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By W. DALE NELSON
Star-Tribune correspondent
Wednesday, March 2, 2005 11:00 PM MST

LARAMIE — Exhausted by a grimy, two-day train trip to an unknown destination, the Jews were told to remember what hook they hung their clothes on. That way, they would be able to reclaim their own when they came back from the showers.

The guards who told them this knew that these people would never put their clothes back on. The destination was the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination and Selection Camp. The shower was a gas chamber. The seemingly considerate words were a bit of gratuitous cruelty in the horror of the Holocaust.

After the bodies were taken to the crematorium, the guards “would go home on leave, play with their little children, go to church and pray, and come back to continue the same evil over and over again,” Holocaust survivor Jack Adler of Denver said Wednesday.

Adler, 76, was 10 years old in September 1939 when Nazi soldiers marched into Pabianice, Poland, where his family owned a textile business. Along with other Jews in the town, they were moved to a ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz, where they were held virtual prisoners. His mother and brother died there. In 1944, Adler and his father and two sisters were sent to Auschwitz/Birkenau. His sisters were killed. He and his father were later sent to a work camp at Kaufering, Germany.

Young Jack was later sent to the German concentration camp at Dachau. […]

[…]

His stories were not all about cruelty. At one camp, his chores included cleaning the commanding S.S. colonel’s wood-burning stove daily. In the ashes, he said, he regularly found neatly wrapped bits of bread and bacon that he could share with his father.

“He wanted me to find that, or else he would have thrown it into the garbage,” he said.

After he was beaten by a guard one day, he said, the commander, an S.S. officer, asked him to point out the guard who had done it. Despite his fear of reprisal, he did so, and the commander duly disciplined the guard.

“He was a decent human being who got caught up in something over his head, as I am sure were many other Germans,” he said.

[…]

Star-Tribune correspondent W. Dale Nelson can be reached at [email protected].

Source: www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2005/03/03/news/wyoming/eadc6a59e2c8527a87256fb80062b1af.txt

by Chris Tarver

Holocaust survivor Eva Kor shared her terrifying story Tuesday night of torture and humiliation at the Auschwitz death camp.

A packed audience listened in utter silence as Kor told of her experience as a young girl in Auschwitz under Dr. Josef Mengele, who was known as the “Angel of Death.”

Kor said she doesn’t have many vivid and detailed memories of Auschwitz. She does, however, remember the spring day in 1944 at age 10 when her life changed forever.

That day was the last time she saw her parents and two of her three sisters. Kor and her identical twin, Miriam Kor, were used for experimentation. Kor described how she was held down and had the identifying mark of A-7063 branded into her arm. After a couple of days in the camp, Kor made her first silent pledge — to keep her and her sister alive. She had only one objective and that was to simply survive.

Kor recalled that in early summer of 1944, she was injected with an unknown germ after a visit to Mengele’s lab. She eventually became ill and was taken to a hospital and assigned to a barrack that she described as “the barrack of the living dead.”

She came up with that moniker because people either die in the barrack or wait to be escorted to the gas chambers.

Kor was told that she only had two weeks to live by Mengele. That was when she made her second silent pledge, which was to get better and reunite with her sister. She also remembers being too weak to walk and having to crawl just to get to a nearby water fountain.

While Kor was in the hospital, her sister became even more ill than Kor. Kor’s only objective was to “organize,” or steal, food to help her sister get well. Miriam died in 1993 from a rare form of cancer caused by Mengele’s experiments.

Three times a week the doctors would perform experiments that weren’t harmful or deadly, but they were unbelievably demeaning and humiliating.

Onetime during a raid, Kor remembers staring down the barrel of an automatic rifle. Kor said she must have had a guardian angel looking over her because she fainted before the bullet struck her.

On Jan. 27, 1945, just 12 days before her 11th birthday, Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz.

[…]

Source: media.www.collegian.com/media/storage/paper864/news/2005/03/02/Newscampus/Holocaust.Survivor.Shares.Story.Of.Horror.Forgiveness-1706408.shtml

5 friends, separated in the Holocaust, reunite to share stories of survival

By Mike Clary, Staff Writer

February 18, 2005

www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/palmbeach/

sfl-pholocaust18feb18,0,4451043.story?coll=sfla-news-palm

Boynton Beach — Almost 60 years have passed since Margit Feldman and four of her Thursday luncheon guests had been in the same place at the same time.

They all brought memories to the table.

Among the horrors that Clara Dann, 83, remembers from Auschwitz in 1944 and 1945 were the showers where new arrivals were shaved from head to toe before being assigned to a camp. Kati Roth, now 75 but just 14 in the waning months of World War II, said the man she first saw when she stepped off the train from Hungary was the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known as “the angel of death.”

[…]

Mike Clary can be reached at [email protected] or 561-243-6629.

Copyright © 2005, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Holocaust survivor shares story with students

• North High in Torrance hosts George Brown, who watched the Nazis march his mother to her death at Auschwitz in 1944.

By Seung Hwa Hong

Daily Breeze

Saturday, February 05, 2005

www.dailybreeze.com/news/articles/1229377.html

The image still lingers in George Brown’s mind: clouds of ash spewing from four chimneys at Auschwitz, the sun blotted out by the smoke that hung over the death camp.

[…]

There were no birds or flies at the camp and ashes blotted out the sun, Brown said.

[…]

French far-right MP suspended from teaching duties over gas chamber remarks

Friday February 4, 2:15 AM

news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050203/en_afp/francepolitics_050203181534

The French education ministry suspended far-right lawmaker Bruno Gollnisch from his position as a university professor over controversial comments he made about Nazi gas chambers.

Gollnisch, a professor of Japanese civilization and international law at the Jean-Moulin university in Lyon, said he would appeal his suspension to the Conseil d’Etat, the country’s highest administrative court.

The education ministry said Gollnisch, who is a top deputy to far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen within his National Front (FN) party, had been relieved of his duties “in the interest of the department”.

Gollnisch told a press conference in October: “I do not deny the existence of deadly gas chambers. But I’m not a specialist on this issue, and I think we have to let the historians debate it. And this debate should be free and open.”

The FN deputy said he did not contest the “hundreds of thousands, the millions of deaths” during the Holocaust, but added: “As to the way those people died, a debate should take place.”

[…]

Le Pen sparked controversy last month when he described the Nazi occupation of France during World War II as “not especially inhumane”.

Paris prosecutors have launched a preliminary inquiry to determine whether Le Pen’s remarks constitute “denial of crimes against humanity” or “apology for war crimes” — both of which are criminal offenses.

Copyright © 2005AFP. All rights reserved. All information displayed in this section (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the contents of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presses.

Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Pte Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

THE BELL CURVE: Auschwitz remains stark after 60 years

JOSEPH N. BELL

February 2, 2005

www.dailypilot.com/front/story/2152p-3159c.html

I suspect that all of us have a handful of places or events in our lives that leave such an indelible impression that they are never very far from our consciousness. One such place for me is the Nazi death factory called Auschwitz.

It has been much on my mind this past week as both the print media and television have been full of remembrances of this place on the 60th anniversary of its liberation by the Russian army. Although my memories come from a visit long after the carnage that took place at Auschwitz, they are nonetheless vivid.

[…]

[…] We took a bus from Krakow — a delightful river city that ironically serves as the gateway to the horrors of Auschwitz — enduring some 30 miles of garrulous talk in broken English from an anti-Semitic female bus driver who dropped us off at the gates to the prison camp on a lovely late summer day. There was a long, graveled walk to an arch that marked the entrance. We got our first view of the interior of the camp — and were stopped dead in our tracks — when we made a sharp turn at the arch and saw a bevy of German soldiers in uniform, many of them holding straining police dogs on tight leashes, standing guard over dozens of prisoners in striped clothing.

That’s the scene deeply implanted in my memory. We found out quickly that a movie was being shot there that day, but the fictitious German guards became more and more real to me as we explored the camp, and, by day’s end, I found myself unable to put down a smoldering hatred of the actors playing the Nazi soldiers.

[…]

It was only a minute’s walk from the unloading platform to the room, full of overhead showers, where most of the new arrivals were sent to disrobe and supposedly be deloused. But instead of water, the showers pumped out gas. […]

[…]

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column appears Thursdays.

Copyright 2005 Daily Pilot

Swiss court ruling opens door for historic Gypsy suit against IBM

Jerusalem Post

February 2, 2005

www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?
strwebhead=Gypsy+suit+against+IBM+moves+forward+
&intcategoryi

A European Gypsy group suing IBM for conspiracy to commit genocide has prevailed in its efforts to secure jurisdiction in Switzerland, charging that the company consciously coordinated its punch-card automation for the Nazis out of its European headquarters in Geneva.

[…]

In the concentration camps, IBM’s code for Jews was 8 and its code for Gypsies was 12. General executions were IBM-coded as 4, death by gas chamber as 6. The Nazis used these codes to manage and track their prisoners efficiently.

[…]

Holocaust horrors couldn’t break the spirit of Auschwitz survivor

Nick Lees

The Edmonton Journal

January 29, 2005

www.canada.com/edmonton/edmontonjournal/news/

insight/story.html?id=2319303e-68c5-4b09-b8d3-e3969a127a0a&page=1

[…]

[Rajmund] Pierzchajlo spent three years and four months in Auschwitz and says he witnessed countless brutal beatings, executions carried out at the whim of guards, and countless Jews and others walk innocently to the gas chambers.

[…]

“Everyone knows the smell of a barbecue,” says Pierzchajlo. “We had that smell in our nostrils every moment of every day. It was the smell of burning flesh. We of course felt sorry for all those who died. But there was absolutely nothing we could do.”

[…]

“As a carpenter, I also visited the Birkenau and other sub-camps to make repairs,” he said.

“I saw what was going on. I saw the never-ending black columns of smoke belching from chimneys.”

[…]

Pierzchajlo watched the first Russian prisoners — about 500 top officials of the NKVD, the political police — arrive after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

“They looked well-groomed and marched with confidence, as if to say, ‘Stalin wouldn’t let anyone harm us,’ ” says Pierzchajlo. “But most or all of them were of Jewish ancestry and were placed in the death barrack.”

[…]

The memory of those dreadful times still brings nightmares.

When he finds his mind drifting back during the day, he makes himself think of the few lighter moments there were at Auschwitz. SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer (Captain) Rudolph Hess [sic] was the commandant of Auschwitz and never did find out what happened to his impeccably groomed German shepherd that vanished as soon as it arrived at the camp.

“The dog was cooked in the prisoners’ kitchen,” says Pierzchajlo. “If you have ever been close to dying from hunger, you’d know what a treat that was.”

© The Edmonton Journal 2005