Transcript Slide 1

It is said that history can repeat , but if
you know what happened in the past it is
less possible to make the same mistakes
that other people have done.
Do YOU know what happened at
Auschwitz??
•
Auschwitz is a name that has come to
symbolize the holocaust of the Second
World War. In this place an estimated as
3 million people of various races, but
mostly Jews, were murdered by Nazi
Germany. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nazi
Germany's largest concentration and
extermination camp facility, was located
nearby the provincial Polish town of
Oshwiecim in Galacia .Auschwitz was the
place where the Nazis perfected the
machinery of extermination, starting off
as quite a small camp but rapidly
expanding to form other camps as they
had to cope with increasing numbers of
victims transported in by trains from all
over Europe. When the Germans
retreated in 1945, they tried to conceal
the incriminating evidence of their crimes
but the advance of the allies was so rapid
and Auschwitz so massive that they
simply did not have time to finish their
work. When camp survivors started to
tell of life inside Auschwitz, their stories
were of crimes of such depravity and on
such a scale that it was far beyond
human comprehension.
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As a permanent sign of respect to the
people who suffered in Auschwitz, the
Polish Parliament declared it a National
Monument and Museum - a grim
reminder to all of us of what humans are
capable of doing to one another.
Many horrifying things happened there
.Most of the people killed ,9 out of 10
were Jews and the rest were gypsies or
soviet POWs . The people who weren’t
killed through gassing, starvation,
diseases, shooting or burning were used
and killed in terrible experiments and
those people were especially children
At Auschwitz children were often killed
upon arrival. Children born in the camp
were generally killed on the spot. Near
the end of the war, in order to cut
expenses and save gas, cost-accountant
considerations led to an order to place
living children directly into the ovens or
throw them into open burning pits.
“Special” children and twins were
supposed to experiments by the ones
called camp doctors. The worst doctor
was Josef Mengele. He putted children
into pressure chambers , tested drugs on
them , children were castrated or
suffered many traumas.
• One twin recalls the death of his brother:
"Dr. Mengele had always been more interested in Tibi.
I am not sure why - perhaps because he was the
older twin. Mengele made several operations on Tibi.
One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed.
He could not walk anymore. Then they took out his
sexual organs. After the fourth operation, I did not
see Tibi anymore. I cannot tell you how I felt. It is
impossible to put into words how I felt. They had
taken away my father, my mother, my two older
brothers - and now, my twin ..."
• These terrors occurred in Block 10 of Auschwitz I.
Josef Mengele was nicknamed the Angel of Death for
the inhuman experiments he conducted.
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At that time nobody cared about those people lives about their injuries or feelings or
dreams, all they wanted to do was to make a pour human race: Private diaries of Goebbels
and Himmler unearthed from the secret Soviet archives show that Adolf Hitler personally
ordered the mass extermination of the Jews during a meeting of Nazi German regional
governors in the chancellery. As Goebbels wrote "With regard to the Jewish question, the
Fuhrer decided to make a clean sweep ..."This cleaning didn’t skip Romania , jews and
gypsies were deported to Auschwitz .Some of the Romanian survivors told to others their
stories or even written it . Many of them were from Transilvania and were deported by the
hortists, but in fact Romania never came under direct German rule, and consequently very
few Romanian Jews were deported to German camps. The Romanian government pursued
an anti-Semitic policy of its own, and Hitler was satisfied with it. Most of Romanian jews
deported from the county Moldavia, from Basarabia and Bukovina were killed in
Transnistria. Transnistria was a geographic invention, but a historic reality. The name was
coined by Romanian fascists in World War II to designate a territory chosen for the
annihilation of Jews deported from Romania. It was an area situated in south-western
Ukraine, between the River Dniester to the west, the River Bug to the east, the Black Sea to
the south, and a line beyond the city of Moghilev-Podolsky to the north. In Romanian the
river is called The Nistru. TRANS-NISTRIA meant "beyond the River Dniester".Territorially,
Transnistria was the largest killing field in the Holocaust. Many authors refer to it as "The
Romanian Auschwitz". But even having this killing area ,Romania sent some jews to
Auscwitz too, especially from Transilvania were deported to Auschwitz almost 150.000
jewish people : For example Eva Mozes Kor was a Romanian Jewish sent there which
survived of Dr. Mengele's experiments:
“Mengele came in every morning after roll call to count us. He wanted to know every
morning how many” guinea pigs” he had.
“Three times a week both of my arms would be tied to restrict the blood flow, and they took
a lot of blood from my left arm. At the same time they would give me a minimum of five
injections into my right arm.
“After one of those injections I became extremely ill and Dr Mengele came in next morning
with four other doctors. He looked at my fever chart and he said, laughing sarcastically, he
said: ‘Too bad, she is so young. She has only two weeks to live.’ I would fade in and out of
consciousness. I would keep telling myself: I must survive. I must survive.”
“Would I have died, my twin sister Miriam would have been rushed immediately to
Mengele’s lab, killed with an injection to the heart. Then Mengele would have done the
comparative autopsies. That is the way most of the twins died."
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Another Romanian Jew who survived at Auschwitz was Leopold Schobel who was from a
village near Sighisoara , in Transilvania. He stayed 8 months at Auschwitz .He was
deported by train with his mother, with his brother’s wife and her daughter. He was the one
of his family that survived. At first he was taken at Auschwitz 2 (Birkenau ) and then moved
in Auschwitz 1 .He was tattooed a number on his arm A-13221; he was the prisoner number
A-13221, now he didn’t have a name anymore.He was a lucky man because the work he had
to do there was not so exhausting as other works and he resisted for 8 months. He
survived but he says that a part of him remained there with his family.
Oliver Lustig was another Romanian Jewish survivor which described the life at Auschwitz
and also described some vivid images of his camp experience:
“ I am Oliver Lustig.
On May 3, 1944, soon after 4 o’clock in the morning, our house was invaded by a
group of Hungarian gendarmes. We were living in the commune of Soimeni, in Cluj County.
I hadn’t turned 18 yet.
Concurrently, in all the villages and communes of northern Transylvania, without
exception, at the same hour, and following the same procedure, the Hungarian gendarmes
knocked on the doors of all the Jewish houses with their rifle butts and seized every living
Jew.
They gave us a few hours to pack and prepare ourselves to leave. They warned us not
to carry more than a total of 50 kilos per family. They took us out of our homes, put us on
carts pulled by oxen and herded us to the Cluj ghetto. …
…The journey from Cluj to Birkenau-Auschwitz lasted 4 days and 3 nights…
… I looked at my mother drifting away with her children. She held the youngest by the hand
and the other two were close to her. They began marching to their deaths. There were only
1,000-1,200 steps to the gas chamber and the crematory. I watched them march until I lost
sight of them. They were unsuspectingly approaching the end. “
• THIS is the famous entrance
to Birkenau (Auschwitz II)
Concentration Camp.
The picture is taken from the
outside of the Camp. From
May 1944 (but not before),
the railroad track was
constructed to enter directly
into the Camp through its
front gate. From that time
on, all trains, arriving with
deportees from almost entire
Europe, would enter directly
into the Camp on one of the
three (3) railroad tracks
constructed
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The same picture taken from the inside.
Now, we can see the entire railroad
tracks complex from within the Camp
with the space between the tracks known
as the "Ramp of Death" because it was
from that place that the newly arrivals
were selected for who would go straight
to the gas chambers.
This railroad tracks complex was built
only in early 1944 when it was realized
that the deportation of Jews from
Hungary, including Northern Transylvania
and Subcarpathian Ukraine --both
annexed at that time to Hungary, would
exceed all previously known quotas. As a
result of that, Rudolf Höss, the
commander of the Birkenau Camp went
two times to Budapest. There, he met
with Eichmann (head of Gestapo that was
responsible for resolving once and for all
the so-called Jewish problem) who,
temporarily, had moved his headquarters
to the capital of Hungary. Together, they
were able to come up with an
understanding with the Hortyst
authorities whereby they could "adjust"
the gassing and burning from the
Birkenau crematoria with the rate of
arrival of the incoming trains.
• This photo of the
entrance to the
Auschwitz death
camp, with the
famous sign “Albeit
Macht Frei” (Work
will make you free)
is famous all over
the world.
• View of the camp's
double, electrified,
barbed wire fence
and barracks.
(Immediately after
liberation January
1945)
• The wall where
prisoners were shot
This gas chamber
was in use for only a
short time before
being converted into
a bomb shelter.
• Interior of a barrack
• A warehouse full of
shoes and clothing
confiscated from the
prisoners and
deportees gassed
upon their arrival.
The Germans
shipped these
goods to Germany.
• Bales of the hair of
female prisoners
found in the
warehouses of
Auschwitz at the
liberation. (After
January 1945)
• Prisoners
• Prisoners
preparing for
death.
• Corpses of
Auschwitz prisoners
in block 11 of the
main camp
(Auschwitz I), as
discovered by
Soviet war crimes
investigators.
• Human corpses in
a “huge common
tomb”.
• What happened at Auschwitz was horrible for the Jews
and for the entire humanity . It is said that now after
so many years, at Auschwitz crematory you can feel the
bitter smell of burnt human corpses.
The author of this project is
Anca Adriana Pasarin