Name:     Michael L. S.   [E-Mail]
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      Website:  Middle East Resource Center


 

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The Holocaust, symbolized by Auschwitz, the worst of the death camps, occurred in the wake of consistent, systematic, unrelenting anti-Jewish propaganda campaign. As a result, the elimination of the Jews from German society was accepted as axiomatic, leaving open only two questions: when and how.

As Germany expanded its domination and occupation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, the Low Countries, Yugoslavia, Poland, parts of the USSR, Greece, Romania, Hungary, Italy and others countries, the way was open for Hitler to realize his well-publicized plan of destroying the Jewish nation.

After experimentation, the use of the gas called Zyklon B on unsuspecting victims was adopted by the Nazis as the means of choice, and Auschwitz was selected as the main factory of death (more accurately, one should refer to the “Auschwitz-Birkenau complex”). The green light for mass annihilation was given at the Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942, and the mass gassings took place in Auschwitz between 1942 and the end of 1944, when the Nazis retreated before the advancing Red Army. Jews were transported to Auschwitz from all over Nazi-occupied or Nazi-dominated Europe and most were slaughtered in Auschwitz upon arrival, sometimes as many as 12,000 in one day. Some victims were selected for slave labor or “medical” experimentation. All were subject to brutal treatment.

In all, hundreds of thousands of people, almost all Jews, were slaughtered in Auschwitz alone (the number is generally put at 1.3 million but believe to be two, maybe three, times that). Other death camps were located at Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec (Belzek), Majdanek, Treblinka and elsewhere where--in all--six million Jews were murdered.

Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on 27 January 1945, sixty years ago, after most of the prisoners had been forced into a Death March westwards. The Red Army found in Auschwitz about 7,600 survivors, but not all could be saved.

For a long time, the Allies (particularly the British) were well aware of the mass murder, but deliberately refused to bomb the camp or the railways leading to it. Ironically, during the Polish uprising, the Allies had no hesitation in flying aid to Warsaw, sometimes flying right over Auschwitz.

There are troubling parallels between the systematic vilification of Jews before the Holocaust and the current vilification of the Jewish people and Israel. Suffice it to note the annual flood of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN; or the public opinion polls taken in Europe, which single out Israel as a danger to world peace; or the divestment campaigns being waged in the US against Israel; or the attempts to delegitimize Israel’s very existence. The complicity of the Allies in WWII is mirrored by the support the Palestinians and, crucially, Palestinian terrorists have been receiving from Europe, China and Russia to this very day.

If remembering Auschwitz should teach us anything, it is that we must all support Israel and the Jewish people against the vilification and the complicity we are witnessing, knowing where it inevitably leads:




(A massacred body.)





(An emaciated child awaiting his death. The picture was taken on the day of the Soviet liberation.)





(A pile of corpses.)





(A man following unremitting torture.)





(A bulldozer pushing hundreds of corpses into ditches (seen later).)





(Deportees en route to the concentration camp... - the last stairs they'll ever have walked.)





(A Jewish woman scrubbing a sidewalk. This was a common punishment, particularly in Vienna and Salzburg. Punishment for being born a Jew.)





(People herded onto cattle wagons where they'll have spent days traveling in a cooped up space on their final journey.)





(Barbed wire surrounding the camp.)





(A pile of corpses. Crime? Being Jewish.)





(Another bulldozer clearing away another mass of corpses.)





(Young men arrested, imprisoned and murdered for being Jews.)





(Children were by no means spared.)





(Camp prisoners in their "sleeping" cubicles.)





(Crowded cubicles unfit for even animals.)





(Destitute Jews awaiting their impending death.)





(A pile of shoes whose owners perished in the ovens on Auschwitz.)





(A woman and her grandchild among corpses in the camp.)





(A ditch impregnated by Jewish corpses.)





(Another ditch--they were used after the Nazis had found that the ovens couldn't cope with the sheer number of the murdered Jewish martyrs.)





(More Jews, wearing a yellow magen David, led to their slaughter by sadistic Nazi beasts.)





(A look from the outside.)





(ID numbers were tattooed on the martyrs' arms.)





((Children showing theirs.)





(Clothes of the perished.)





(And a heap of their glasses.)





(One-way tracks leading to the camp.)





(Endless barracks filmed by the Allies a few months prior to camp liberation. Had the camp been bombed, hundreds of thousand of lives would have been saved. The Britishers were the ones who vetoed bombardment.)


And possibly the most shocking datum for last: "45% of Britishers have never heard of Auschwitz".

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