Little-Known Death Factory
Operation Barbarossa,
The German invasion of the Soviet Union
commenced on June 22,1941.
Behind the rapidly advancing Wehrmacht forces
mobile SS death squads, the Einsatzgruppen,
went into action. They killed Jews,
Soviet prisoners of war and political commissars.
The historian Raul Hilberg estimated
the number of Jewish men, women and children
murdered by the Einsatzgruppen
in the ravines of Babi Yar, in the forests of Riga
and many other places at 1.3 million.
On the outspread yards of a former kolkhoz,
a dusty Soviet collective farm,
the SS task forces set up a secret death factory.
Its horrible assembly lines creaked and cried
in the outskirts of Minsk of Byelorussia,
near the village of Maly Trostenets.
Here the Nazis murdered thousands of Jews,
Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, Gypsies
and other Byelorussian civilians.
And then, on May 19,1942,
the first transport of Jews from Germany,
Austria and Czechoslovakia arrived.
Maly Trostenets became
a Vernichtungslager, an extermination camp.
Men, women and children
Were shot daily in the forests.
Others, thousands of them,
were killed in mobile gas chamber vans,
on the way from Minsk to Maly Trostenets.
Special groups of prisoners threw the corpses
Of the murdered into deep pits of mass graves.
The 'final solution',
the euphemistic code used in Hitler's Reich
for the extermination of the Jews,
was conducted in great secrecy.
The guards were ordered under oath
to shut their mouth.
The perpetrators of the massacres tried
to obliterate the evidence
that the camp ever existed.
As the Red Army advanced
the inmates were forced to exhume the bodies
from the mass graves and to cremate the corpses.
After they completed their terrible task
the guards killed them as well.
Finally, on June 28,1944,
the SS guards blew up the camp.
One of the victims who was shot by the Nazis
at Maly Trostenets was Vincent Hadleuski,
a Catholic priest and Byelorussian patriot.
Another victim who died here was Cora Berliner,
a German Jewess born in 1942 in Hannover,
She was known in her homeland
as a pioneer of social work and as an economist.
The Austrian-born soprano Grete Forst
was murdered in Maly Trostenets, too.
History has recorded the date: June 1,1942.
The psychologist Margarete Hilferding,
her compatriot, also lost her life here,
on September 23 of the same year.
No survivors of the lager are known
to be alive today.
Since the Nazis did not keep camp records
the exact number of people who perished here
in the genocide is unknown.
Estimates range from 200,000
to half million murdered men, women
and children. At least 65,000 of them
were Jews.
poem by Paul Hartal
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Related quotes
Nazi Death Squads Enter Eastern Europe
Einsatzgruppen ultimate genocide killing machines
plans so heinous Satan glorified as his SS hells legions;
task forces sowed vile atrocious monstrous Nazi deeds
SS paramilitary death squads systematic mass killings;
originally killing by indifferent civilian herd shootings
typically seek primary target Jews Gypsies Communists;
political categories Polish intellectuals Soviet prisoners
early prey physically mentally handicapped homosexuals;
rabid intolerance eradicated Nazi perceived imperfections
great musical voices minds selected for mass executions;
Einsteins Stephan Hawkings earth rare intolerated genius
unique human diversity frog marched to foul gas chambers;
Einsatzgruppen operated throughout invasion territories
occupied by German armed forces following invasions;
like Poland and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Einsatzgruppen systematically carried out evil operations;
ranging from repellent murder of individuals to operations
which lasted over two or more days vast horrific massacres;
at Babi Yar Kiev Soviet Ukraine 33,771 killed in two days
at Rumbula forest near Riga Latvia 25,000 killed in two days;
who testifies 33,771 Kiev Jews were massacred in two days
at Babi Yar official reports by Einsatzgruppe to headquarters;
infamous September 29-30 1941 SS and German police units
auxiliaries under awful guidance of Einsatzgruppe members;
(mobile killing unit) C slaughtered their naked Jewish victims
as quarry marched into a ravine Einsatzgruppe detachments;
shot all women children elderly without mercy in small groups
in subsequent months following the massacre German authorities;
stationed at Kiev rounded up killed thousands more Jews
at Babi Yar and non-Jews including Roma (Gypsies):
executed too were Soviet prisoners of war Communists
100,000 people estimated murdered at Babi Yar massacres;
Latvia during first six months of Nazi occupation Germans
local collaborators slaughtered 90 percent of the 95,000 Jews;
July 1941 invasion 40,000 Jews live in Riga in fear first days
of occupation savage attacks are launched upon Riga's Jews;
racist pogrom arresting beating torturing raping Riga Jews
Latvian 'civilian' nationalists begin burning synagogues;
with families inside thousands are driven toward beaches
nearby woods shot murdered a surviving 32,000 victims;
are forced into 2 separate overcrowded slave labour ghettos
males 16 to 60 are selected war effort 'productive' workers;
Jewish women children old disabled people will be corpses
German abominable massacres indict humanity forever stains;
Einsatzgruppen were responsible for the murders
of over one million people in occupied territories;
Einsatzgruppen were the first Nazi organizations
to begin as organized policy mass killing of Jews.
Copyright © Terence George Craddock
See also The Holocaust Files!
poem by Terence George Craddock
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Holocaust Latvia Begins
Holocaust Latvia begins
on June 22,1941 when
the German army invaded
the Russian Soviet Union;
and the Baltic States
of Lithuania, Latvia,
and Estonia which had
by Soviet military forces;
recently been occupied
after a proud period
of independence after
World War One finished.
Murders of Jews
Communists began
almost immediately
by Einsatzgruppen;
perpetrated by German
killer squads known
as Special Task Groups
Special Assignment Groups;
the German Security Police
Sicherheitspolizei or Sipo
the Security Service of the SS
the Sicherheitsdienst or SD.
The first recorded murders
were on the day after invasion
on the night of June 23,1941
in town of Grobina near Liepāja;
six Jews were killed
in the church cemetery
by Sonderkommando
1a members deployed;
with the 14th Army
Nazi German
Einsatzkommandos
were a sub-group;
of five Einsatzgruppen
mobile killing squads
up to 3,000 men each
composed of 500 to 1000;
officials of dread SS
Schutzstaffel (SS)
and Gestapo thugs
their vile missions;
the annihilation of Jews
Gypsies Soviet political
Commissars to kill Jews
all Polish intellectuals;
Romani, communists
NKVD collaborators
in captured territories
behind the advancing;
German front lines
Nazi occupiers
were also aided
by a unit of native;
Latvians known
as Arājs Commando
Latvian auxiliary police
Wehrmacht commanders;
bolstered the strength
of the Einsatzgruppen
with regular-army troops
whenever required.
Latvia July 29,1941
forty mental patients
from Lódz in Poland
are taken from hospital;
executed in nearby forest
July 31,1941 Hermann
Göring instructs SS Reich
Security Service chief;
Reinhard Heydrich
to evacuate eliminate
all European Jews
in German-held territory;
Göring's letter mentions
'complete solution'
to European Jewry
Jews purified in death;
July 1941 Germans
establish a Jewish
ghetto at Dvinsk Latvia
July-August 1941;
Jews are murdered
by the tens of thousands
throughout western
Soviet Union Lithuania;
Romania and Latvia
who are the murders?
German Einsatzgruppen
Romanian troops militia;
Ukrainian peasants
Lithuanian civilians
August 1941 German
slaughter of Jews;
at Cesis Latvia
is celebrated
by German troops
security police;
celebrate with
a Totenmahl
'death banquet'
August 1941;
in Belgium
collaborationist
military
organization;
Legion Wallonie
Wallonian Legion
is established
September 29-30 1941;
Babi Yar Kiev
Soviet Ukraine
33,771 Jews
killed in two days;
by SS and German
police units
November 30 and
December 8 1941;
at Rumbula forest
near Riga Latvia
25,000 Jews
killed in two days;
Einsatzgruppen
will murder
over one million
people in occupied;
territories the first
Nazi organized
policy mass killing
of European Jews.
Copyright © Terence George Craddock
See also The Holocaust Files!
poem by Terence George Craddock
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A Prisoner of Sobibor
On an early autumn day
a train coming from Minsk rolled
into the railway station of Sobibor,
a village in the Lublin district of Poland.
The passengers of the train
were unaware that the outskirts
of this dusty small town
concealed a dreadful Nazi death camp
where gas chambers poisoned victims
with carbon monoxide.
It was September 23,1943,
and a Soviet prisoner of war,
First Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky
was also in one of the boxcars
of the deported Jews.
His mind in captivity
wandered restlessly.
He thought about his family.
And he thought about the war
and about Mother Russia
and of daring plans of escape.
In the Great Patriotic War
Sasha fought bravely
against the German invaders
in the Smolensk Oblast,
defending the road to Moscow.
as the Red Army was retreating.
A Wehrmacht unit captured him
in the fall of 1941 in Vyazma.
Sasha found it ironic that here
in 1812 the Russians defeated
a French army of Napoleon
retreating from Moscow.
Before his arrival in Sobibor,
Sasha had already spent long months
in various prisoner camps.
Then, during a strip search,
the Nazis discovered
that he was circumcised
and as a Jew they deported him
to Sobibor.
The transport that took him to the camp
was an unusual one, because the Nazis
selected 80 men for work,
instead of gassing them.
Sasha was chosen along with 79 others
to build new storage facilities in the lager.
Now, exhausted and hungry,
he was chopping wood
with other prisoners.
They hoisted their heavy axes
and then let them fall
on the tree stumps.
SS Oberscharführer Karl Frenzel,
a squad leader, guarded the group.
He routinely punished prisoners
for slowing down
with twenty-five lashes each.
Once, when Sergeant Frenzel
was busy in beating a prisoner,
he noticed that Sasha
took a moment of rest.
'Russian soldier, you don't like the way
I punish this fool? ' Frenzel asked.
'Well, I give you exactly five minutes
to split this stump. If you make it,
you get a pack of cigarettes.
But if you miss even by one second,
you get twenty-five lashes, too.'
It looked an impossible assignment
but Sasha was still young and strong.
He started to assault the stump
with all his strength,
fuelled with the hatred of the enemy.
He finished the task in less
than the allotted time of five minutes.
Impressed by the performance,
Frenzel handed Sasha
a pack of cigarettes.
Many prisoners
valued the luxury of smoking
even more than their scarce food rations.
But Sasha refused to take
the highly prized commodity.
'Thanks, but I don't smoke', he said.
Then he lifted his axe
and went back to work.
The SS guard was puzzled and furious.
He turned around and left.
However, he returned soon
with a piece of bread
and some margarine.
It was a very alluring delicacy
for a starving man
and Frenzel handed the food to Sasha.
But, again,
Sasha declined the SS man's offer.
'Thank you', he said, "the food
we are getting here satisfies me fully.'
This was obviously a lie
and Oberscharführer Frenzel
became even more furious.
Yet at the same time
he admired the strength,
the pride and moral backbone
of the prisoner.
The SS man was at a loss how to react.
But he did not whip Sasha.
He just turned on his heels and left.
A few weeks later a revolt broke out
in the Sobibor death camp.
Sasha played a central role
in organizing the uprising.
In the afternoon of October 14,1943,
the prisoners killed
most of the German SS men
and some of the Ukrainian guards
in the camp.
Three hundred prisoners,
from a crowd of nearly six hundred,
managed to break through
the barbed wire fences and mine fields
under a hail of fire of the guards.
This daring uprising
was the most successful mass escape
of prisoners from a Nazi lager
in World War II.
But only about 50 of the escapees
survived the war.
Sasha was one of them.
He found his way to the partisan forces
fighting in the forests against the Fascists
and later joined again the Soviet Red Army.
Seventeen years after the war,
In 1962, Karl Frenzel was arrested
in Germany for his participation
in the mass extermination
of 250,000 Jews at Sobibor.
Witnesses testified that Frenzel
was a sadist murderer.
He brutally had beaten to death
scores of prisoners, whereas others
he shot through the head.
A survivor of the death camp,
Esther Terner-Raab
saw the SS sergeant grabbing a baby
and slamming the infant's head
against the side of a boxcar.
The Hagen Trials in Germany
continued for four years.
In the end,
the court found Karl Frenzel guilty.
It sentenced him to life imprisonment
for war crimes
and crimes against humanity.
poem by Paul Hartal
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Peaked Cap; Skull-And-Crossbones Badge
stripped of citizenship rights
stripped of wealth all property
herded into walled off ghettos
denied medicines adequate food
forced to wear star badge of shame
thousands choose their own death
by suicide as starvation disease cull
shipped to Nazi concentration camps
shipped in tightly closed cattle wagons
shipped without food water for terror days
old sick weak die during locked in journeys
upon arrival selected forced labour or gassings
when your thin enough limbs like fragile sticks
thrown into proud efficient ovens to burn bones
Mercedes Benz;
caught in blizzard;
of monsters making;
a flurry of residue ash;
drifting fluttering down;
from overcast ashen sky;
sniffing charred wind;
flicking off ash flakes;
from spotless windshield;
a trim double-breasted suit;
for this top ranking Nazi official;
a fine young; decorated SS officer;
walks brazenly; beside party official;
SS uniform; tailored to poster fear;
project respect;
for absolute authority;
people fall ill at sight;
peaked stylish cap;
skull-and -crossbones badge;
Death’s Head collar patch;
Waffen-SS uniform field-grey;
a fine uniform;
produced by Hugo Boss;
dignitaries to inspect;
production of Waffen-SS;
uniforms produced;
under forced labour conditions;
in concentration camps;
midsummer storm human ash
incinerated remains of murdered
used up slaves Jews undesirables
gassed burned in Hitler’s death camps
in patented J. A. Topf & Soehe ovens
name proudly handsomely emblazoned
with the name Topf in Gothic brass letters
Nazi Topf family ovens
used to incinerate millions
leaving almost no evidence
Aushwitz Buchenwald Dachau
a proud family heritage
we “designed and built dozens
of crematoriums for the Nazis”
when a tyrant regime slaughters
innocent women children in the streets
rounds them up in the night ships
them off in cattle wagons to genocide camps
brands their flesh murders millions
in slave starved exterminations experiments
it is time for a moral; civilized world; to take action;
but the allies; will hide shocking facts; from the public;
deny knowledge; you must understand; those trains;
resources; could be carrying munitions; weapons of war;
taking troops to the front; costing allied lives; desperate;
Nazis will break out; at the Battle of Bulge; could win war.
The sad indictment of History remains;
the allies; could have stopped; the final
solution; but deliberately choose not to;
no Nuremburg Trial ever tried them; will
you? Who has authority to try such a case?
The decision by Topf & Soehne; to build
crematoria; for Auschwitz; enabled Nazi
industrialized; mass murder. Six million
Jews were murdered during the Holocaust;
a fifth; were killed at camps; at Auschwitz.
Least We Forget
along with
homosexuals,
Gypsies,
Polish
political
prisoners,
Soviet
prisoners
of war.
poem by Terence George Craddock
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The World Was Silent Then
THE WORLD WAS SILENT THEN
The world was silent then-
Six million Jews among them more than one- and one- half million children murdered by the Nazis and their helpers-
And now when from one end of the world to another
One hears ‘The Jews are cancer’ and ‘We will wipe out the microbe Israel’ and ‘Every one of the Zionist dogs must be shot’
And when Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah and Kardawi and Imam this and Imam that scream for the blood of every Jew in Israel-
It is business as usual at the U.N.
And more North Koreans missiles in Iran
And Russian uranium at Bushehr
And Chinese technical help for the Revolutionary Islamic regime
And cowardice from the West,
And mild mild mild protest from an occasional leader here or there-
The world is largely silent again
The Jews are a small small people and Israel is twenty-thousand kilometers all in all-
And after all who has the oil and one eighth of the earth and more than fifty nations and with them too the most progressive of the most enlightened of the most extreme Left?
‘So why not let it be done
Another few million Jews gone
What difference does it make anyway?
They’re troublemakers aren’t they? ’
The world is largely silent again
And we can we our friends contend with them all
And overcome?
Pray pray for Israel good people wherever you are
We are in a long struggle to survive
And it is not going to be easy.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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Fate Hanged on a Hairbreadth
It was summer,1944.
The train stood at the railway station of Gyŏr,
halfway on the road
between Budapest and Vienna.
In the boxcars
there were over 3,000 passengers.
The Hungarian gendarmes squeezed
the deported men, women and children
like sardines into the wagons
and the prisoners were crying for help.
For the SS-Unterscharführer
assigned to the transport
it was just another job.
The corporal already directed
many similar trains to the east.
And those trains always went to the east
and to the same terminus.
However, this transport of deportees
was unlike the others.
The SS corporal made a fatal mistake
but the guards discovered this
only at the Slovakian border.
The train's number was not
on the list of transports
destined for Auschwitz.
The train stopped
at the Slovakian border.
Here the guards contacted
Colonel Adolf Eichmann by telephone
and informed him about the error.
Eichmann decided
that since the train traveled that far
it should continue to Auschwitz.
So the SS guards changed the serial number
of the train and replaced it with the number
of another train departing from Debrecen.
Thus, instead of the death camp
of Auschwitz-Birkenau
in Nazi occupied Poland,
the train from Debrecen
was sent to the distribution camp
of Strasshof in Austria.
As you see,
fate hanged in the war on a hairbreadth.
A freak of chance, a random accident,
an oversight of procedure,
or of a supposed algorithm,
could lead to arbitrary decisions
regarding the life or death of thousands.
Although Strasshof
was a brutal slave labor lager,
most people there,
about 14,000 of the 21,000 deportees,
survived the ordeal of the Holocaust.
poem by Paul Hartal
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Dagmar Topf: A Defence Of Family Furnaces
ghettoes, massacres, concentration camps,
the moral decadence, of rich war profiteers,
yet impossible, to keep pace, with final solution,
dispose of thousands, of bodies daily, without Toft,
Dagmar Toft, in the 1990s, seeks legal restitution,
compensation, for Topf property, seized by the Soviets,
represents, dispossessed offspring, confiscated inheritance,
them Russians heap bad people, we want to
count recoup regain our assets, confiscated
by those terribly bad communist people, regain
millions of dollars of our property, after all it
was our company “our engineers and bricklayers
installed the ovens at Aushwitz Buchenwald
Dachau and other camps” for this great service
to the nation the fatherland: “we demand the
return of our factory site where the furnaces
were fabricated” contracts fulfilled with zeal
Kurt Prufer, a Topf & Soehe company engineer,
patented his 'Auschwitz style' twin-chambered
oven “boasting that its burning capacity - 30 to 36
corpses in 10 hours - easily beat the competition.
Dagmar Topf said “Yes, it's true that the company
built four big crematoria at Auschwitz” “But at that
time, you could have called them civil crematoria.”
“You have to understand about German history” “If
you did not go along with the system, you had lots of
problems” Yet the eleven million 'enemies' the Nazi’s
killed butchered received absolutely no compensation.
Can you be the judge? Put Ernst Wolfgang
and Ludwig Topf to the test! The brothers
joined the National Socialist Party in 1935,
to early to make their defense, being forced
to join plausible. Yet Dagmar Topf claims
maintains they joined “only under pressure
from the Nazis”. Is she bearing false witness?
The acid test must be, exactly what did Ernst
and Ludwig Topf know about mass murders?
'Nothing insists Dagmar Topf: “I feel quite sure
that they didn’t know how their ovens were being
used.”' All fresh evidence chillingly indites them.
The importance of being earnest serious solem,
exhibiting a spirit of deep sincerity conviction,
Copyright © Terence George Craddock
See also The Holocaust Files!
Source for Dagmar Topt quotations, The Register-Guard. Oregan, Saturday. September 3,1994.
Quotation from Topf & Sohne, The Site and its History
1939 Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang Topf, owners and managing directors of the family business in the third generation, begin supplying the SS and its concentration camps with corpse incineration ovens specially developed by furnace construction engineer Kurt Prüfer to meet the needs of these camps.
1942 With full knowledge of the practises of mass murder being carried out with gas at Auschwitz, the company – on the initiative of engineer Fritz Sander – applies for a patent for a “continuous-operation corpse incineration oven for mass use”.
1943 The large-scale crematoria in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp are equipped as “death factories” with ovens and gas chamber ventilation systems from Erfurt.
1945 In February, Topf & Sons works on setting up a new extermination centre near Mauthausen Concentration Camp using the death factory facilities dismantled in Auschwitz-Birkenau. In April, the newly elected works council composed of Communists and Social Democrats supports the company management’s justification of its oven-supplying activities as a completely normal business relationship. On 31 May, for fear of being arrested by the U.S. Army, Ludwig Topf commits suicide. Ernst Wolfgang Topf travels to the Western occupied zones and is prevented from returning after the Soviet army becomes the occupying force in Erfurt.
1946 Kurt Prüfer, Fritz Sander, Karl Schultze and Gustav Braun are arrested by the Soviet army. In 1948 they will be sentenced in Moscow to twenty-five years in a penal colony for assisting the SS in committing genocide.
Quoted from REUTERS.Com, Thursday, July 21,2005, Auschwitz oven builders scrutinized at new Berlin exhibition, http: //www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/602999.htmlFresh archive evidence shows the brothers who ran Topf, cousins of Hartmut's father, were not fanatic Nazis and faced no personal risk for declining orders for furnaces from Hitler's elite SS guards. Nor were they in it for the money. Crematoria and ventilation systems for the concentration camps comprised only two percent of their turnover, and the SS paid late. Rather a picture emerges of a firm of meticulous technocrats, motivated by the 'challenge' of perfecting and installing incinerators capable of burning thousands of corpses daily, and blinded by the detail to their moral crime. Hartmut Topf said 'It makes me furious that these were my relatives... they were no anti-Semites, no evil Nazis. They were normal people, in a completely normal firm, which only makes it harder to understand'.
poem by Terence George Craddock
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An Oak Wood Piano on Kristallnacht
The SS guard hit Zindel Grynszpan on the head and he fell
Into a ditch. Father, he heard the voice of his son, you must
Go on. Zindel took the hand of his son and climbed out of
The trench. With his wife, a son and daughter on his side
They continued the march. But the SS guards did not stop
The savage whipping of the deportees. Blood was flowing
On all sides.
The Grynszpan family were Polish Jews from Hanover.
When the Nazis came to power they became outcasts.
In October 1938 they were expelled from Germany
And deported to Poland in a group of 12,000 Jews.
They were taken by train to the frontier town Neubenschen
And from there on foot to the German-Polish border.
When they reached the border heavy rain started to fall.
The Nazis confiscated their money. They had no food to eat.
Polish officers arrived and began to inspect their papers.
They admitted the refugees with Polish passports,
Housing them in military stables. Old, sick and children
Were herded together in most inhuman conditions.
One of the first things that Zindel did in Poland was to send
A postcard to his seventeen year old son Hirsch in Paris.
When Hirsch Grynszpan read the family’s tribulations
He became furious. His heart was filled with rage and hatred
And he decided to avenge their sufferings. On the morning
Of November 7, Hirsch entered a gunsmith’s shop on rue
Faubourg Saint-Martin and purchased a 6.35 calibre pistol
With a box of 25 bullets, for 235 Francs.
Then he took a ride on the Metro to the Solferino stop
And walked to the German Embassy at 78 rue de Lille.
Hirsch told the receptionist that he has some documents with him.
He was received by Ernst vom Rath, the third secretary.
When the German diplomat closed the door Hirsch pulled out
The gun. “You are a filthy Kraut”, he said, “and in the name of
12,000 persecuted Jews here is the document”. He fired five
Bullets from point blank range at vom Rath. The diplomat died
Two days later of his wounds.
The assassination came as a godsend thing for the Nazis.
Hitler denounced it as part of a global Jewish conspiracy
Against Germany. It became a pretext for the well-orchestrated
Pogrom of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.
During the night of November 9-10,1938, in every place
Throughout the Third Reich, Storm Troops attacked Jews
And Jewish institutions.
Hitler’s henchmen burnt down or destroyed in Germany
Nearly two hundred synagogues. They burst into Jewish houses,
Broke the glass of Jewish businesses and beat up Jews wherever
They found them. About ninety people were murdered
And thousands of others were wounded in the street violence.
The Nazis also arrested thirty thousand Jews and sent them
To concentration camps in Buchenwald, Dachau,
And Sachsenhausen. And on top of all this, the Reich
Cynically imposed a billion mark penalty
On the Jewish Community to pay for the damages.
In Berlin hundreds of truncheon swinging storm troops
Led the mob in smashing up the glass plate windows
Of Jewish stores. In the Jewish neighbourhoods of German
Cities the Nazis lit bonfires. They threw on them to burn
Torah scrolls, prayer books and whole libraries. Thousands
Of Germans joined the Storm Troops in the atrocities.
But many resented the pogrom. People watched in horror
The roundup; they cried silently behind their curtains.
On a third floor balcony in Leipzig
Storm Troops shattered a balustrade and pushed
An upright oak wood piano over the edge. It plunged like
A black wingless dragon and fell helplessly to the street.
It crashed on the pavement with a shocking clamour.
Its wooden casing had split. The strings stripped bare
Stood in the middle of the wreckage as an orphan harp
Screaming with a heartbreaking outcry.
poem by Paul Hartal
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The Restaurant Keeper
In the City of Toronto there was once
a restaurant owned by a man named Imre Finta.
Born in 1912 in Austria-Hungary, Finta spent
his years of youth in my hometown Szeged,
immigrating to Canada after the Second World War.
Settling in Toronto, in 1953 Finta bought
the Candlelight Restaurant but it did not go well,
so he closed it. Then he opened The Moulin Rouge
on Avenue Road at DuPont Street.
The old fashioned Hungarian gentleman greeted
his guests warmly, politely kissing the right hand
of his female patrons.
I had never dined at the Moulin Rouge
but I encountered Finta in a brickyard and
at the railway station of Szeged in the summer
of 1944. At that time I was eight years old
and Finta, aged 32, was a Captain
of the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie.
He was also a Nazi collaborator who supervised
the deportation of 8,617 Jews to slave labour lagers
and death camps. I was one of them.
A few months earlier, on March 19,1944,
the German Army occupied Hungary
and Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest.
His Mission was to implement in Hungary
the “Final Solution”, a Euphemism the Nazis
used to disguise the mass murder of the Jews.
In June 1944, swearing gendarmes pushed
a group of Jewish prisoners from the ersatz ghetto
of Kistelek onto a freight train. My mother,
my three year old sister Vera and I were
among them. We travelled thirty kilometres to
Szeged where the gendarmes led us to
an abandoned brick factory that was turned into
a makeshift concentration camp.
The brickyard camp commandant was
SS captain Angermayer, whom I remember
as a tall and lanky silhouette moving among
the prisoners in a black uniform.
He was assisted by ruthless gendarmes
in cock-feathered hats, armed with
bayoneted rifles and swords,
who terrorized the captives.
Living conditions in the makeshift ghetto
were dreadful. Only one water tap served
almost nine thousand people and the latrine
did not deserve that name. Garbage was strewn
all over the place. The silence of the night
was broken by the screams of the mentally ill.
Captain Finta, head of the Department
of Investigations in Szeged, appeared
in the brickyard day after day.
Accompanied by a group of his detectives,
he repeatedly threatened to shoot every person,
who hides his or her own money and valuables.
This chief of “investigations”
and his police thugs had beaten and tortured
innocent Jewish men and women in order
to find and confiscate their private property.
Many of them committed suicide.
Aided by doctors and midwives, the gendarmes
conducted the bodily searches, including anal
and genital inspections. Not everyone in Hungary
was impressed though by the efficiency of police
investigations. Endre Hamvas, the Catholic Bishop
of Csanad, for example, was shocked and sent
a protesting report to church officials
on the brutal police searches.
On June 21, Finta initialled and submitted
a memorandum to the Mayor stating that
the German SS command decided to deport
the Jews from Szeged on June 25,27 and 28,
on three freight trains.
The deportations occurred under dreadful weather
conditions, amid thunder storms. A lot of rain
fell on the city in June. The dark skies opened
their gloomy gates. The heavens were weeping
for the sorrows of mothers, the anguish of fathers,
for the misery of the world.
Finta came to the railway station to oversee
how the gendarmes pushed us onto the crowded
cattle cars. About eighty people were squeezed into
each box car like sardines. The guards provided for
every car a bucket of water and another bucket
to serve as the toilet. When a woman called out,
“please, give us more water”, a gendarme replied:
“You don’t really need water because
you will be soon dead”.
Finta stood at the station cursing the Jews.
His former fiancée was among the deported,
and he told her that she was “a Jewish whore”.
Three months later his police career was over.
The advancing Soviet Army crossed the Tisza River
and on October 11,1944, had taken Szeged.
Finta did not wait for their arrival and fled from
the city.
After the war a Hungarian People’s Court in Szeged
tried him in absentia for his complicity in torture,
robbery, forcible confinement, kidnapping and
manslaughter. In 1948 it convicted Finta for
war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was
sentenced for five years of prison with forced labour.
Yet Finta was free. He and hundreds of other Nazi
war criminals arrived in Canada, hiding their
terrible secrets. They committed harrowing atrocities
in their own country. Then they fled and found safe
haven in Canada. Not knowing their horrific crimes,
Canada welcomed them with open arms.
However, in 1987 Finta was arraigned in Toronto
and prosecuted for war crimes. But, how do you
deliver justice half a century later? The crimes were
committed in another country, in a different era,
while the memories of the witnesses have faded.
Mind you, the judicial system is not about justice
but the power struggle between prosecution and
defence. And the Finta trial was very poorly
designed. He was not judged for robbery, torture,
kidnapping, deportation and murder but for
his mind set in 1944. Thus Finta managed to pass
the responsibility for his crimes to his superiors.
In 1990 the 78 year old Finta walked out
of the court hall as a free man, proclaiming his love
for the Jewish people. He did not forget to add that
he used to have many Jewish friends and that once
he even had a Jewish fiancée.
As his victim, I do not feel any anger or bitterness
over his acquittal. I do not believe in punishment
for revenge. Moreover, what sort of justice can result
from a trial? After all, courts cannot compensate us
for our sufferings, for our lost years of youth.
Nor can they bring back to life the dead.
poem by Paul Hartal
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A Moral Civilized World
When a despicable tyrant
regime proudly slaughters
defenseless innocent women
children in the city streets
brutally rounds them up
in fear strike night ships
them off in bolted cattle wagons
to slave labour genocide camps
brands their living human flesh
systematically murders innocent millions
in calculated inhuman slave starved
research exterminations experiments.
It is time for a moral;
educated civilized world;
to take opposing action;
but the victorious allies;
will hide shocking facts;
from the wartime public;
deny previous knowledge;
you must understand;
those drafted Judas trains;
desperately needed resources;
could be carrying munitions;
weapons of axis total war;
taking troops to the front;
costing allied combatant lives;
fanatical disciplined desperate;
Nazis will cunningly break out;
at the decisive Battle of Bulge;
could even now win world war.
Copyright © Terence George Craddock
See also The Holocaust Files!
To commence the 'Final solution', it was decided at The Wannsee Conference, on January 20 1942, to transport all Jews in German occupied countries, to concentration camps in Poland and Germany. When prisoners could no longer work, they were executed in extermination camps in Poland, like Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka and most feared of all Auschwitz II – Birkenau.
poem by Terence George Craddock
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There Are Those Who Have Known Daily Horrors
THERE ARE THOSE WHO HAVE KNOWN DAILY HORRORS
I have had a relatively easy life-
There are those who have known daily horrors
Beyond those any human being should ever have to imagine
I think of the last generation of survivors of the Shoah
Slowly dying out now
Taking with them their memories of loved ones murdered before their eyes
Of incredible tortures and cruelty
Of horrible partings and endless humiliations-
I think of these people my fellow Jews
And wonder why God allowed it to happen to them
And what it all means-
I certainly don't know-
I have had a relatively easy life
With of course my own griefs and sorrows and failings
But nothing at all like what they went through -
Oh God what is this whole thing about anyway?
And why did You let the Nazi Germans and their Austrian Polish Lithuanian Slovak Romanian Hungarian Dutch French helpers
Do it to them?
Why families with tens of members murdered
Why the children?
The incredible cruelties and humiliations and horrors
Why?
poem by Shalom Freedman
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The Religious Rigor!
Talking to friends about religion and its manifestations, that is my conclusion, my humble opinion
.Religião is faith and belief in something divine! Exceeding this limit personal and trying to impose itself by force, the notice is given to us by history.
Currently, groups say they are religious, and follow their fundamentalist beliefs that can't never be questioned or criticized. Your God is to make us all keep on our knees.
Fanatic Rigor!
Your application methods are Divines: death, terrorism, bloodshed innocent. He has no love for they lives, love is death. Our deaths!
Always existed in our world, evils men who believes in a barbarous theory: A new World Order! Based on politics or religion!
Hidden, behind this theory, are the other worst Eugenia; human selection of who should live and how to live and create a purebreed.
New World Order?
Cambodia, Pol Pot, one quarter of the population dead;
Germany, Hitler,6 million Jews and not Jews killed;
Chile, Pinochet. over 30 thousand prisoners, killed, tortured.
The list is endless!
They continue attacking civilians, hiding in his holy words, and trying justify yours killing. For me, Satanic Laws! Satanic words! ! !
poem by Mirna Morgan
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Spring and summer 1942 was probably the worst period of internal terror in Slovakia. It was also the time of mass deportation of Slovak Jews to the extermination camps in Poland.
quote by Alexander Dubcek
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Shoes on the Bank of the Danube
On a sunny day in Budapest
The Danube Promenade offers a serene stroll.
The Royal Palace perched on Castle Hill
Greets you under an azure sky
And the mountains of Buda wave brightly
Their wooded hands across the river.
But along your peaceful walk listen
To the quiet murmur of the Danube,
Listen to the shifting waves that whisper
About bottomless grieves and sorrows.
The river drifts irremovable memories,
On the flowing waters float
Myriad sad stories.
Not far from the Parliament building
And the Academy of Sciences
Sculpted shoes cast in iron
Line the left bank of the Danube;
Between Roosevelt Square and Kossuth Square:
Sixty period-exact footwear,
In the style of the 1940s, conceived
And created by the sculptor Gyula Pauer
And the poet Janos Can Togay.
Attached to the top of the stone embankment,
The shoes symbolize real shoes of real people
Who lost their lives here.
They commemorate thousands of persecuted
Men, women and children,
Mostly Jews, who were murdered
By Nazi thugs in the terrible days
Of the Hungarian Arrow Cross terror
Between October 1944 and February 1945.
While the Soviet Red Army had encircled
Budapest and its units were already fighting
In the suburbs of the capital, Arrow Cross
Militiamen rounded up Jews in groups of fifty
To sixty and led them to the bridges linking
Pest with Buda.
When they reached the river bank
The executioners told their frightened victims
To remove their shoes and put all their jewellery,
Watches, money and other valuables inside.
And then they shot them into a freezing death.
Drift ice floated on the winter Danube,
The water turned red from the blood of the victims
As the river carried away their bodies.
On a serene walk along the Danube
Listen to the quiet murmur of the river.
Listen to the shifting waves that whisper
About bottomless grieves and sorrows.
The river drifts irremovable memories,
On the flowing waters float myriad sad stories.
poem by Paul Hartal
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Armenia, Armenia
After the great flood Noah’s ark landed
on Mount Ararat, says the Bible.
Nowadays, the snow-capped summit
of the mountain soars over Yerevan.
Although the dormant volcanic cone
of Ararat lies south of the border,
in Turkish Anatolia,
the view of the mountain dominates
the skyline of the Armenian capital.
Most of the territory
that was once part of historic Armenia
belongs to Turkey today.
Under the yoke of the Muslim Ottomans,
the aspirations of the Christian Armenians
to obtain autonomy clashed
with the dreams of their rulers
to establish a pan-Turkish Empire.
In the 19th century the government
of the crumbling Ottoman Empire
started a campaign to wipe out
the Armenian population.
It perpetrated a genocide,
which reached its peak
during the First World War.
In 1908 an extremist wing
of the Union and Progress Party,
the Young Turks, came to power
in the Ottoman Empire.
They rejected demands for ethnic autonomy
and launched a systematic state organized attack
on the Armenian community.
It began on April 24,1915,
when the Ottoman authorities arrested
some 250 Armenian leaders in Istanbul
and murdered them.
Then armed Turks began uprooting men,
women and children from their homes.
Rape and murder became a commonplace.
Depriving them food and water, Turkish squads
forced Armenian communities to march
through the deserts of Syria where they died
of dehydration, starvation and exhaustion.
Hundreds of eyewitnesses
from all over the world recorded
and documented state-supported massacres.
In 1915, for example, Leslie Davis,
the American consul in Kharput, reported
that 10,000 bodies of murdered Armenians
had been discovered near Lake Göeljuk.
In the same year Giacomo Gorrini,
the Italian consul in Trabzon, testified:
“I saw thousands of innocent women
and children placed on boats,
which were capsized in the Black Sea”.
Armenians call the mass slaughter
of their people Metz Yeghérn, the calamity.
Historians estimate the number of those
who lost their lives
in the great Armenian tragedy at 1.5 million.
The government of Turkey, however,
refuses to admit that a state organized genocide
took place.
In the fall of 2001 Pope John Paul II
paid a visit to the former Soviet Republic
of Armenia. He laid a rose at the eternal flame
in the memorial of Yerevan
and prayed for the victims:
The lament that rises from this place,
The call of the dead from the depth of Metz Yeghérn,
The cry of innocent blood
That pleads like the blood of Abel,
Like Rachel weeping for her children
Because they are no more.
poem by Paul Hartal
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How Did You Kill Me?
All German concentration camps
will be run under total authority
of dread Death's Head Units of SS;
after 1934 a unified Nazi plan killing
with Prussian military precision
Theodor Eicke will command
SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV):
under SS, Heinrich Himmler
author creator of Dachau in 1933
creator of eastern Europe's death camps
head of most extremely feared unit;
in Nazi Germany the Gestapo in 1934
put in charge of Ministry of Interior
June 1934 Night of the Long Knives
grim SS deed conducted with cold chilling;
efficiency the stamp of events to horrify
appointed commander of unified police
forces in Germany in 1936 unlimited power
Himmler made ‘cattle' trains run on time;
ensured profit camps ran on business lines
concentration camps will be fully integrated
into Waffen-SS by 1944 standard practice
rotate SS members in and out of camps entire;
SS knew shared war crimes against humanity
Himmler chief architect of the Final Solution
uses Einsatzgruppen death squads formed by
Deputy Heydrich in German occupied countries;
to murder mostly Jew civilian non-combatants
Heinrich Himmler demonic vile nasty monster
will assume responsibility for establishing
operating inhuman abhorrent concentration camps;
extermination camps in which millions of inmates
will die in extremely painful systematic mass
gassing ruthless, merciless, heartless, inhumane
treatment scientific ratio overwork malnutrition;
ghastly dissection vivisection medical experiments
Nazi vivisection selected victim human beings
cut up cut apart without any mercy pain killers
no anaesthetics alleviates nerve agony alive cuttings;
surgery conducted for Nazi experimental purposes
on ill fated living breathing man woman or child
medical experiments preformed for years repeatedly
to satisfy ambitions of rhetoric master race demons;
who unleashed unholy inferno upon civilized world
post World War Two judges at the Nuremberg Trials
declared the SS its sub-parts criminal organizations'
responsible for the implementation of racial policies;
of genocide war crimes and crimes against humanity.
No One Saved Our Souls From Demon Spawn Nazis?
Under Nazi Ideology the SS exterminated alleged racially
inferior Jews Poles Romani Slavic Russians chosen SS;
implemented Final Solution killing torturing enslaving
their selected target sub races in crimes against humanity.
Copyright © Terence George Craddock
See also The Holocaust Files!
poem by Terence George Craddock
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Whose Life is Worth More?
'Whose life is worth more? ' the SS officer asked.
Jacob Kogen did not answer.
In the eerie silence that ensued
the SS man drew his pistol.
'Tell me', he said, playing with the weapon,
'Whose life is worth more?
Yours? Your wife's? Your children's,
or the life of a stranger? '
'All human lives are equal', Kogen replied.
'You mean the life of a Jew and a non-Jew
has the same value? ' the SS officer asked.
'God created all human beings
equally entitled to their lives', Kogen said.
'In that case you will provide me 7,000 Jews',
the SS man said.
It was September 1,1942,
the third anniversary of the war's start,
the German attack on Poland
and Kogen was a member of the Jewish Council
in a Polish town.
He went home devastated.
He realized that The Nazis would take
the selected 7,000 people
outside the town in order to be shot.
'One shall not shed innocent blood
to save his own life', he told his wife.
And he added: 'A Jew Cannot decide
who will be taken for execution'.
Kogen and his family committed suicide.
poem by Paul Hartal
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Schindler's List
Oskar Schindler was a member of the Nazi party. He was a, womanizer, war profiteer, and saved the lives of 1,100 Jews during the holocaust. He was enigmatic - one man against overwhelming odds who made a difference.
'Save one life and you save the world.'
The tide of evil swept across Europe
And darkness eclipsed the light
Nazi jack-boots stamped down
Upon the necks of the oppressed
Torture and executions were the rule
And for the Jews... Hitler's Final Solution.
Schindler was a German businessman
Successful and enjoying the good life
Wining and dining in the best restaurants,
Making love to beautiful women
Driving fast cars and befriending high ranking SS
While using the black market to make huge profits.
When he saw the treatment of the Jews
Forced to wear the Star of David
Humiliated and beaten, murdered in the streets
Living in ghettos like animals in a zoo
Transported in cattle trucks to death camps
A divine light flickered within his conscience.
And as the flame grew steadily brighter
He purchased a factory employing Jewish labour
Saving them from the gas chamber
Created a list of names and bribed the SS
Risking torture and execution
Schindler saved as many lives as he could.
Those he saved call themselves 'Schindler's Juden'
And after the war Israel honoured him
Giving him the title of Righteous Person.
And he planted a tree in the Avenue of the Righteous
Where it still grows as a sign of one man's morality
Oskar Schindler is buried in Israel.
poem by Colin Ian Jeffery
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If A Human Being Can Be Alive In One Second
If a human being can be alive at one second
And a second or perhaps many tormenting minutes or hours
later be dead
with a bullet in his brain or gas in his lungs or fire going all through his body
Then I too can be suddenly never breathing and never conscious again forever-
I too can be an incident and accident
Here one second not here another-
I too could be like one of those millions the Nazis murdered in just this way
Or one of the millions threatened by terror or nuclear night
One of those millions who through the centuries were just killed in the most cruel and violent ways simply because they were Jews
Or one of those who actually knew the burns and the radiation and the heat storms and the bleeding inside and out
And are threatened now simply because they are other than their enemies
It has happened to others and could happen to me and mine
To any and all of us-
How I pray to God no great and evil disaster will come to us again-
poem by Shalom Freedman
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Genesis Of Genocide
GENESIS OF GENOCIDE
Jewish history comes with homily,
the seder shared by all the family
the best example. When men talk about
the Holocaust the homilies they're taught
homogenize the fate that menaced us
the Jews, with that of gentiles. Genesis
of genocide is changed: the hermeneutic
of revision makes it therapeutic
for those who wish to drive Jews from their land.
"The Jews, " they say, "have like the Nazis sinned,
creating victims just as Nazis did,
replacing Hitler with the settlers' God, "
revisionists exclaiming "Out of order! "
when hearing at the end of every seder
the mantra, "Next year in Jerusalem! "
while they as chauvinists condemn
the Jews, in spite of their thousand years
of blood and sweat and toil, and lots of tears,
as then in Jewish wounds rub salt, declaring
that there were other holocausts, comparing
other genocidal horrors to
what happened to the Jews, a point of view
that totally distorts significance of what,
in Wannsee, Hitler's minions chose to plot,
reducing the Solution that was Final
to a competition's quarterfinal.
The greatest homily of Jewish history
is Jews' survival, a great mystery
which it's impossible to overhype,
based on the theme of their great anthem, hope.
The last part of this poem was inspired by an emotional outburst that I had after Gerald Duchovnay told Linda, Florence Zhou and me about how he teaches students in Texas about the Holocaust by using the Shoah to explain to them "the holocaust in Sudan."
Ed Rothstein ("Memories of Holocaust, Fortified, " NYT,4/22/11) writes from Skokie:
Before the $45 million Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center opened here two years ago, there was some urgency in completing its 65,000-square-foot building, which now stands so incongruously monumental in the midst of Chicago's suburban landscape. At one time,7,000 Jews bearing the scars of the Holocaust had lived in Skokie with their families, and they were aging. Many had contributed artifacts to the museum; some participated when it was just a storefront on Main Street; some had their oral histories recorded for its exhibition and their lives chronicled in the institution's imposing companion book, "Memory and Legacy."…..
If we want to find a lesson in the events, for example, is it that individuals should not be bystanders or that nations should not be appeasers? Is the lesson that everybody should have a social conscience, or that a different kind of political action is needed when such forces emerge? Was the Holocaust a product of intolerance or an expression of more specific archetypal hatreds?
One of the challenges faced by Holocaust museums as survivors die is to understand their experience by seeing it through more than their eyes, to examine the past without homogenizing it with platitudes, to offer history without homily.
This poem echoes one that I wrote on 2/17/09, inspired by a statement by the Lubavitcher Rebbe:
TOMORROW MORNING, EARLY
"Will there be another holocaust? "
they asked the Rebbe of Lubavitch.
For an answer he was never lost.
"Of course there will be. Man is savage."
"When will this happen? " they inquired.
"Morgen in der frih, " he said,
Tomorrow morning, early, has transpired,
and millions are already dead.
It's happened in Rwanda and Sudan,
as in silence we looked on.
It couldn't happen here, we say. It can,
and millions more will soon be gone.
Long ago an interviewer asked the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, if he believed the Holocaust could ever happen in America. "Morgen in der frih, " was his reply, Yiddish words that mean: "Early tomorrow morning."
11/6/12 #11803
poem by Gershon Hepner
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