Posted on 05/12/2003 3:17:02 AM PDT by Tarsk
Auschwitz survivor tells students about concentration camp horrors
By Jackie Beranek , Herald-Standard 05/12/2003
When she turned 14 she was a thriving teenage girl living in Czechoslovakia with her mother, father and seven siblings
When she turned 15 she was an emaciated 60-pound orphan, who had spent the last year of her life in a Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland, witnessing the attempted genocide of Jews.
There was total silence in the audience as Violet Weinberger of Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, told her story to upperclassmen at Frazier Senior High School.
Weinberger, now 73, timidly told students that the holocaust changed her life forever, as she wiped tears from her eyes and explained why she considers America her home.
"When I was not much younger than you the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia," Weinberger said. "It was the start of the tragedy for the Jewish people."
Weinberger said it was during World War II when Adolph Hitler was the Fuhrer or leader of the German National Socialist (Nazi) Party that hatred of the Jewish people grew.
"It was the very beginning of anti-Semitism and hatred in 1938 and later on everything was taken from the Jewish people," she said. "I know that some people say that the holocaust never happen but I am here to tell you that it did."
Weinberger explained to the students that Hitler preached a racist brand of fascism and promised to overturn the Versailles Treaty and secure additional Lebensraum (living space) for the German people, who he said deserved more as members of a superior race.
Weinberger said Hitler threatened war to annex the western border area of Czechoslovakia in September 1938 and less than six months later he seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia.
According to historical accounts, in the early morning hours of Sept. 1, 1939, the German armies marched into Poland and on Sept. 3 the British and French surprised Hitler by declaring war on Germany, but the British and French soldiers did not assist the Polish people.
Weinberger said when the war ended in 1945 the entire Jewish secular and religious culture in Europe had been obliterated, and from 5.6 million to 5.9 million Jews had been exterminated. Some 1.5 million of the victims were children.
"We were only men, women and children, not warriors," Weinberger said. "One minute we were living in our house and the next minute we were forced to the ghetto where we were under house arrest and they took away our professions.
Weinberger said her older sister was a doctor at the time and was thrown out of the hospital where she worked. She also said that Jewish students were no longer allowed to attend colleges, universities or grade school.
"A short time later we were taken to the train station and herded into cattle cars and taken by train to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
"We stood the entire trip because there were so many people in the cattle car that there was no where to sit. There was no food. We only had one bucket of water and one bucket for waste. The destination was unknown to us and we road all day and all night before the train stopped."
Weinberger said when the train finally stopped the doors opened and Nazi soldiers with huge K-9 dogs began to yell and curse at the prisoners.
"Everyone started to push and shove and the dogs were jumping all over us," she said. "The Nazis ordered the sick and handicapped to one side, the mothers with dead babies to another side and healthy women and girls to another side and did the same with the men.
"Unfortunately my father and brother went one way, my dear sister who was married and a teacher and had a gorgeous little 3-year-old daughter were pushed aside and we never saw them again."
Weinberger said the Nazis selected the younger women like her mother and her sisters to work in the camp but they didn't know that the women were related.
"If they had know that we were mother and daughters they wouldn't have allowed it," said Weinberger. "They made us line up, five people in a row, and made us walk from the railroad station to a huge barracks and made us strip down completely, shaved off our hair and gave us an inmates uniform with a number on it."
Weinberger said the prisoners lived like that for a year.
"We only got what they called coffee in the morning but it really wasn't coffee it was just some kind of brown water," she said. "We didn't get any lunch and for supper we got what they called beet soup but again it was just some kind of broth with dirt in it. We did, however, get a half a slice of bread with margarine with it though.
"We worked 12 hours a day and we were starving. We had to walk to the railroad station in the morning to pick up the heavy uniforms and walk back to the railroad station in the evening to take them back. It was a long way and the bundles were so heavy. I actually think they weighed more than I did."
Weinberger said there wasn't enough room to sleep at night so the women slept sitting up on a wooden plank.
"We were sent out to work every day and we were repairing the Nazi uniforms," said Weinberger. "The man we worked for was nice, but the soldiers wanted him to beat us to make us work harder.
"He never beat us, but he pretended to. When he saw the Nazis coming he would crack the whip on the tables so it would sound like he was beating us."
Weinberger said she later found out that her sister, niece, father and brother were killed in the gas chamber.
"They were so innocent," she said. "They were told that they had to take a shower in order to be deloused. The Nazis herded them into the gas chamber, where they even played music so they wouldn't suspect what was about to happen to them."
Weinberger said after the people were gassed some of the bodies were dragged out from the gas chambers and burned in the crematorium while others were piled up outside the gas chamber and burned in an open pit.
"I remember the flames were sky high like a towering inferno," she said. "You could see the fire from miles and the smell was awful, but there was nothing we could do about it. This went on 24 hours a day, seven days a week for years we were told."
Weinberger said as the months dragged on people were hanged for no good reason.
"If they were too sick to work or if they looked at the Nazis the wrong way in the morning they were killed," she said. "They were innocent people. People were shot, tortured and starved to death."
Weinberger said her mother was only 50 years old when she contracted typhoid fever at Auschwitz and died.
"My mother and one sister died because we were in such close contact with each other and we didn't have the proper nutrition or sanitary conditions," Weinberger said. "We had to stand for roll call from 4 to 6 a.m. outside every day and it didn't matter if it was hot or cold, you stood."
Weinberger said anyone who could not stand was taken away and never returned.
"We didn't have a sweater or a coat, no pillow or blanket, nothing to protect us from the cold. They were torturing us and they knew it and they didn't care."
After the war, Weinberger's sister contacted her mother's sister who had relocated from Poland to the United States and her aunt wrote a letter to the United States government and vouched for her and her surviving sisters.
"When we were freed, we didn't have an idea of what to do," Weinberger said. "Thankfully, our aunt agreed to bring us to America."
Weinberger said she has never been back to Czechoslovakia.
"This is my country, not that," she said. "I remember every day what happened to me, but my life is now in the United States."
Weinberger said one of her last memories of her mother is sitting on the ground and the 14-year-old telling her mother that she was going to die.
"I said mother I know I'm going to die and she said 'no you are not going to die. You are going to go back to Czechoslovakia and be with you aunts, uncles and cousins.'"
Weinberger said out of all of her extended family only a handful of relatives actually came back from the concentration camps.
©The Herald Standard 2003
Never.
Warriors are merely men women and children who have decided it is better to struggle against what will kill one than to meekly submit. Had every Jew who was exterminated in the camps decided to take at least one SS member with them in their death then in very short order the SS would have run out of troops. Of course they would have needed arms to effectively accomplish this goal but they had none due to the strict laws against Jews possessing firearms and the gun registration in effect in most European nations.
You are of course correct. It happened in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and so many other places. The only real preventative is an a population well enough armed to provide a balance of power that would make such actions too costly for the perpetrators. Such a balance of power is whatr provides peace and stability.
L
I know, and it disgusts me. Sometimes, I believe I can identify people who are just like them; they surround me. They prefer to stick their heads in the sand, as they watch wrongdoing in our country, our schools, and our communities. How many of them, I wonder, would turn in a "Jew" if it meant saving their own skin, regardless of the evilness of the act? I shudder to think. Those who were guilty of acts of complictness in Nazi Germany are in America, too; just their names are different.
Those other resistance movements had rural drop zones for aircraft delivered supplies. They also had long established contacts with the allied inteligence agencies which provided some additional pressure to get them supplies. Further, the allies did not view any Jewish underground in the Warsaw Ghetto as being able to mount anything even slightly beyond token resistance to the German forces.
They still are antiwar...
They were for sure true works of Satan, attacking secular and religious Jewish credentials as well as faith through the antisemitic catalyst. By denying Jews an intermediary and mediator in the disputes and hate, they actualy attemtped to drive a stake in the role of Christianity too.
Grotesqueness is the word for the sheer orgy of pigs without any conscious nor questioning.
As for the complicitness, I think it is more than that, because Germans could have fled their country if it was going to force them to do evil things long before. They did not, they just waited for the moment and chance to squeeze when they could, long in advance, relishing at it. It is chilling to see nowadays Germans and French denouncing US power to that effect.
In any case, Germans never pay debts, and hence their attitude with respect to terrorism and their false tolerance. It is quite profitable in fact when one supports the tolerance of terrorists, there is no real debt to pay in there. Complicit? Afraid to act against their government? Gibberish! Their government was showering them with wonders in their names! It was not hate that drove them, but lust and "love" for the Aryan man and hope in him.
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