Powered by WebAds

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Out of Auschwitz

This article should be read by everyone.
One gray, frosty morning, our guards ordered those of us still capable of slave labor to line up and marched us out of the camp. We were to be shunted westward, from Poland into Germany. I was beside myself with excitement — and dread. Salvation somehow seemed closer — yet we also knew that we could be killed at any moment. The goal was to hang on a little longer. I was almost 16 now, and I wanted to live.

We marched from camp to camp, day and night, until we and our torturers began to hear distant explosions that sounded like artillery fire. One afternoon we were strafed by a squadron of Allied fighter planes that mistook our column for Wehrmacht troops. As the Germans hit the dirt, their machine guns blazing in all directions, someone near me yelled, “Run for it!” I kicked off my wooden clogs and sprinted into the forest. There I hid, hungry and cold, for weeks, until I was discovered by a group of American soldiers. The boys who brought me life were not much older than I. They fed me, clothed me, made me a mascot of their regiment and gave me my first real taste of freedom.

Today, the last living survivors of the Holocaust are disappearing one by one. Soon, history will speak about Auschwitz with the impersonal voice of researchers and novelists at best, and at worst in the malevolent register of revisionists and falsifiers who call the Nazi Final Solution a myth. This process has already begun.

And it is why those of us who survived have a duty to transmit to humankind the memory of what we endured in body and soul, to tell our children that the fanaticism and violence that nearly destroyed our universe have the power to enflame theirs, too. The fury of the Haitian earthquake, which has taken more than 200,000 lives, teaches us how cruel nature can be to man. The Holocaust, which destroyed a people, teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man when he loses his moral compass and his reason.
Read the whole thing.

2 Comments:

At 1:28 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

Hi Carl.
Amazing story ,he was one of the "Lucky" ones.
But having survived has been for some an evil thing that you carry within you.
Some have done insane things to survive.
My in law uncle (Jewish) was together with his mother survivors of the camps ,he never wants to talk about it he only says this was hell on earth.
But it's up to the living to make sure people don't forget what happened.
Now that I'm reading lately so much about the role of the grand Mufti his role in all this it angers me tremendously that he got away with it.
There should be no rest until the truth is told to every one about criminals like this!
To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or of principle. Confucius
Will.

 
At 11:53 AM, Blogger Chrysler 300M said...

my father was born in Lodz, he was liberated in April 1945 in Kaufering and was the only survivor of his family

http://www.kaufering.com/overview.html

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauLiberation/KauferingIVLiberation.html

 

Post a Comment

<< Home

Google