Remembering Auschwitz

It was the ' dignity ' of those who give/gave their personal accounts that always resonates with me.

They ask only for what they suffered to never to be forgotten for the sake of the future generations.

I mentioned previously in my post a speech at the Auschwitz Memorial on Monday talking about the ' 11th Commandment ' and Auschwitz not ' falling from the sky ' and I have found an extract from Marion Turski and felt the need to post it. One of many I could post but he had a standing ovation.

Extract:-

Marian Turski, deported to Auschwitz from the Litzmannstadt ghetto, addressed in the introduction the generation of his daughter and grandchildren:

“When I meet the young nowadays, I realize that after 70, 75 years they seem to get bored, they are a little bored with this subject. The war, Holocaust, Shoah… and I do understand them. So I promise you, the young, that I’m not going to talk about my sufferings, I’m not going to talk about what I had gone through, about my two death marches, how I lived to see the end of the war with my body weight of 32 kg on the verge of death, exhaustion. I’m not going to talk about the worst: the tragedy of saying goodbye, the tragedy of leaving our dear ones, when you see after the selection, when you feel what fate they are awaiting. No, I’m not going to talk about it.'

‘I see that the President of Austria van der Bellen is here among us. Mister President, you remember, when you received me and the leaders of the International Auschwitz Committee, when we were talking about that time: you used such sentence: “Auschwitz ist night for himmelgefahlen”. Auschwitz had not fallen from the sky. It can be said, as we say it, it is obvious obviousness. Sure, it had not fallen from the sky. It can even seem trivial, but it is an extremely deep mental shortcut, important to be understood’, he said.

‘My Dear, here in Europe, the majority of us has Judeo-Christian origins, both believers and non-believers adopt the 10 commandments as their canon. My dearest friend, President of the International Auschwitz Committee Roman Kent, could not come here, but he developed the 11th commandment, which is the experience of the Shoah, the Holocaust, the experience of this cruel era of contempt: do not stay indifferent. I would like to tell this to my daughter’s and grandchildren’s peers, wherever they live, in Israel, in Western or Eastern Europe. Do not stay indifferent when you see historical lies, do not stay indifferent when you see that the past is adapted to current political needs. Do not stay indifferent when any minority is discriminated, as democracy assumes that the rights of minorities need to be protected at the same time. Obey the commandment. 11th commandment: do not stay indifferent. Unless you do so, in the blink of an eye, an Auschwitz will suddenly fall from the sky’, Marian Turski emphasized.

trisher....it’s not all one way you know! There were those who were happy to give up any Jews and those who weren’t.
Many Jewish Poles who felt unsafe in Poland after the war came and settled in my home town ( in the North.)
The brave Polish people do receive recognition btw but that doesn’t mean that a lot of Polish people did dislike/hate Jews.
Poland was /is a strongly Catholic country.

trisher, one of my sons in law had a Polish grandfather. He escaped a concentration camp and came to England, goodness knows how. He'd been an engineer and volunteered to work with the free polish forces.
What do you mean, why don't they get recognition? So far as I can see, they do. The Free Polish Forces are rightly admired and commemorated.

40% of the prisoners in Ravensbruck were Polish political prisoners. Why don't they get the recognition for their sacrifice? A Polish Boy Scout troop was executed by the Nazis. But the Poles "cooperated enthusiastically". Not to mention of course the Polish Free Forces who came to this country to fight leaving their families behind and who were not united at the end of WW2 because Churchill gave Poland to the Russians.

I agree that in many occupied countries, some people collaborated with the Nazi's, maybe through fear, maybe through a desire to be less likely to suffer at their hands.

I know anti semitism exists everywhere but there are records of pogroms and persecution of Jewish people in Eastern Europe throughout history. Russian Jews, Polish Jews, Hungarian Jews all forced to flee death threats towards their communities.

In August 1945 in Krakow, a number of Jewish people were killed, attacked, humiliated, their synagogues attacked. It seems anti semitic beliefs such as that Jews drank the blood of Christian children they had murdered were behind these attacks. Anti semitism was recorded in many Polish cities between 1945 - 1946 with the result many who had returned to their former homes when they were liberated from Auschwitz left Poland.

If you want to read more
marthahallkelly.com/you-wont-believe-how-many-girl-scouts-joined-the-polish-underground-in-wwii/

If we were being threatened with being shot, maybe so Sodapop but not for any other reasons.The truth is that the Poles who were happy to co-operate did so for material goods and because they despised Jews.The Poles who were good people, didn’t.

There is no doubt that SOME Poles cooperated but many? and enthusiastically? If you resisted, if you were found in any way to be acting against the Nazis you and all your family suffered.
From Martha Hall Kelly who wrote Lilac Girls
Writing Lilac Girls, I had a great time researching the girl guides, a group instrumental to the Polish underground during WWII. In that war, the Polish resistance movement was the largest in all of Nazi-occupied Europe and Polish Girl Scouts (called Girl Guides abroad) joined in huge numbers. It was a natural progression for the girls, since it was an established social network. Frustrated by their Nazi oppressors who tried to wipe out Poland and Polish culture the Guides did important work to fight back

I think its very unfair to criticise what the people of occupied countries did during the war. We have no conception of what this must have been like. What would we have done to protect ourselves and our families.

Lemon grove is correct, many Poles cooperated with the Nazis. A Jew on the run could be betrayed for a few bags of sugar, the Poles were kept near starvation level. Equally many Poles did not cooperate, and many helped Jews who were in hiding.

I will find the book you recommend on Amazon and read it Dee.

Of course there was a small gas chamber at the main camp of Auschwitz from quite early in the war. I have seen it and stood in it. It’s very sobering to stand and know what was done there. I was told it was used to kill the sick who could no longer work.

The huge gas chambers I was referring to earlier, built at Birkenau, the second and much larger Auschwitz camp, was where the Final Solution was carried out. There thousands of people could be killed at one time. They were built in 1943. What was done there is, in my opinion, the worst atrocity of all atrocities ever committed, and there have been a lot.

I still maintain that the allies were not truly aware of the magnitude of the crime till the liberation.

Of course it wasn’t always the case trisher but there certainly were plenty who were happy to co-operate with the Germans.Polish people do know this btw.

I suppose none of us can even for one second comprehend what it was like in there.

Nor, can we predict how we would behave. What a cruel thing it was.

lemongrove You said I wonder if the Polish people feel a collective guilt about the camps?Many worked there and collaborated enthusiastically with the Germans
Just pointed out that it wasn't always enthusiastic and not cooperating brought terrible repercussions. Read about the Rabbits and their amazing survival thanks to other women in the camp www.rememberravensbruck.com/projects

ALEXA, if you can, please continue the Amnesty International letters and cards. When you read accounts from victims, after their release, they often say how helpful it was to get these messages, which in many cases hastened their release.
There are so many good thoughts on this thread today.

Again, I'd urge people to look at the story of Pilecki. He was sending information out of Auschwitz from 1941.
There is evidence of this....he escaped in 1943.

Good posts from you maddyone ??

maddyone. Thank you. Thank you too for reminding us of the words of Jesus.

No trisher........Lemongrove does not ‘blame the Poles for the camps’ !!
If you read my post properly, you would see I was asking the question, do the Poles as a nation feel collected guilt.A good number of Polish people gave up details of where Jewish neighbours lived and collaborated in many ways with the Germans.
Lemongrove entirely blames Hitler and the Nazis for the death camps.

The documentary I mentioned above showed women from the local town being taken into a camp after it was liberated. They obviously had no idea what had been going on in there. They were smiling and jolly on the way in. Some were collapsing and fainting in shock at what they saw.

Tillybelle,

What a lovely, caring post. I agree with every word you have written.
I will join you in offering apologies to all our Jewish friends who have ever suffered an anti Semitic remark in Britain. I offer my apologies on behalf of those too ignorant to apologise themselves.

Jesus said, ‘Love thy neighbour.’
The Jewish community in Britain are our neighbours.

The Wannsee Conference only took place in January 1942. How could anyone have known about mass killings in gas chambers when they were only being planned in January 1942. It was called the Final Solution.

It is so painful to read from our Jewish Grans that they have experienced antisemitism. I was aware of it as a child in the 1950s, particularly with a disgusting phrase my mother used. my mother and her friends, living in the beautiful country villages of south Surrey, were not only antisemitic but racist also. It was born of ignorance. Yet my dear Father was not like it at all and one day spoke very sternly to my mother about this phrase she used and that was how I learned it was an antisemitic phrase. I was only about 6 as I can remember which class I was in at school. I was shocked at my mother. Later I was shocked at my God Mother who used a horrible expression about a Black woman working on the Train platform in London. I began to dislike this group of village women and vowed to leave the village when I grew up and to be myself.
Then, many years later when I was in my thirties, a woman came to teach at our fairly prestigious public school from another such school. The first time I met her she began to run down Jewish people who she said sent their children to the school at which she previously taught. It was horrific.

Yes, that was some time ago. But this cancer of anti- Semitism pervades our country. I have been told by my Jewish friends from time to time, one particularly when he wrote his family story. He found out what happened to his Grandparents in different Camps in the war and how his mother had fled to Paris then to England. He still suffers from remarks that are so painful it breaks his heart. How can people be like this?
I think that there are two sorts of people in Britain and basically they are the decent, empathic, caring and unselfish ones, and then the others - selfish, unempathic, demanding their "rights" types. There is nothing in between as far as I have experienced.

To all Jewish people I want to say a very deep apology for those ignorant and selfish British people who haven't a clue how cruel and hurtful they are being when they say such horrible things to you. I am so sorry that in Britain we have not managed to teach everyone what that terrible painful scar you carry is like, since the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust. I hope and pray that you may never be hurt again by any anti Semitic comments. I know this is unlikely so I pray that you grow in strength to ignore these ignorant and wicked people and never let them hurt you. There are many of us who are so overwhelmed with grief and sorrow at what Jewish people have suffered and would do anything we could to hold you up and support you.

How do you know that ananimous?

It was known about at a later stage in the war. The gas chambers weren’t in use in Auschwitz until 1943.

There were small gas chambers used before that. The mechanised killing of thousands at a time was unimaginable to people unless they were part of the perpetrators or lived nearby. Treblinka started to gas large numbers in 1942.

I cannot disagree with you more.

Everybody
in all governments knew exactly what was being done in the camps.

It slowly filtered down to the populace, yes.
But all the top people knew.