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Survivors recounts the Treblinka Death Camp!
Hershl Sperling
Personal Testimony of the Treblinka Death Camp
Hershl Sperling and his family lived in the Czestochowa ghetto on Wilsona Street near the ghetto wall.
What follows below is his account of the deportation and incarceration in the Treblinka death camp
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Czestochowa Wartime Town Map showing Wilsona Street (click text to enlarge) |
In September 1942, the deportation of the Jews of Czestochowa began. We had already sensed it coming weeks before. The town was surrounded by SS units. We are all woken from sleep before daybreak by the noise of wild shooting, vehicles and people screaming and wailing.
We look out into the street and see the SS men savagely bursting into people’s houses and driving the occupants out into the street with blows from their rifle-butts. We watch them arbitrarily dividing up people after a superficial glance at their work-permits; a very small minority of them is assigned to work, and the rest are transported away en masse.
Some kind of premonition tells us that this is the route to death, and we decide to hide in the bunker, which we had already prepared. Some elderly Jews join us and we lie together, hidden in the bunker, cut off from the world, and discus our dangerous situation. We don’t dare go out in daylight, but at night we creep out into the fields to find something to eat. There are cabbages, turnips, and other vegetables. We bring them back and cook them on an electric stove. At night when it is dark, we enter the houses of the deported Jews and search through the abandoned rooms.
Our bunker is discovered almost at the end of the period of deportations. Whether we were betrayed by someone, or whether it was purely chance, we don’t know. The commander of the deportations, Degenhardt makes a personal appearance and commands us all to leave the bunker. We all comply, because we know if we were discovered during a second search, it will be certain death. We are taken to Pszemiszlaver Street, where the last deportees are just being taken away.
Of the seven thousand Jews who are rounded up here, three hundred men and ten women are assigned to a work – detail in Czestochowa. The remainder are forced into a large factory yard. They are destined for the furnace in Treblinka.
On the day before the deportation one loaf is distributed to each person, for which they have to pay one zloty. This is a carefully worked out plan of the Germans. According to the number of zlotys they will know the number of people and can estimate how many wagons they will need, and how many people should be loaded into each wagon. At four o’clock in the morning the deportation began. Everyone has to assemble. Everyone has to take off their shoes, tie them together and hang them over their shoulders. Then begins, silent and barefoot, the march to annihilation. At the exit to the factory yard a box has been placed.
Under threat of punishment by death, everybody has to throw all their valuables into it. Hardly anyone does it. As they marched on, however, their fear grows. They have second thoughts about it and from all sides valuables, foreign currency, money and so on are dropped by the wayside. The route of the death-march is littered with Jewish possessions.
When we arrive at the train, the SS shove eighty to hundred people into each of the wagons. The disinfectant calcium chloride is scattered liberally into every wagon. Each wagon receives three small loaves of bread and a little water. Then the doors are pushed shut, locked and sealed, Ukrainian and Lithuanian SS stand guard at the steps of each wagon. We are shut in like cattle, tightly crammed together. Only a tiny bit of air comes in through the one small wire-covered window, so that we can hardly breathe.
The calcium chloride hardly helps combat the unbearable smell, which gets worse all the time. Some women faint and others vomit. The natural functions also have to be performed in the wagon, which makes the situation even more terrible, and on top of everything else we are tormented by a dreadful thirst.
We become utterly desperate and keep begging the SS guards to bring us some water. They refuse for a long time but eventually they agree to give us some water, but only for money. We managed to collect a few thousand zloty and give them to the guards. The SS take the money, but no water appears. Thus in pain and torment, the journey drags on until we reach Warsaw. Then our train is shunted into a siding. It’s not until the following morning that we travel on to Malkinia, seven kilometres from Treblinka.
Here we see Poles working in the fields and try to communicate with them. We just want to find out what our fate is going to be. They, however, hardly lift their eyes from their work, and when they do, they just shout one word at us: “Death!”
We’re seized by terror. We can’t believe it. Our minds simply won’t take it in. Is there really and truly no escape for us? One of the Polish workers mentions burnings, another, shootings, and a third – gassings. Another tells of inhuman, unbelievable tortures. An unbearable state of tension mounts among us, which in some cases even leads to outbreaks of hysteria.
Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/sperling.html
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
Copyright Carmelo A. Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2012
SS Statment on Chelmno
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Report of My Activity by the SS Special Detachment in Kulmhof (Chelmno) [photos added to enhance the text]
Rheinberg the 13.7.1945
Name: Fritz Hensen
Nationality: German
Date of Birth: 29.11.1920
Profession: Police File Sergeant
From 25.4.1940 to 2.7.1940 Police Training Battalion in Pohrlitz
2.7.1940 to March 1941 SS Police Division at Katscher Oberschl.
25.3.1941 to January 1945 Police administration in Litzmannstadt
From the Police administration I was assigned in July 1942 to December 1943 to the Gestapo and came to the SS special detachment in Kulmhof District Warthbrucken in Poland.
15.4 1945 I came into captivity to Hagen at the Police Quarters.
From the beginning of the war until my enlistment by the Police, labourer at the West Wall
Exact statement of your activity and occupation
Police file sergeant at Pohrlitz Niederdonau
Were you a member of the NSDAP?
No
Last Service Rank
Police File Sergeant
Report of my activity by the SS Special Detachment in Kulmhof
Read the full article here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/trials/Hensentest.html
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2012 |
The Holocaust in the East!
The Holocaust in the Soviet Union and Baltic States
Eyewitness Statements - 1941 -1943
Tadeusz Zaderecki a Polish writer who lived in Lvov recalled:
A rabble of drunken farmers flowed in from the countryside in Lvov. Something was about to happen and it was planned. The prisons that the Soviets left behind opened and dozens, hundreds of mutilated bodies of political prisoners were revealed.
Who carried out the murders? The Jews! The fact that the murdered included Jews made no difference to anyone. In front of the military prison, Zamarstinov, hundreds of Jews were removed from the nearby houses ,men,women, old people, youngsters,boys and girls,children, all naked, after their clothes and underwear had been plucked from them, bleeding, followed by blows and kicks into the prison courtyard.
The people were ordered to dig their own pits and trenches, into which they fell, after being shot. Some three hundred people were killed on that day, and several thousands more were injured, beaten, crippled.
Thus is the face of the first day of German rule in Lvov
Andreas Eberl a German soldier watched an Aktion in the Latvian town of Daugavpils:
We heard that they were executing Jews in the prison – we went to watch.
The executions didn’t take place inside the prison but nearby.
The trenches were two and a half meters wide and 40 to 50 long. I couldn’t work out the depth of the trench, since it contained the bodies of hundreds of Jews who had been shot earlier.
The condemned were forced to kneel on their knees on a dirt bank, with their faces towards the trench. The commandos shot them in the back of the neck. The distance between the shooter and the person being shot was about half a meter.
After being shot the people fell off the bank and into the trench. The commando unit consisted of ten men, half of them shot, while the other half stood behind them and changed places from time to time.
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Inside the pit, I could see a man of about sixty, obviously a Jew whose job it was to arrange the bodies in rows. When a row of corpses was completed, the man climbed out of the pit and sprinkled white stuff, probably chlorine, over the corpses.
For about an hour, I watched the executions along with my friends. During that time, some 150 Jews were shot. The number of soldiers watching was about 60 to 80.
The Jews who were shot and fell into the pit and continued to move were shot with a sub-machine gun by one of the commandos. Ammunition for recharging the weapons was laid on a table alongside some bottles of vodka, and from time to time, one of the commandos would come up and take a sip from the bottle.
Vsevelod Klokov interviewed on The World at War – historical TV series:
The occupiers were harsh, very harsh, especially in those areas where the partisans were active. In the Ukraine 511 villages were burnt down by the Nazis, before the population could escape.
In one village Pinsk near Kiev, which was totally raised to the ground, babies were thrown into the fire.
Anton Heidborn a soldier with Sonderkommano 4a that took part in the infamous massacre at Babi Yar, Kiew where 33,771 Jews were executed on the 29 and 30 September 1941:
The third day after the execution we were taken back to the execution area. On our arrival we saw a woman sitting by a bush who had apparently survived the execution unscathed.
This woman was shot by the SD man who was accompanying us. I do not know his name. We also saw someone waving their hand from among the pile of bodies. I don’t know whether it was a man or a woman. I should think that this person was finished off by the SD man as well, though I did not actually see it.
The same day work began to cover up the piles of bodies. Civilians were used for this task. The ravine walls were also partly blown up. After that day I never returned to the execution area.
The next few days were spent smoothing out banknotes belonging to the Jews that had been shot. I estimate these must have totalled millions. I do not know what happened to the money. It was packed up in sacks and sent off somewhere.
Anton Lauer Police Reserve Battalion 9 made a statement regarding the use of gas vans:
Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/Holocaust-in-the-east.html
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2010
Story of Max Block Part 2 - Auschwitz!
The story of Max Block (Part 2)
| BORN DECEMBER 14 1889 IN BOCHUM EMIGRATED 1936 TO AMSTERDAM DEPORTED APRIL 21 1943 TO THERESIENSTADT MURDERED OCTOBER 14 1944 IN AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU Although Max Block did not survive the Holocaust, his story has. H.E.A.R.T has determined that this memoriam and its unedited text is well placed in our Survivors section. |
Guest publication by Thomas Nowotny
(no grammatical corrections were made to the original text)
Auschwitz
On October 12th, 1944 Max Block is deported on the seventh autumn transport "Eq“ to Auschwitz, where he is murdered – probably on October 14th, shortly after selection. He had reached the age of 54 years.
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List of Transportation Eq. Max Block carries number 1191, he is declared a worker. The little hook after his first transport number (250-XXIV/1) indicates that Max went on the transportation. |
Few people were able to report about this transportation; one of them is Frank Bright (Brichta) from Berlin, who is forced to go to Auschwitz at the age of 16 years together with his mother:
We were on the list of transport “Eq”. [...] On 12 October 1944 we boarded a third class railway carriage, similar to that which had brought us from Prague to Theresienstadt 15 months ago. [...]
We sat on long wooden, slatted varnished, curved seats[...].
Decidedly more comfortable than the pitch dark cattle truck which normally entered and left the ghetto with frightened human freight. Why we were so privileged I don’t know. [...]
The simple answer, without recourse to any conspiracy theory, is that the Reichsbahn just happen to have this particular train available for one of their very many journeys to this particular destination. [...]
Although there was a large window there was nothing to see. We were into October and it gets dark early in those parts. There was the rhythmic clanging of steel wheels against the joints between the steel rails. We were on our way. [...]
Day dawned. We were passing through a dull, flat landscape. And then the train slowed down and all of a sudden we were in a large area defined by concrete posts, wire and wooded towers in the distance. [...]
The train came to a halt, the seal on the door was removed, we were ordered out. Others remember the shouting, screaming, threats, whips being brandished, snarling dogs. Nothing like that occurred at the arrival of our transport, there was no need to. [...]
In the melee of leaving the train and being put into one of the two columns I became separated from my mother. Anyway, my mother was in the column to the left of mine. [...] Her column went forward first, one at a time until one came across an SS-officer with several assistants either side of him. I couldn’t see exactly what was happening but some of us went to the left and some to the right. I had seen my mother go to the left.
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The Gate at Auschwitz/Birkenau |
It didn’t seem to take all that long for the left column of women to be processed and then it was our turn. I was, as I said, near the front and when it was my turn I walked forward until I got to the SS-officer in charge.
According to the accounts of others he would look at one, just for a second, the process was quite quick, and indicate with his finger where the person in front of him was to turn. I can’t remember any of that, I didn’t take that in.
I had seen my mother go to the left and so I simply turned left too. I was called back. Obviously the officer’s assistant had watched his finger and saw it point to the right even if I had not.
So I was called back and told to go to the right. [...] On the right I waited for further directions with the others who had also been told to turn right. There weren’t many of us. From records I now know that out of our transport of 1,500 who left the ghetto of Theresienstadt on 12 October 1944 only 78 survived. Of course, a few more may have survived this first selection and died, or were put to death, later but there were very few anyway. Say that there were 90 picked to work [...]“.33
Max Block is not among them; he is not registered as a prisoner but is sent to the left side, directly to the gas chamber. Max‘ age alone is a sufficient reason for this; selection was very rigorous in October 1944. 34 Just two weeks later, killings are stopped in Auschwitz gas chambers for ever.
The (Calendarium of events in the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945):
Contains ten entries for October 14, 1944, including the following: „With a RSHA** transport, 1,500 Jewish men, women and children from Theresienstadt ghetto arrive. Young and healthy men and women are sent to the transit camp and the remaining people are killed in the gas chambers [...] 3,000 Jewish men, women and children are killed in the gas chambers of Crematorium
III. Among those killed people are Jews from Theresienstadt, selected at the ramp.“ 35
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A view of the selection ramp at night (photo Thomas Nowotny (2008) |
From a report by Jewish pathologist Miklós Nyiszli who had to work for the infamous SS doctor Mengele* from July to November 1944 in Crematorium I:
„It’s early in the morning. From the ramp, the long whistle of a railway engine is heard. I go to the window where I have a good sight of the ramp. A long train is standing there. [...] Lining up and selection takes hardly half an hour. The left group moves slowly. [...] After five to six minutes, the transport reaches the gate which opens widely. In the usual rows of five they take the turn to the yard. No one of the marchers will ever be able to report on what follows next. [...]
They move on, about 100 meters on a path lined up by green lawn, leading to a grey metal grid. Ten concrete steps lead to a subterranean hall. At the entrance a sign announces in German, French, Greek, Hungarian language that this was a bath and disinfection room. The unsuspecting calm themselves, even the doubtful.
Read the full article here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/maxblock2.html
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2012
The Story of Max Block
The story of Max Block
(Part 1)
| BORN DECEMBER 14 1889 IN BOCHUM EMIGRATED 1936 TO AMSTERDAM DEPORTED APRIL 21 1943 TO THERESIENSTADT MURDERED OCTOBER 14 1944 IN AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU Although Max Block did not survive the Holocaust, his story has. H.E.A.R.T has determined that this memoriam and its unedited text is well placed in our Survivors section. |
Guest publication by Thomas Nowotny
(no grammatical corrections were made to the original text)
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Max Block 1939 in Amsterdam (Post card to his sister Herta, private collection) |
Bochum
Max Block was born in Bochum on December 14th, 1889. He is the fourth of Bendix and Therese Block’s (née Mayer) twelve children.
Bendix Block owns a men’s wear store in the city centre (Obere Marktstraße). Occasionally the children have to help. Max‘ sister Herta remembers:
“Max, who often had to help too, liked playing jokes in a way the customers did not understand, but we children were having fun about it. For example, when offering a colour shirt he said: “You can wash it LAU” (lukewarm). He winked at us, as if he wanted to say:
“You can NOT wash it”, using the Hebrew word “LAU” (not). In fact you could wash the shirt quite normally. He was just making fun.“1
Max successfully completes secondary school and becomes a merchant. After his father’s death, the family moves to Neustraße 18. Max Block is enlisted to fight in World War I.
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The Block Family (undated, Max is 2nd from left) |
Residential and commercial building of the Block family, Obere Marktstraße
(undated; Bochum City Archives) |
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Berlin
Max moves to Berlin in 1917, where he works as a banker. On March 31st, 1930 he marries Gertrud Hildegard Rosenthal (born April 15th, 1905 in Berlin). They don’t have any children. From 1931-36 they live in Bechstedter Weg 13 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf 2.
Max‘ niece Nora Walter, born in 1923, writes: „Max was my mother’s favorite brother and thus my favorite uncle. This was also because he could perform magic and spit through his tooth-gap! And something else impressed me deeply: In grandma’s glass cabinet there was a little Vaseline tin with a hole in its lid. Once Max showed me the tin and told me that it was in his pocket when he was a soldier. He was hit by a bullet which stuck to the Vaseline. ,If I didn’t have that tin with me, there would be no Uncle Max anymore’, he said with a serious expression.
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Max and Nora Block |
– But usually Max was rather cheerful, [...] and very good-natured.” Max has a good relationship with his mother. Nora Walter remembers: „I know from my mother that grandma liked travelling and made up her mind quickly. When her son Max from Berlin was visiting and asked her at nighttime: ‘Mother, will you accompany me to Berlin tomorrow?’, she would breath shortly and ask back: ‘Tomorrow? What time?’ A few minutes later she would accept.” 3
Max‘ sister Nora Block (later Platiel) becomes a lawyer. As a left-wing activist in the „Internationaler Sozialistischen Kampfbund“ (ISK), she is forced to flee from Germany to France in 1933 directly after the Nazis’ takeover of power. In 1934, her sister Herta also emigrates with her family to Paris; her husband Berthold Walter tries to establish a business there without success and decides to return to Germany. In Hamburg, he seeks to earn his living as a peddler; he is treated so cruel and humiliated so badly that he commits suicide in August 1935. His daughter Nora Walter reports:
Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/maxblock.html
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T
Thomas Blatt takes on Karl Frenzel
Sobibor survivor Thomas Tovi Blatt confronts Death Camp Commandant Karl Frenzel (forced labour section) in 1983
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Thomas Tovi Blatt (left) and Karl Frenzel meet in a hotel room in Hagen Germany in 1983 |
Thomas Blatt: Here you are drinking beer. With that smile on your face you could be anybody’s neighbour, anybody’s fellow sporting club member.
But you are not anybody. You are Karl Frenzel, the SS commandant. You ranked third in the chain of command at the extermination camp of Sobibor. You were the commandant of Lager 1. Do you remember me?
Karl Frenzel: Not exactly you were a small boy then
Thomas Blatt: I was fifteen years old. I survived because you made me your shoeshine boy. Besides me nobody survived; not my father, not my mother, not my brother, none of the two thousand Jews from my town, Izbica.
Karl Frenzel: That was terrible, just terrible………
Thomas Blatt: At least a quarter- million Jews were murdered at Sobibor. I survived why would you want to speak with me?
Karl Frenzel: I would like to apologise to you
Thomas Blatt: You want to apologise to me?
Karl Frenzel: I would like to apologise. Nothing can be done about the victims. What happened - happened. We can’t change anything about that. But I would like to extend my personal apologies to you.
I am not angry with you and the other witnesses, those who already testified and those who are still to come.
Thomas Blatt: You would like to apologise?
Karl Frenzel: I can only say it again in tears. Not only am I beside myself now, no back then too. I was greatly bothered by it all.
Thomas Blatt: But you didn’t prevent any of it from happening. You took part in it.
Karl Frenzel: You don’t know what went on inside of us. You don’t understand the circumstances in which we found ourselves.
Thomas Blatt: And we, and our circumstances?
Karl Frenzel: I spent sixteen and a half years in prison. I suffered a lot and I thought long about justice and injustice.
Thomas Blatt: Were you an anti-Semite or did you do these things because you were ordered to do them?
Karl Frenzel: I was no anti-Semite but we had to do our duty. For us this was a bad time.
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Josef Cukerman |
Thomas Blatt: Duty. That’s what it always comes down to, duty. Why did you club my father to the ground immediately upon arrival? Was that your duty too?
Karl Frenzel: I don’t remember.
Thomas Blatt: Do you remember Cukerman?
Karl Frenzel: Yes, he was the cook. At one time, five or eight kilograms of meat were missing. When we searched the kitchen, the meat was found. That’s why I beat him.
Thomas Blatt: And the son?
Read more here: www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/blattfrenzel.html
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2012
The Bankrupt state of Holocaust Denial and Debunking!
Holocaust Denial & Debunking
A review of the bankrupt state of Revisionism, and the
insensibility of arguing with Holocaust deniers.
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In May 2009 I concluded in my H.E.A.R.T editorial stating there is little value to be found in Holocaust Denial, and even less value in debating or debunking denial. That was a little over two years ago, so where are we now?
Casually glancing through any number of revisionist websites and forums, one can find an abundance of neo-David Irving acolytes and pseudo scholars, who dedicate their time to refuting the Holocaust narrative. This isn’t a new phenomenon; it’s been going on for well over three decades, however what we are seeing more recently are the smattering of these new denial-debunker forums, that on the surface appear designed to dispute revisionist ideas and philosophy, yet in practice emulate a pugilistic event more akin to naked mud-wrestling than to any scholarly debate.
Even more disturbing is the striking similarity between actual denial sites and these new debunking forums and blogs. After painting Holocaust deniers as modern day Nazi’s, the debunkers offer little in their behaviour that lends any contrast or credibility to their own moral standing versus that of the deniers, and it is often quite difficult to tell the difference, between the two.
At least one of these controversial debunker blogs maintains extremely low, if any professional standards at all, and in most cases the discussions are quite juvenile and often quite hostile in nature.
When you visit these sites you will notice the arguments are repetitive; those who deny the Holocaust are still demanding irrefutable proof, where even the slightest error, fragment of detail, date, time, location, spelling etc. is incorrect, is then pounced upon as the evidentiary “Holy Grail” that the Holocaust is a hoax perpetrated by a global Jewish conspiracy.
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On the flip side you have the radical and often controversial revisionist debunkers who are obsessed with engaging in pointless debates, with no other purpose than to prove their own intellectual superiority, or at least what they deem to be a greater intellect than that of their opponent. Some of these debunker groups have gone to great lengths to trash the works and reputation of not only revisionists, but Holocaust memorial scholars as well.
Clearly it’s not the desire for a correct historical record that motivates the debunkers, any more than it is for their denier counterparts. Both groups have a belief structure or agenda that supersedes the factual narrative, for them it’s something far more duplicitous and corrupt, than simply setting the record straight.
Case in point; as early on as 2004 when I lead the Action Reinhard Camps Foundation, an applicant for membership, who unbeknownst to me at the time was a member of one of these perfidious debunker groups, and at the time was pressing ARC memberships to include a forum on the www.deathcamps.org website. This forum he explained would be constructed to debate with Holocaust deniers.
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After careful consideration this proposal was rejected, as pointless.
The Holocaust happened and there is nothing to debate or dispute.
ARC members felt that the best answer to combat Holocaust Denial was to memorialize the victims and teach people about the perpetrators and the events that lead to the mass murder of millions.
I later went on to create the Holocaust Education and Archive Research Team with a broader focus that the events of Action Reinhard, but do I still feel the same way?
Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/essays&editorials/deniers&debunkers2.html
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2012
Images of the Holocaust
www.holocaustresearchproject.org
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
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See the full image gallery here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/galleries/kloogagal/index.html
Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2012
Letters to London - Life and Death in the Kovno Ghetto
Dr Elchanan Elkes chairman of the Kovno Judenrat
Letters to London
1943 - the chairman writes to his children about life in the Kovno ghetto
My beloved son and daughter!
I am writing these lines, my dear children, in the vale of tears of Vilijampole, Kovno Ghetto, where we have been for over two years. We have now heard that in a few days our fate is to be sealed. The Ghetto is to be crushed and torn asunder.
Whether we are all to perish, or whether a few of us are to survive, is in God’s hands, we fear that only those capable of slave labour will live; the rest of probably are sentenced to death.
We are left, a few out of many. Out of the 35,000 Jews of Kovno, approximately 17,000 remain; out of a quarter of a million Jews in Lithuania (including the Vilna district), only 25,000 live plus 5,000 who, during the last few days, were deported to hard labour in Latvia, stripped of all their belongings. The rest were put to death in terrible ways by the followers of the greatest Haman of all time and all generations.
Some of those dear and close to us, too, are no longer with us. Your Aunt Hannah and Uncle Arieh were killed with 1,500 souls of the Ghetto on October 4, 1941. Uncle Zvi, who was lying in the hospital suffering from a broken leg, was saved by a miracle. All the patients, doctors, nurses, relatives, and visitors who happened to be there were burned to death, after soldiers had blocked all the doors and windows of the hospital and set fire to it. In the provinces, apart from Siauliai, no single Jew survives.
Your Uncle Dov and his son Shmuel were taken out and killed with the rest of the Kalvaria community during the first months of the war, that is about two years ago
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Due to outer forces and inner circumstances, only our own Ghetto has managed to survive and live out its diaspora life for the past two years, in slavery, hard labour and deprivation – almost all our clothing, belongings, and books were taken from us by the authorities.
The last massacre, when 10,000 victims were killed at one time, took place on October 28, 1941. Our total community had to go through the “selection” by our rulers: life or death. I am the man who, with my own eyes, saw those about to die.
I was there early on the morning of October 29, in the camp that led to the slaughter at the Ninth Fort. With my own ears I heard the awe-inspiring and terrible symphony, the weeping and screaming of 10,000 people, old and young – a scream that tore at the heart of heaven. No ear had heard such cries through the ages and the generations.
With many of our martyrs, I challenged my creator; and with them, from a heart torn in agony, I cried; “Who is like you in the universe, my Lord!” In my effort to save people here and there, I was beaten by soldiers. Wounded and bleeding, I fainted, and was carried in the arms of friends to a place outside the camp. There, a small group of about thirty or forty survived – witnesses to the fire.
Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/survivor/elkes-london-letter.html
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T
Rawa Ruska
Rawa Ruska is located in the Lwow distrit, formerly it was part of Poland, but today it is part of the Ukraine. The first Jews arrived with the founding of the town in 1624, in the 18th Century they were subjected to restrictions and to heavy taxes under the Austrians from 1772.
The town developed as a stop-over on the Lwow – Warsaw railway line, the Jewish population increased from 3,878 to 6,112 in 1910, Jewish trade centred on egg marketing abroad, but they were also prominent as furriers and hat -makers, a Jewish stoneware factory declined with the advent of porcelain utensils.In 1884 a fire destroyed 234 Jewish homes and a Baron Hirsch school was founded in 1892, reaching an enrolment of 200 within six years, following the First World War was reduced by about 1,000.
Devastating fires struck the community again in 1923 and 1932, during the inter-war years the Jewish fur trade developed considerably with markets throughout Poland. The Soviet annexation of Poland which lasted from September 1939 to June 1941curtailed Jewish communal and commercial life, with the German invasion of Russia, the Germans captured the town on the 28 June 1941.
As a foretaste of things to come the local Ukrainian militia immediately executed 100 Jews and the Germans instituted a regime of forced labour and extortion. A Judenrat was established in July 1941 and in the spring of 1942 they were concentrated into a crowded ghetto area.
Shortly thereafter Rawa Ruska, as the county town, was incorporated into the Generalgouvernement, within the Distrikt Galizien, under the control of SS-Brigadefuhrer Dr Wachter. At the beginning of the German occupation there were no anti-Jewish measures in the town, however in the surrounding smaller towns such as Niemirow, Magierow, Sokal and Kulikov, German soldiers together with Ukrainian nationalists organised anti-Jewish pogroms.
German soldiers at Rawa Ruska
As part of increasing anti-Jewish restrictions the Jews were forced to wear armbands marked with the Star of David, premises were marked with a Jewish Star of David and used by the Germans to perform forced labour.
In mid-July 1941 a Jewish Council known as a Judenrat was established with Wastenberg as the President. During this time there was no closed ghetto in Rawa Ruska, Jews were allowed to live anywhere in the town, as they could before the occupation, there were no Gestapo or SD premises in Rawa Ruska but a Krimminalpolizei (KRIPO) office was there. In August 1941 the Germans demanded monetary contributions from the Jews of Rawa Ruska, the advocate Dr Jozef Mandel opposed the Germans’ orders and refused to give them the Jews for forced labour and the money they demanded.
Members of the German Security Services (SD) from Sokal arrived in Rawa Ruska and arrested 15 members of the Jewish intelligentsia, as well as Dr Mandel. He was taken out of the town at night, as the Germans were concerned that the population might resist. As a hostage Dr Mandel was taken to Krakow where he was incarcerated in the notorious Montelupich prison, his niece Erna Weinberger, nee Hartel from Gorlice sent him a food parcel in August 1941. Dr Mandel died in Montelupich Prison from typhus circa December 1941.
Read more here: www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/rawaruska.html
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2011