I've learned something new, too. I did know that Gentile Poles and other Slavic people were treated terribly by the Nazis, but the second number below still surprised me:
"Germans were to receive 2,613 kilocalories, Poles 699 and Jews only 184.
It is quite clear that one cannot survive long on 184 calories. But for how long can you survive on 699 calories? And, if you do, what state of health could you expect. Horrible, just horrible. No matter how much I've read and what I've heard, details such as this pain me.
Until I lived in Central Europe and visited some of these infamous sites and talked to old survivors (Gentiles and Jews alike), I was not aware of the full extent of the extermination machine. Jews were singled out for extermination, but Poles were also to be eliminated. They were considered “subhuman”. Auschwitz was, initially, set up to accommodate the Poles.
One shocking discovery, at least for me, was to realize that Westerners, for the most part, do not realize that there were two Warsaw uprisings: the Warsaw Ghetto one, and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
Here’s an interesting site with more information about the Uprising: http://www.warsawuprising.com/zegota.htm.
It is quite clear that one cannot survive long on 184 calories. But for how long can you survive on 699 calories? And, if you do, what state of health could you expect. Horrible, just horrible. No matter how much I've read and what I've heard, details such as this pain me.
When I was a kid I knew a Dutch couple that met in a German concentration camp. When they were liberated, the husband - a tall six foot three inch man - weighed 90 some pounds. His wife told me that her smoking habit helped keep her alive - she held off the terror by her endless search for thrown away cigarette butts...
Somehow, all of us need to figure out a way to stop the type of evil that grew and festered in Germany. Understand it - know the soil - know how to stop it... It's not that we talk about the Holocaust too much - it's that we don't talk about it enough.