what I was incapable of, for I grew up as a typically spoiled, materialistic American kid always wanting something and when I got it, I would already be wanting something else. If you are such , then are you ready for disappointment????: OK: the gift:
Life is wonderful, don't take it for granted. Appreciate what you have.
If you are where I feel most people are psychologically, then it comes across as a very shallow and nearly meaningless statement and you are probably disappointed. I will attempt it once more and in a different way: Only fate allowed you to have the luxury of sitting at the computer today, reading in you spare time about this long past event, you probably have plenty of food in your stomach, money in you pocket, you could turn off the PC right now and go drink some Coke, make a sandwich, go shopping or whatever you want....Do you think you DESERVE this freedom? What have you personally done to deserve it? Probably not much. Then it was fate, right? Luck. It is only by grace of fate that you are not at this very moment in Treblinka in 1943, standing, naked, freezing, shivering, whimpering, wailing - waiting for your group to be callously herded into a sealed room to be exterminated with carbon monoxide exhaust gas from a diesel engine. It was fate that there is no one right now, at this moment standing over you at a mass grave giving you the final shot in the head to finish sending you to your death. But all of this did happen to others. They lived and died in the horror of genocide. Children who lived and died in a world so different than yours...never learning about the pleasures of life we take for granted everyday. Food. A bed. TV. Freedom. So many of those who died are not known or forgotten. They are nameless and therefore, faceless to us. Can't we spare a bit of our luxury for them?
Put faces on their faces...our own faces. Names on their names...our own names. Our children's faces and names. Now look at the numbers who were exterminated. The millions. Now you are ready to say to yourself: "But for the Grace of God, There Go I" or even "there go my children".
You have the gift of freedom....the opportunity to bring good and not evil into the world at all times, - and to live each moment with utter joy that your life really belongs to you. You have so many choices! Try to live a little less for a tomorrow that may never come.
Are you beginning to understand? The slaughtered innocents, if they could come back, would tell you how lucky you are and how they wish they could be you. Can't you internalize your good fortune of having a wonderful life and then spread that joy and make this world better???? Can this be something you could do in honor of the million and a half children who were exterminated? To make their deaths less in vain by remembering them and living a bit for them and in memorial to them, pouring out your gladness for them?
Listen to me: Today is all you really have for sure. Live it, love it and spread joy and love and gladness. It's a timeless philosophy and I am lucky enough to have learned it at middle-aged as a result of only temporary, self-imposed suffering. I must tell you, it is a key to true happiness and contentment.
How will you know that you "have made it"? You will slow down a bit in the rat-race. You will begin to feel a universal love, you will stop and talk to the children instead of the adults. You will not be able to pass someone by who is in need...whether on the side of a rural road or in front of K-Mart. You will start sleeping well at night. You will see sunrises very significantly, and as you sip your coffee in the morning, you will venture outside to spot birds or check out interesting clouds floating overhead. You will throw junk mail offering chances for $1,000,000 in the garbage, and serial TV will not interest you in the least. You will see yourself as a part of the larger circle of life and the petty day-to-day worries will be relatively insignificant and will not affect your basic contentment and outlook. You will begin to purge yourself of racial hatreds and prejudices. You will have finally learned to love and appreciate the life you possess and the universe in which you inhabit. You will have the same gift given to me as a survivor of my personal self-inflicted Holocaust. Whatever you do, remember, you too will one day join the dead and what you have done will, for the most part, be forgotten. Your moment in the sun is now. Live...love and remember that there have been millions before you who were denied the kind of life you enjoy. Finally, know this: While smothering in the cold dark gas chambers of Auschwitz, many last thoughts were the hope that the world would know and not forget. You can help honor their wishes. Let them live within you, for nothing but fate separates you from them and what happened in that not-so-distant past.
Good luck to you in all that you do and I hope that love and happiness accompanies you to your last day.
Dedicated to the children who were annihilated in Europe during the Holocaust
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