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Our Crime Was Being Jewish
For someone who read through about a dozen individual memoirs from survivors, and a compilation as well of historical documents by inmates of Warsaw ghetto and more, during last couple of years, apart from being familiar over years with more, this book brings trepidation about immersing oneself again in the horrors perpetrated by humans who chose to turn themselves into ghouls and subject others to horrors, and a whole system that yoked them and encouraged them into this, when the opposite choice - of raising oneself nobly higher - is always possible, and while the trepidation about beginning reading this is quite real, well, one one can only say, these were humans and if one joins those that prefer denying they existed, .... no, one cant! This is the least one can do, and most, not forgetting.
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At that, some of it should be familiar, and already in preface there is the name of Ruth Webber, seems familiar. Did one read her memoir? One will know, as one reads.
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As one reads foreword, one finds this somewhat cryptic, until later, within reading a page or turning to the second.
"Pay attention to Pitch’s subtle, deliberate method; the book is fragmented, deliberately so. He has refused to impose an order of the fragments of testimonies. Pitch does not use chronology as his organizing principle, nor does he employ geographic groupings of experiences, region by region. Insights build on insights and the compiler—one can neither quite call him an author nor an editor, yet he surely is both—adds not a word to the testimonies that have been given. He presumes that fragment after fragment will not yield a fragmented understanding, but something far more integrated.
As one reads foreword, one finds this somewhat cryptic, until later, within reading a page or turning to the second.
"Pay attention to Pitch’s subtle, deliberate method; the book is fragmented, deliberately so. He has refused to impose an order of the fragments of testimonies. Pitch does not use chronology as his organizing principle, nor does he employ geographic groupings of experiences, region by region. Insights build on insights and the compiler—one can neither quite call him an author nor an editor, yet he surely is both—adds not a word to the testimonies that have been given. He presumes that fragment after fragment will not yield a fragmented understanding, but something far more integrated.
"And he is right."
And yes, that's correct. Oh, arranging by timeline and/or regions would've been good too, but lack thereof makes it universal, as it indeed was. Only, this way its less a book for someone's first introduction to holocaust than for one who, say, has read William Shirer's Rise And Fall of The Third Reich, or Upton Sinclair's World's End series, and has a clue. But as it is, this is genuine, since not a single word is added by the author-compiler-editor.
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"THIS BOOK WAS PROMPTED BY revolting anti-Semitism in France, epitomized by the antics of a so-called comedian. He ridicules the Holocaust in a skit named Shoananas, and makes fun of a Frenchman, who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, only because he was Jewish. Yet his audiences roar with laughter. Ignorance of history cannot be justified by his birth long after the Holocaust. He is just the latest in a long line of anti-Semites, spanning thousands of years, who have targeted Jews for the “crime of being Jewish.”"
"THIS BOOK WAS PROMPTED BY revolting anti-Semitism in France, epitomized by the antics of a so-called comedian. He ridicules the Holocaust in a skit named Shoananas, and makes fun of a Frenchman, who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, only because he was Jewish. Yet his audiences roar with laughter. Ignorance of history cannot be justified by his birth long after the Holocaust. He is just the latest in a long line of anti-Semites, spanning thousands of years, who have targeted Jews for the “crime of being Jewish.”"
"“You heard everybody say, ‘We’ve got to survive and tell the world what is going on.’”
—Ruth Webber, Survivor
"People who say the Holocaust is a hoax cannot answer an elderly survivor who asked me, “If the Holocaust never happened, then where is my family?”"
"Women barricaded themselves indoors to prevent rape by Russian liberators who said, “We liberated you, but now you don’t want to love us?”"
"No one can dispute the chilling words of the commandant of Auschwitz, who told a postwar courtroom before he was hanged, that millions were killed during his reign of terror. Inmates, telling their stories within, wept when recalling how they had seen babies burned alive, and parents and siblings led off to their deaths under the whips of guards and the snaps of ferocious dogs. Within these pages are the damning testimonies from the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, better known as the War Crimes Trials, and later from the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here are the details of those who sobbed while telling courts in Germany and Israel of their travails during the Holocaust. Personal narratives inside this book describe sights so grotesque that the storytellers would not have believed they happened if they had not seen them with their own eyes. It would have been incomprehensible to imagine that atrocities took place on such a scale."
"In the words of a lady who spoke to a man about to escape from a French train bound for Auschwitz, where she was condemned to the incinerator, “You must do it! If you get out maybe you can tell the story. Who else will tell it?”"
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"I commanded Auschwitz until December 1, 1943, and estimate that at least 2.5 million victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning and at least another half a million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about three million. This figure represents about 70 percent or 80 percent of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries.
—Rudolf Höss, Nuremberg trials, vol. 11, 4/15/1946; The Avalon Project, Yale University"
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"When somebody comes over to me after I speak in a school and tells me proudly, “I cannot read this book. I cannot go to a movie to see anything to do with the Holocaust because it’s too sad,” don’t expect me to give you a pat on your shoulder. If we could live it, you can watch it.
—Cecilie Klein-Pollack in an interview with Sandra Bradley for the USHMM film Testimony, RG-50.042*-0018"
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"Mauthausen [concentration camp in] Austria was a slaughterhouse for human beings when we liberated it on May 5, 1945. I was with the Eleventh Army Division, C Battery, 492nd Armored Field Artillery Battalion. It was such a horror that I chose not to discuss it for about thirty years. I do not want this overshadowed by the repugnant neo-Nazi groups who say this thing did not happen. ... The Nazis had many marched out before we got there, to get them out of our hands. We saw some on the road about three days before, in their gray and white striped uniforms and the word Jude on their chests. They were emaciated, weighing about 60–70 pounds, covered in filth, smelling, in poor shape, and couldn’t move. We gave them our C and K rations, but some of them went into convulsions. Then our medical people fed them intravenously.
"Mauthausen [concentration camp in] Austria was a slaughterhouse for human beings when we liberated it on May 5, 1945. I was with the Eleventh Army Division, C Battery, 492nd Armored Field Artillery Battalion. It was such a horror that I chose not to discuss it for about thirty years. I do not want this overshadowed by the repugnant neo-Nazi groups who say this thing did not happen. ... The Nazis had many marched out before we got there, to get them out of our hands. We saw some on the road about three days before, in their gray and white striped uniforms and the word Jude on their chests. They were emaciated, weighing about 60–70 pounds, covered in filth, smelling, in poor shape, and couldn’t move. We gave them our C and K rations, but some of them went into convulsions. Then our medical people fed them intravenously.
—Dix Lathrop; USHMM, RG-50.234.0119"
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"I remember the date because January 6 was a Polish Catholic holiday, and that’s when they annihilated the rest of the Jews from the Copernicus school. I personally witnessed it. I was working in a factory in Minsk, but had documents from the underground allowing me to be on the streets after the 7:00 p.m. curfew, when we carried out our resistance activities. That morning we heard shooting, put on our factory fire brigade helmets, and raced to help put out the fire. The remnants of Minsk’s Jewish population was housed in the Copernicus school, now on fire, with smoke belching out. The roof was on the verge of collapse. Uniformed Germans, Latvians, security, and Polish police were shooting at the windows, aiming to kill anyone trying to escape. I saw partially burned bodies on the ledges of windows. Next to the school were two piles of bodies, six or seven feet high. A mother tried to throw her child out the window when someone shot her dead. A few steps from me a German, six feet plus, weighing about 250 pounds, took a little Jewish girl by the hand, led her to a wall, sat her down, even corrected her posture, and then moved back a few steps and shot her in the head. That atrocity stayed with me for many, many, many years after the war. At a moment like that, one is ready to do anything. But what could I do? Anything I did then would have resulted in all of us being killed. I could only pay them back through my acts in the underground. Too often, one hears the Holocaust never happened. Well, here is one eyewitness who saw what was going on and what happened.
—Steven Galezewski; USHMM, RG-50.030*0377"
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"In the last days of December 1941, SS Franz Murer, a.k.a. the Butcher of Vilnius, gave a present to the ghetto: a carload of shoes belonging to the Jews executed at Ponary was brought into the ghetto. He sent these old shoes as a gift to the ghetto. Among them I recognized my mother’s.
—Abram Suzkever, Nuremberg trials, vol. 8, 2/27/1946; The Avalon Project, Yale University"
"After Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, I went to school in Kosheetza, Czechoslovakia. It was quite an experience. I was eight, and apart from one other boy, I was the only Jew in my whole school. To this day I’m really sad to say I find it so difficult to understand why we were so disliked. We looked just like the rest of the kids. We did not appear Jewish in any way. We didn’t wear hats or yarmulkes or have long hair or anything like that. My only mark was my tattoo number. That branded me as a Jew. I don’t think this other fellow had a number from any camp, but he was Jewish, and they knew it. Maybe he looked more Jewish than I did, if there’s such a thing. Even at that age, the boys, who were eight, nine, or ten, were out there to beat us up. Every day after school, they waited for us. We had to run, not for our lives, because we were not old enough to really do that kind of harm to each other, but we had to run because we were going to be beaten up.
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"Crematorium 3’s crew refused to obey orders and barricaded themselves inside the living quarters. They put their straw mattresses to the torch and exchanged fire with the SS guards, using small weapons in their possession. The guards got reinforcements, and when it was over the crematorium was a gutted shell with several hundred prisoners dead. But the crew of crematorium 1 thought the uprising had begun. After throwing their German kapo into the burning furnace, they cut barbed wire enclosing the crematorium and dispersed to the Vistula River. The SS gave chase and every single one of the several hundred prisoners was hunted down and killed. Several days later, the crew of crematorium 2 was gassed and all that remained of the approximately fifteen hundred strong Birkenau Sonderkommandos was the crematorium 4 crew of less than one hundred men. The three crematoriums were then blown up and dismembered. Number 4 was left intact until final evacuation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. In the sudden evacuation, the remaining Sonderkommandos managed to get intermingled with the general camp population and share their fate and survival chances. I was told after the war that about thirty or forty of them survived the death marches.
—Philip Goldstein; USHMM, RG-50.233*0037"
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"An individual crawled on his hands and knees out of one group at Dachau and said, “Thank God. Americans!” I told him to come with me. My objective was Munich. I was taken to a castle. Inside was a piano. He asked if he could play, which he did. He was a genius. The next day he came to my headquarters and asked if he could leave for his home nearby to see if anyone from his family was alive. I never saw him again.
"An individual crawled on his hands and knees out of one group at Dachau and said, “Thank God. Americans!” I told him to come with me. My objective was Munich. I was taken to a castle. Inside was a piano. He asked if he could play, which he did. He was a genius. The next day he came to my headquarters and asked if he could leave for his home nearby to see if anyone from his family was alive. I never saw him again.
—Ralph Miles; USHMM/University of California, Los Angeles, RG-50.005*0043"
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"After Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, I went to school in Kosheetza, Czechoslovakia. It was quite an experience. I was eight, and apart from one other boy, I was the only Jew in my whole school. To this day I’m really sad to say I find it so difficult to understand why we were so disliked. We looked just like the rest of the kids. We did not appear Jewish in any way. We didn’t wear hats or yarmulkes or have long hair or anything like that. My only mark was my tattoo number. That branded me as a Jew. I don’t think this other fellow had a number from any camp, but he was Jewish, and they knew it. Maybe he looked more Jewish than I did, if there’s such a thing. Even at that age, the boys, who were eight, nine, or ten, were out there to beat us up. Every day after school, they waited for us. We had to run, not for our lives, because we were not old enough to really do that kind of harm to each other, but we had to run because we were going to be beaten up.
—Rene Slotkin; USHMM, made possible by a grant from Jeff and Toby Herr, RG-50.549.02*0008"
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April 26, 2020 -
December 12, 2020 - December 13, 2020 -
Purchased January 24, 2021
Kindle Edition, 360 pages
Published April 28th 2015
by Skyhorse Publishing
ASIN:- B00WGX4OWY
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