Day 7: Not as The Jews had Waited.
These Jews are en-route toward Chelmno and its Gassing facility. They are the Jews of Lodz and they are, hopefully, unaware of what is about to greet them. True! There were stories of excess and killing, but the Jewish World could not have considered such systematic a Genocide was planned for their People. How could Civilisation be awake to such a Catastrophe?
1935 August 16th. Friday “..solution of ..Jewish question ..is ..business of ..Fuhrer ..not ..individuals.” Heinrich Himmler.
In the words of the man who knew what Hitler had planned, and which Himmler himself had augmented in line with Hitler’s demands, the World is given evidence of that Truth. What Himmler proposed would be an un-written page in our History had been underscored by Hitler’s demand to shield The Final Solution from view, screened from the German people, and then the World ostensibly.
1941 August 16th. 298 Rassainiai Jewish Women and Their Children are murdered.
It is a daily procession of figures, numbers crunching the senses relating to the Slaughter of innocent Jews in The Holocaust. The task for all Historians has been to assess the impact this was having at a time when knowledge was perhaps scant but available. Information about isolated incidents were all adding to a credible evidence of an assault upon the integrity and the entirety of The Jewish People. From the margins as we look in, it might appear easy to accept that Hitler had got his wish and could bury the Community of Judaism amidst the conflagration that is War.
“..For a Catholic ..anti-Semitism is ..an offense against charity. We are bound to Israel ..tied to it.” Francois Mauriac.
He was immensely wrong given the proximity of the Slaughter to People who witnessed it all, the Intelligence gathering network of the Allied powers who had gathered it all and of course the Church whose confessionals rang with the truth of it all! What a Catholic Priest did not know, within earshot of the all the Churches of Europe, would have been very little!
1943 August 16th. The Bialystok Ghetto Liquidation has commenced.
Barely 300 Ghetto fighters, who had held out for several weeks, are finally captured and are sent to the Majdanek Death Camp. Amongst those who refused to surrender was Mordechai Tenenbaum who committed suicide. The Judenrate Chairman, Ephraim Barasz is sent to the Treblinka Death Camp. Wherever Resistance might persist, the Nazi machinery of terror is on hand to stamp it out with all means necessary, both swiftly and with merciless brutality.
A Book a Day, or so of suggested reading!
9. Hoess, Rudolf Kommandant at Auschwitz.
