People who experienced the Holocaust

I thought Cold Anger might appreciate this owning to his anti holocaust beliefs...

Here is an excellent website / blog I have come across that you might find interesting reading, I did...

The main site silflayhraka.com... has a great articel on a guy who was with the Amerians who first entered the camps,

This second has the personal story of the blog writer...

silflayhraka.com...
(pics on the page as well..)
Holocaust deniers like David Irving have always had a hard time with my family. The idea that the Holocaust didn't happen, or that its extent was exaggerated was always considered lunacy. We had proof, you see.

Not that we're Jewish, or lost anyone in the camps. The closest we ever got to a connection of that sort (before my middle brother married above himself) was the lady who lived beside us when I was a child, and whose lawn I mowed for pocket money during my teenage years.

I never knew her as anything other than Dr. Blumenfeld. She was a professor at the college, a sad women who lived alone with only a Dachshund for company. As best as I remember she came to America from Germany in the thirties, and most if not all of the family she left behind perished.

For the most part I never thought of her. As a child I remember being scared of her. As a teenager I initially resented her, for she was very precise in her instructions when it came to mowing her lawn, then uncomfortable and nervous around her, as if she were a hideous cripple who had gotten into a too-small elevator with me.

The reasons my attitude changed were found in the back of a large metal Army Surplus filing cabinet, one of a number bought by Louisburg College in the late 1970's, presumably because they were cheap. It's one of the oldest junior colleges in America, but it's always suffered from financial troubles. It was given to my father, who stuck it in a corner of his office and ignored it for months.

In the bottom of the filing cabinet, stuck beneath the drawer were 20 black and white photos from World War II, mostly of piles of bodies. Some had this message stamped in red on the back;

ORIGINAL PRINT
Must be returned to
Office of War Information
Picture Division Library
224 West 57th Street
New York, N.Y.

Others had this ominous message;

WAR POOL PHOTO, NOT FOR USE IN BRITISH ISLES, FRANCE, OR WESTERN HEMISPHERE

All had descriptions glued to the back, usually a general overview of the circumstances in which the picture was taken, followed by a specific description of the picture contents. My father happened upon them the day he finally decided to use the heavy metal beast the administration had crammed into his office.

As best as we tell they have never been published anywhere. I remembered them when I first started this site, but could never get past the feeling that exhibiting them here was something akin to inviting people to come down to the local 7-11 for a Guernica showing.

The environment still doesn't feel right, but I decided a week or so ago while looking for a particular Will Rogers speech that withholding information from the Internet was as close to a electronic sin as one can get. Also, the photo and descriptions are aging rapidly, despite the acid free folders they've been stored in over the last 25 years, and I thought it best to put the photos and descriptions into a more accessible digital form before turning the lot over to a organization better equipped to care for them.

I never apologized to Dr. Blumenfeld for my attitudes towards her before she died. I don't know that I could have found the words to express the awkwardness I felt around her without giving offense at that age. I can only hope that she didn't notice. I think Dad may have shown these to her at one point. I don't care to think how painful that must have been for both of them.

Perhaps I can redress some small part of that wrong I did as a child to the good Doctor by posting the pictures. Given the present day situation in the Middle East, and the rising tides of an all too familiar anti-Semitism in parts of the progressive movement, perhaps they might also serve as a caution, of a fresh reminder of what happened the last time the West abandoned the children of Israel.

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I'll post one or two a day; it takes time to scan them, research the backstory and transcribe the descriptions. I'll endeavor to keep each at the top of the site for most of each day.

The first two pictures are from Ohrdruf, one of the satellite labor camps associated with Buchenwald, and the first to be liberated by western forces.

On April 12, 1945, Ohrdruf was visited by Generals Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton. The Generals viewed piles of bodies, implements of torture, and a butcher's block used to smash gold fillings from teeth, among other sights. Patton became ill and reportedly refused to visit the punishment shed. As the tour progressed, Eisenhower's mood turned increasingly grim. As recounted by Abzug, Patton's aide Charles Codman described an encounter between Eisenhower and a G.I., when the soldier accidentally bumped into a Nazi ex-guard and giggled nervously: "General Eisenhower fixed him with a cold eye, and when he spoke, each word was like the drop off an icicle. 'Still having trouble hating them,' he said."

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Following is the general description found on each of the Ohrdruf pictures. I've kept the mispellings, and added links where I can to more information. The specific descriptons, as well as any other information on a photo, appear beneath each.

SS MURDER CAMP UNCOVERED

The swift advance of the Third U.S. Army's famous Fourth Armored uncovered the horror of a Nazi SS murder camp at Ohrdruf, entered April 4, 1945, after the fall of Gotha, eight miles to the north. American soldiers who seized the camp found the courtyard littered with the bodies of Czechoslovakian, Russian, Belgian and French slave laborers, slain because they were too weak to be evacuated. In a shed, they found a stack of 44 naked and lime-covered bodies.

According to survivors, 3,000 to 4,000 prisoners had been kileed by SS troops, 70 being slain just before the Americans reached the camp. The 80 survivors had escaped death or removal by hiding in the woods. They reported that an average 150 died daily, mainly from shooting or clubbing. The Nazi system was too feed prisoners a crust of bread a day, work them on tunnelling until they were too weak to continue, then exterminate them and replace them with another 150 prisoners daily.

Led by Colonel Hayden Sears of the Fourth Armored Division, prominent German citizens of the town of Ohrdruf saw with their own eyes the horrors of SS brutality during a conducted tour of the Ohrdruf charnel house April 8, 1945. As they stood over the slain prisoners, Colonel Sears said: "This is why Americans cannot be your friends..." The enforced tour of the Germans ended with a visit to a wood where 10 bodies lay on a grill, made of railway lines, ready for cremation. Colonel Sears asked a uniformed German medical officer: "Does this meet with your conception of the German master race?" The officer faltered and at last answered: "I cannot believe that Germans did this."



[Edited on 5-7-2003 by Netchicken]

If only generations today could know the Evil that was rising in the world.

How dare people compare America to the Nazis in any way.

Netchicken,

Thank you very much for sharing this link.

NC thanks alot for posting this! Now we should be able to put away any anti-Semtism, and stop CA's disbelif the the massacre of 6 million people.

Words go out the window when you see the pictures, even the comments by people were interesting.

Here is what Eisenhower said

On a recent tour of the forward areas in First and Third Armies, I stopped momentarily at the salt mines to take a look at the German treasure. There is a lot of it. But the most interesting - although horrible - sight that I encountered was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escapes. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they had piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda".

... and look what happened, he was right...

Its seeing the events through the pictures like this, and even commens by leaders like Patton who were there that make deniers so grotesque and horrifying.

[Edited on 5-7-2003 by Netchicken]