want to do.
Posted on 01/27/2005 4:25:38 PM PST by SandRat
The Holocaust horrors are unspeakable. The images of the Auschwitz death camp are indelible. Dr. Klara Swimmer speaks nonetheless.
"You cannot imagine the pain, the suffering, and the smell," says the 80-year-old retired physician. She was a teenage Hungarian Jew when she entered the camp of the damned.
Bill Kugelman, a Polish-born Jew, was interned behind the wire fences of Auschwitz when the first Hungarians arrived.
He recalls the naked body of a young girl thrown from the train onto a heap of corpses.
"She was blue all over," says Kugelman, also 80. "She was all blue," he repeats. His voice goes quiet, as if trying to shake off the unshakable.
Today the world recalls the horrific crime known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. These two Tucsonans know the story intimately. It was 60 years ago today that Russian soldiers liberated the camp in Poland.
Kugelman and Swimmer were not in Auschwitz when its prisoners were freed. They had been transferred to other camps and would not see freedom until later.
Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi extermination centers, was a series of work camps, gas chambers and human ovens. An estimated 1.5 million people - Poles, European Jews, Gypsies, Russian prisoners of war, homosexuals, the physically disabled, elderly, children and pregnant women - were killed or died from disease, cold or hopelessness at Auschwitz.
Tuesday, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder remembered the victims, promising that Germany will maintain its "moral obligation" to keep alive the memory of his country's crimes.
"I express my shame in the face of those who were murdered - and above all you, who survived the hell of the concentration camps," Schroeder said during a Berlin ceremony, The Associated Press reported.
By the time the Allies smashed Adolf Hitler, his death machine killed an estimated 6 million Jews and several million other people, each one considered unwanted and a threat to the Nazi state.
Swimmer's mother was one of Auschwitz's dead. Her father died in a German labor camp - something Swimmer didn't learn until years later.
The Germans shipped Swimmer and her mother in overcrowded train cars with other starving, scared Hungarian Jews in June 1944. They did not see each other after they stepped off the train. A Nazi officer randomly selected who would die and who would live in a human-made hell.
A peculiar smell - one she'll never forget - slammed into the 19-year-old Swimmer. Guards were barking orders. Their dogs were yelping and snapping at the prisoners, who had traveled for three days without food and water.
She saw the flames of the crematoriums. She smelled human flesh burning.
It was the smell of death.
That smell hovered over Auschwitz and lingered for years in Kugelman's memory.
Kugelman had already spent several years in German work camps when he was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in late 1943.
He was 15 years old in September 1939, when the Germans invaded his small Polish city. The Germans made him work in Polish factories that produced furniture and shoes for German civilians and chemicals for the German army. At Birkenau, a large, new addition to Auschwitz, he worked in the shoe shop.
He outlived the death factory. So would his mother and two of three siblings; a brother did not.
He considers his family lucky to survive nearly intact. "We were an exceptional case," he said.
The mental pictures of the dead and near dead continue to live with Kugelman, who came to Tucson nearly 40 years ago and opened three stores, Zev's Famous Brands Shoes.
With the smell, noises and scenes of death permanently etched in his soul, Kugelman could not talk about Auschwitz and the Holocaust for 40 years. He does now in schools and in public gatherings.
Swimmer talks, also, to high school students and adults.
For both, the experience is painful. Still, they speak about the unimaginable evil. The dead demand it.
Groups and school classes can request a Holocaust survivor speaker by calling Jane Scott at the Jewish Community Relations Council at 577-9393.
By sharing the unimaginable with younger generations, Swimmer's and Kugelman's nightmares of Auschwitz will not be forgotten.
want to do.
TellittotheGerman.I am tired of being to of the holocaust like we did it.
I did a tour in Israel and the guide said "Americans caused and allowed the holocaust."
That is BS and the jews never, ever said thank you.
Thanks for the ping!
Bump!
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