So Sad. Warsaw Ghetto: A survivor's tale

One can't even begin to imagine what they went through. Reading about it's one thing but Living It......So Wicked and Cruel.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18924842

Re: So Sad. Warsaw Ghetto: A survivor's tale

Rox, I've read a lot on this and had a Jewish friend who told me horrific stories about her family.
Cowardly acts, for which I can never understand. Sick, disabled, old and children first to the chambers.

Re: So Sad. Warsaw Ghetto: A survivor's tale

I just heard Janina Dawidowicz speaking on the 'Witness' programme on Radio 4 .

My friend's parents were Austrian Jews and with the exception of an aunt were the only members of their large family to escape the death camps .

Such testaments really are 'the stuff of nightmares'...

Re: So Sad. Warsaw Ghetto: A survivor's tale

When I was a child, we regularly had a visitor with a foreign accent and her name was Maria. I loved her and, in my innocence, I one day asked her what the mark was on her wrist.

It was a PoW tattoo number. She was Polish and survived the camp, but I don't know which one she was in. I think it was Auswich.

A few years later I found some books that my dad had, which he'd secreted away. Books were valuable to us as a family and dad encouraged us to read, but he'd hidden these for a reason, until I found them.

There was one book showing black and white photos of people who had been tortured, starved, turned into slaves until they dropped dead from hunger. Skeletons, but still alive - just. Men, women and children had to march naked in the snow and, those that didn't freeze or starve to death, went to the "showers." The showers with no water, only gas. There were photos of what the SS and Nazis did to people to experiment, and those are too shocking for me to describe here, but the saddest thing of all is that because of those "experiments" there was to some degree great medical advancement.

It's almost 70 years since WWII ended, just four years before I was born and the German people are still trying to live down what happened.

Such cruelty can not be comprehended, yet it did happen, and must not be forgotten and must never happen again.

I worked with Ingrid in Berlin and she told me that the ordinary people truly did not know what was going on. She, as a child, caught rats in bins to eat when Berlin was blockaded and no food could get through.

If you've never seen the film "The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas," then you really should.

Re: So Sad. Warsaw Ghetto: A survivor's tale

I have read the book and seen the film "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas", it is indeed eye opening. It is impossible, for me at least, to even contemplate how any human being could do such a wicked and evil thing.

Re: So Sad. Warsaw Ghetto: A survivor's tale

Why didn't the Jews fight back? I know that the Gestapo were omnipotent and that there was really very little hope for the occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto but the bottom line was death so why would they not organize themselves into some form of resistance?
If the Nazis had won the Battle of Britain and declared the Cockneys to be eliminated do you really think that they would have gone gently into that good night? (apologies to Dylan Thomas)

Re: So Sad. Warsaw Ghetto: A survivor's tale

The cockneys are not a race Hu99, although there are plenty of cockneys who are jewish or have jewish origins in the East End of London.
Apart from pockets of resistance, I think it would have been impossible for the jewish people to successfully resist the power of the German millitary. What millitary force did the jews have in Europe have? Some were lucky enough to flee and get away to a safe country, but it was a time of great racial hatred, suspicion, fear and prejudice - and Hitler's "grand plan of extermination" in favour of a pure "master race" was ruthless and highly organised. What was going on was not widely broadcast and many people (jews included) did not believe what was happening, nor on what a huge scale. Even today, I come across younger people who doubt the history of what happened.
My dad was a survivor of a work camp in Poland. He was a British jew in the army who was captured in France and spent almost 4 years in captivity, terrified of what might happen. From Poland he was moved into various p.o.w. camps in Germany. When the Americans came into the final camp towards the end of the war the survivors were walking skeletons. My dad weighed less than 5 stones when he was freed and he was one of the lucky ones. He told me that the Americans gave weapons to them. They then turned their backs while prisoners killed the guards who had remained in the camp.
Terrible inhuman times.

Re: So Sad. Warsaw Ghetto: A survivor's tale

I didn't say that they were, I was just saying that if they were singled out for extermination you can be damn sure they would have fought to the death to prevent the Nazis from achieving their goal.
I'm not implying that it would even have been possible for the Jews to fight back but the alternative was certain death. Some joined the sonderkommandos in order to save their own lives while working for the Nazis to aid the expedient extermination of their fellow Jews.

Re: So Sad. Warsaw Ghetto: A survivor's tale

Do you mean the SS sonderkommando or the death camp sonderkommando made up of Jewish prisoners in the camps. The jewish prisoners did not simply join the sonderkommando to stay alive - they had no say in the matter other than immediate death for refusal - Able bodied prisoners were allocated to the role of sonderkommando - there was no choice and it was not an alternative to death - when their turn came round they died as well.

Re: So Sad. Warsaw Ghetto: A survivor's tale

By why would they acquiesce?