Posted on 06/18/2008 9:14:45 AM PDT by Alouette
Henryk Mandelbaum, a member of the Sonderkommando -- Jewish prisoners who were forced to empty the gas chambers at Auschwitz after fellow Jews were gassed and burned -- died Tuesday. He was 85.
Mandelbaum died at a hospital in the southern Polish city of Bytom several days after undergoing heart surgery, said Igor Bartosik, a historian at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum who has co-written an upcoming book on Mandelbaum.
Bartosik said he did not know the exact cause of death, and hospital officials refused to comment.
Mandelbaum was Poland's last surviving member of the Sonderkommando, in which he was forced by the Nazis to search the body cavities of fellow Jews for valuables and pull out gold teeth and fillings after they were executed. They then had to carry the bodies to crematories for burning and when the crematories were filled to capacity they dug huge pits to burn the bodies.
"I thought I was in hell. Fire and smoke were everywhere. I had to clean the gas chambers and put the bodies in the crematoria, or burn them outside when the extermination was in full swing and the crematoria were not enough," he told reporters some time ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.
RIP. I fear when the last of these souls have passed there will be a serious and concerted effort to rewrite history. Sanctioned, institutional anti-semitism is on the upswing sadly.
Unimaginable experience. May Mr. Mandelbaum rest in peace.
They knew even then that the Holocaust would be denied someday. "Those who do not remember history..."
May HaShem grant him rest and peace in the bonds of eternity after what he was forced to endure.
Further proof that true evil does exist in the world.
I’m sure Pat Buchanan has an explanation for this.
And remember - the Nazis were left wing nuts.
The National Socialist Workers Party of Germany, otherwise known as the Nazi Party, was indeed socialist, and it had a lot in common with the modern left. Hitler preached class warfare, agitating the working class to resist “exploitation” by capitalists — particularly Jewish capitalists, of course. Their program called for the nationalization of education, health care, transportation, and other major industries. They instituted and vigorously enforced a strict gun control regimen. They encouraged pornography, illegitimacy, and abortion, and they denounced Christians as right-wing fanatics.
You were Henryk, my friend. May you now find peace.
Myself, I wonder why Bush's grandfather helped finance this.
Hard to imagine that Hell could be any worse.
Don’t know a thing about that, nor do I care. In the here and now, the Nazis have an active and willing apologist and his name is Patrick J. Buchanan.
I have visited Dachau. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that you can literally FEEL the weight of the evil in that place.
How did you maintain your composure?/Just Asking - seoul62......
I concur. We were at Auschwitz in ‘88. You could feel the heaviness and oppression.
All the evil imposed upon him, and he didn't turn evil himself. And yet there are those who try to rationalize the actions of terrorists.
I visited Dachau several years ago. Very little of the camp remains and what does comes across as sterile. I found it almost impossible to visualize the horrors that had occurred there.
I was a hard charging, full of myself, Infantry Sergent stationed in Germany at the time. There came an opportunity to visit Dachau but it was as a group trip from our unit. One of the interesting things I remember was that with 30 guys joking and cutting up on the trip there, everything stopped ... and I mean TOTAL SILENCE descended upon the group as we pulled up to the camp.
I also have to admit, that prior to that experience, I did not believe in ghosts or spirits .... my opinion changed after that day.
As to keeping my composure ... it was strange. You didn't feel fear persay .... more of a great sadness. It was almost as if there were thousands of souls standing by just watching, as if to say “come, see what happened here and witness”. I could not bring myself to touch anything for fear that it would break the surrealism of the moment. I guess that was my only protection.
To this day, some 20 years later, it brings tears to my eyes.
Dachau was only a concentration camp and was not an extermination camp. Two thirds of the prisoners held there were political prisoners. Of the 25k who died in that camp most were from disease and malnutrition.
Poor choice of words.
I visited Dachau while in Germany also. On a ITT Tour from the base. It’s interesting that all our people were civilians, but had a very similar experience.
May peace be upon him and upon all Israel. Amen.
The Sondercommando working life was usually rather short, a matter of months perhaps, then they were rotated through the killing machine themselves. Only those left at the last of the war survived. Also the majority of exterminations were done in a very short period just prior to the end of the war, it took that long for the Nazi machine to figure out the most efficient way of handling that amount of bodies.
There were holocausts before, many times infact through out history, but this was the first industrialized extermination.
A little note, perhaps what saved so many was the fact that German Bureacracy was actually rather inefficient with nepotism, note card filing,and unqualified personel rising beyond their levels of competence, for a truely horrible image picture Nazi’s with computers.
LOL.
How about all ragheads who claim "it never happened" either.
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
Perhaps. I’m not saying that it wasn’t bad, but it was very different from the actual extermination camps.
Wow, I am speechless./Just Asking - seoul62.......
Mandelbaum found himself in the spotlight in May 2006 when Pope Benedict XVI visited Auschwitz. In an emotionally charged event, the German-born pope prayed at the Wall of Death, where the Nazis executed thousands.
There he met with 32 camp survivors, most of them Catholics; he stopped to speak to each one, and kissed Mandelbaum -- the only Jewish survivor in the group -- on both cheeks.
EXODUS
For a horrific but compelling inside account of the operation of the Sonderkommando, read:
“Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account” by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli.
Dr. Nyiszli was a trained pathologist who, as a concentration camp inmate, was singled out to do work for the Nazi Dr. Joseph Mengele. Worth the read. I won’t say anymore. If you read it, you’ll understand. Here’s an Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Auschwitz-A-Doctors-Eyewitness-Account/dp/1559702028
A lot of good reviews there.
My Daddy was in the 88th/351st Army Infantry from N. Africa through Sicily, Italy and into Germany where his group liberated a concentration camp. He either could not pronounce the name of the place or didn’t want to even try to speak it. He did say that they killed many S.S. guards at the place and saw bodies piled like cordwood several feet high for at least an eighth of a mile.
President Bush's grandfather did not help finance Auschwitz.
And Pat has offered explanations for these things, ranging from the "fact" that people like Henryk Mandelbaum are mentally ill, thus statements like
I thought I was in hell. Fire and smoke were everywhere. I had to clean the gas chambers and put the bodies in the crematoria, or burn them outside when the extermination was in full swing and the crematoria were not enough...He saw people going into the changing rooms, he saw people changing, he saw the moment of the gassing, the throwing of the Zyklon [B gas] into the gas chambers, he heard the screams,
cannot be relied on, to his "fact" that Jews can't be killed by diesel fumes. Presumably the political prisoners, mostly Christians, the technique was perfected on are enjoying long vacations in the Caribbean to this day.
High volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel, WOT
..................
I had a similar experience
Henryk Mandelbaum, 83, wearing the distinctive striped cap of the Sonderkommando -- Jewish prisoners who emptied the gas chambers where their fellow Jews perished -- kissed the papal ring.
Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, and the Nature of Anti-Semitism
Catholic Ping
Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
RIP
If it’s still in print some might want to read
Mila 18
Read it decades ago and can still feel the horror of that story.
William F. Buckley declared that in his opinion Pat Buchanan was an anti semite.
I have seen and read nothing that would change that opinion.
That is an old myth, Prescott Bush didn’t finance the Nazis.
May his soul rest in the Heavenly Kingdom and may he behold the Glory of the Lord forever!
Yea, like Patrick Buchanan. He'd sure like to repeat 1937 or thereabouts, that's for sure.
How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power:
George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.
To take that fact and imply that Prescott Bush was responsible for financing Auschwitz is absurd.
To back the absurdity up with an article that states there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause is just plain stupid.
That absurdity and dishonesty is done in the name of defending Pat Buchanan isn't surprising at all.
LOL. Indeed. How else can one defend him?
President Bush owes his family inheritance to Adolf Hitler, and his grandfather, Prescott Bush, helped finance the Nazi rise to power in Germany. These stories had circulated for years but resurfaced on May 13, 2003, in the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma, headlined, "Bush Family Funded Adolf Hitler." As the Associated Press reports, Prescott had been on the board of Union Banking Corp., whose majority owner, the Thyssen family of Germany, indeed had funded the Nazis against a feared communist takeover of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Family leader Fritz Thyssen broke with Hitler over the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews, was stripped of his citizenship and fortune, and was in a Nazi prison at the time the elder Bush sat on that board. There is no evidence that Prescott Bush, who owned just one share of Union Banking, had anything to do with the Thyssen political work in Germany.
Some critics go even further to accuse the president of having inherited ill-gotten profits from a Nazi slave-labor operation near the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. But the Polish company in which Prescott Bush had an interest, Silesian-American Corp., was stolen by the Nazis in 1939, the year before Auschwitz was built. Discussing this controversy, columnist Joe Conason of the New York Observer writes, "Henry Ford was a Nazi collaborator. Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was a Nazi sympathizer. Unless additional information emerges to indict him, Prescott Bush Sr. was neither. To misuse such terms for political advantage against his grandson is to trivialize very grave offenses."
P.S. Don't rely on the Grauniad for anything. They are a way-out left newspaper with only a passing acquaintance with the truth or accuracy.
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