Posted on 10/05/2022 7:18:11 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1943, a special transport of 1,196 children and 53 adults arrived at Auschwitz and were gassed shortly thereafter. Thus ended one of the lesser-known tragedies of the Holocaust.
The children were very nearly the last survivors of the Bialystok Ghetto, which had been liquidated in August 1943. Almost all of the inhabitants of the ghetto wound up being sent to the Treblinka Extermination Camp and killed, but over a thousand children were mysteriously separated from their parents and taken away for some as-yet-unknown purpose. (The transport list can be found here.)
At the time, there were tentative negotiations between the Red Cross and the Nazis to trade Jewish children for either German prisoners of war or cold, hard cash. The exact details are unclear, and there’s a great deal of contradictory information about the entire event.
In any case, the Germans selected children from Bialystok, one of the few places in Nazi Europe where there were any Jewish children left alive.
The children, all of them under 16, spoke only Yiddish and Polish. They were in terrible shape, both mentally and physically. One witness later described them...
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
And isn’t that grim.
Puts me in mind of the movie, “Son of Saul,” about a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz charged with herding fellow Jews into the gas chambers (all the while maintaining the façade that they’re being taken for a shower).
Probably the bleakest Holocaust drama I’ve seen since Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful.”
Thank you for this post. It serves to reminds us all that, even among humans, humanity is optional.
Hmmm . . . in Mel Brooks’ “The Producers”, Zero Mostel’s character is named Max Bialystok. I had no idea of the history of the place. I wonder how Brooks came up with that name for that character?
I don't believe this is something Christians would do, but for many politics is more important than following the example of the Lord.
I'm glad they did what they did, but how could any country refuse children?
Good luck, Brooks has been known to lie when asked about such things. For years he'd been telling that the word "blücher," as in "Frau Blücher," the Cloris Leachman character in "Young Frankenstein," sounds like the German word for glue. Which once was commonly made with collagen extracted from animal bones, especially horses. Which is the 'gag' behind why you always hear a horse whinnying every time her name is spoken.
Except it doesn't. "Blücher" is nowhere close to any of the German words commonly used for "glue." Or Yiddish for that matter. In fact, Brooks eventually dropped the pretense and admitted he made up the story. "Blücher" is just an ordinary German surname.
Which puts him in good company. Michael Gambon is famous for telling bald-faced lies when the interviewer is asking banal questions.
I completely agree. Better they should be shot on sight and their rotting corpses left littering the border, as a warning to all who would follow them.
[/sarc]
That’s the first thing I thought of when I read that name.
L
If you've ever been to a real Jewish bakery, you may have noticed next to the bagels are a round treat that has a hole on the top with onions sprinkled inside and baked.
They are called "Bialys", after the Polish city of Bialystok.
One more reason, as if anyone should need another, to read and heed my tagline.
“how could any country refuse children”
An excellent question for FDR re. the children on the ship St Louis of 1939
Treblinka,
Birkenau,
Auswitz,
Sobibor.
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