World
The End Of Auschwitz
Local survivors remember death camp's liberation 60 years ago.
LEV PARANSKY
Special to the Jewish News
O
nce every month, a group of eld-
erly people come together at the
Jewish Community Center in
Oak Park. They are members of Sham-it
Haplaytah of Metropolitan Detroit, and
all are survivors of the Holocaust.
The destinies of these people differ
from one another, but there is some-
thing they all have in common — they
all endured the horrors of the ghettos
and concentration camps, and they all
suffered from starvation, exhausting
labor, diseases and —most of all —
from the loss of their closest relatives.
The group of about 80 people are
members of the Cafe Europa. The presi-
dent of this group, Abraham_Weberman .
ofWest-Bloo-mfield and his assistant,
Dr. Charles Silow of Huntington
Woods, do their best to make the lives
of survivors more interesting, useful and
meaningful.
The first meeting this year will be
Monday, Jan. 17, and it will be a spe-
cial one, devoted to the 60th anniver-
sary of the liberation of the Auschwitz
concentration camps — the day when
the prisoners could, at last, breathe
freely. Among those who were liberated
on that day, or connected with depor-
tations to those camps, are some resi-
dents of our community, members of
Cafe Europa.
Ruth Lehman, now a resident of Oak
Park, was a young woman when she and
her younger brother were deported to
Auschwitz fromtheir native city Lodz.
That was the last ghetto to be liquidated
in Poland. She experienced all the hard-
ships of the camp. All her family were
killed there. She was later deported to
Bergen-Belzen. There, in spring 1945,
she was liberated by the British army.
Abraham Holcman, now of South-
field, was also deported from the Lodz
ghetto to Auschwitz. Ilona Goldman,
another resident of Oak Park, had been
deported to Auschwitz from Czechoslo
vakia. She stayed at Auschwitz for half a
year. There she lost all her relatives.
Abraham Weberman, now of West
Bloomfield, after the liquidation of the
ghetto in his native town, was in hiding
together with other inmates. These are
only some of the names.
Auschwitz was one of the biggest
German extermination and forced labor
.
1/13
2005
24
The 'railroad leading into Auschwitz
centers of World War II. About 1.5 mil-
lion people died there between Septem-
ber 1941 and January 1945. The Ger-
mans used gas chambers and other bar-
barous methods to murder most of the
inmates. Other victims died of starva-
tion or diseases; some were worked to
death in nearby factories. Those victims
included Poles, Russians and Gypsies.
But most of the victims were Jews from
the countries of Europe.
Auschwitz was located near the Polish
country town Oswiecim, 30 miles west
of Krakow. In mid-January 1945, the
Soviet army started an offensive in the
direction of Warsaw and Krakow and
on Jan. 27, 10 days after the Soviet
troops entered Warsaw, Oswiecim was
liberated. It was the time when the
world first heard the word "Holocaust."
Prominent American historian William
Shirer said after the Nuremberg trials:
"The Holocaust was recognized as
Holocaust only after victory opened up
the death camps."
There were three Auschwitz camps.
The first gas chamber was built around
September 1941 for Soviet prisoners of
war. Later, bigger chambers were built
with 6,000 people killed daily. There,
Dr. Josef Mengele made his barbarous
medical experiments on infants and
children.
No one knows the exact number of
people murdered in the camps, but
most were Jews. Trains containing
Jews arrived continuously from the
occupied Europe.
A special page in the history of the
concentration camps is resistance.
Despite severe conditions, the inmates
offered constant resistance to their
oppressors. It took various forms, the
most common being the inmates look-
ing out for each other. There were also
many instances of physical resistance
and sabotage, although even the slight-
est attempt was severely punished.
But nevertheless, one unidentified
Jewish woman, on arriving on Oct. 23,
1943, together with other women,
while being led to the gas chambers,
pulled a pistol out of the hands of an SS
man, shot him and two other escorts.
The other women also resisted, and all
of them were killed by the SS.
A common form was escape, and
many prisoners — they were about 700
— escaped, risking their lives under
very dangerous conditions. Two young
Jews, Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba,
managed to escape to Bratislava and
wrote a detailed report on Auschwitz
that later became known as the
"Auschwitz Protocols." In late 1944, the
prisoners organized an uprising and
destroyed one gas chamber. All of them
fell in the battle.
By the spring of 1943, the massive
killing operations in Auschwitz became
known to the Allies. By that time,
Allied air forces already controlled the
skies of and had.-range to strike
Auschwitz and railway lines leading to
the camps. But no effort was made to
bomb the gas chambers or death
camps, despite numerous urgent
requests by Jewish groups in Britain
and the United States.
After the war, books and articles
probed this issue. One book was by his-
torian David Wyman, The
Abandonment ofJews. Historian Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. wrote in the April 18,
1994, Newsweek "Did FDR Betray the
Jews Or Did He Do More Than
Anyone Else to Save Them?" There are
many opinions on this point — but the
problem remains: Not a single bomb
from Allied air forces destroyed a single
gas chamber or a railway line leading to
the camps.
For many survivors, it is beyond
their capabilities to forget those tragic
days. But they also cannot forget those
days in January 1945, the days when
the gates were swung open by their
liberators.
Former Soviet Army Major Anatoly
Shapiro, who lives now in Brooklyn,
was commander of the battalion that
opened the gates of Auschwitz, bringing
freedom and life to the prisoners. At the
ceremony in New York devoted to the
60th anniversary of liberation of
Auschwitz, Mrs. Hadassah Lieberman,
the wife of Connecticut Sen. Joseph
Lieberman, expressed her gratitude to
the liberators. "My mother was one of
the prisoners of that concentration
camp," she said.
The new generation must know the
tragic history of the Holocaust. I-1
A new PBS miniseries on Auschwitz begins
Wednesday; Jan. 19. See page 31.