January 27 Is The Anniversary Of The Liberation....

Scarletbegonia

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Of Auschwitz-Birkenau (1945). it is also International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Here is an interview with Bruce Adolphe’s latest work, which focuses on the work of Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who raised awareness of what was happening. He became a civil rights voice after the war.
 

DiamondJoe

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Warning: this is not an easy read.

Lt. Col. Gonin was a British officer working in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 to try to alleviate the suffering of the prisoners. His diaries are kept at the Imperial War Museum in London. I found this extract some years ago and it has terrified/inspired me since.



Extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO
"I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen.

It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing could save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference.

Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance.

That lipstick started to give them back their humanity."
 

edonline

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As poignant and true today as when it aired nearly forty years ago on November 10, 1961...

"There is an answer to the doctor's question ["Dachau. Why does it still stand? Why do we keep it standing?"]. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth." - Rod Serling, "The Twilight Zone: Deaths-Head Revisited", closing narration
 
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