Tishrei 11, 5777
October 13, 2016
Yom Kippur has come and gone…but the holidays are not over
You have to be in Israel to experience Yom Kippur in all of its glory: families praying in synagogues; children playing in parks; families walking in the carless streets; the sound of hammers constructing sukkas when the meal at night after Yom Kippur is completed.
Yom Kippur has come and gone and the next major holiday, Sukkot, arrives on Sunday evening.
MADA issued this report last night:
2,326 people were “treated” for fainting while fasting; 249 children were injured on their bicycles; 136 of the above were hospitalized.
20 people driving cars in non-Jewish areas were injured; 3 Bedouins were killed in an accident near Dimona.
Palestinian terror on Yom Kippur
Riots and “rock” and Molotov assaults took place all day and night, particularly in eastern Jerusalem. One “rioter”, a terrorist who had just been released from prison, was killed by Israeli forces in Silwan.
166 babies born per day
“Israel is depopulating Gaza”, “Israel is ethnically cleansing Gaza”, “the Palestinian Gazans are being starved”, “the poor Palestinian Gazans are suffering from caloric depletion”, and on and on.
Well, if you can believe the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, the population of Gaza reached 2,000,000 yesterday–and all time record. 4,983 babies were born in the Palestinian state of Gaza in September, 166 per day.
166 per day.
Iranians continue their efforts to infiltrate Europe
And attack Israeli targets. On fake Israeli passports. Three Iranians were captured in Italy yesterday when they were seen acting suspiciously near a Yom Kippur event. Authorities then deported them to Serbia which in turn deported them to Turkey.
Undoubtedly, they are back in Italy or some other European country this morning, again attempting to carry out terrorism against Israeli and Jewish targets.
TODAY’S BLOG
JUDENBURG (PART 7)
From a week ago:
As regular readers of israelstreet know, there were no blogs during most of September as your humble servant and my wife made our way through Europe. What you did not know was that the trip took us through 17 countries from Lisbon, Portugal to Russia via trains, buses, ferries, and ships.
In many ways, it was an exhilarating journey, but in others it was utterly depressing, especially as we encountered the desolate remains of Jewry all over the continent culminating in a visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau. For the next few weeks I will share with you, dear reader, some of what we encountered–often by chance.
TODAY
Inside a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Imagine being herded into this room with 2000 other people.
2000 other naked people, stripped of all dignity, and waiting to die.
And then you see a light in the ceiling:
The light in the ceiling is the hole through which death comes, in form of Zyklon B.
A crematorium at Auschwitz:
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This was one of the early crematoria at Auschwitz. Located right beside the gas chamber in the picture above–it eventually had to be replaced because it took too long to burn two bodies at a time. Eventually, 6000 Jews were being killed per day.
Nothing prepares you for Auschwitz and Birkenau.
Not until you are standing in a gas chamber looking up at the hole through which the Germans dumped Zyklon B; not until you are staring at the scrapings on the walls of the chamber and trying to imagine the unimaginable horror of being one of the 2000 Jews trying frantically to scrape your way out or climbing over dead and dying bodies to find an unfindable exit; not until you try to imagine the awful unimaginable horror of babies choking to death, pregnant women in their death throes giving premature birth, mothers and children dying naked while locked in a final embrace; not until you open your ears and hear the cries, screams, and sounds of vomiting as the gas sweeps over you–not until you are there can you begin to fathom, in the smallest way, what happened to our people.
Everything that we saw before in Lisbon, Barcelona, Chambery, San Marino, Venice, and Krakow was a prelude to Auschwitz and Birkenau. Over the centuries, each time a Jew was made to wear a badge, a hat, an article of distinctive clothing; each time a Jew was forced to convert to Christianity on pain of death; each time a Jew was tortured to “confess” to some nonexistent crime; each time a Jew was burned alive for supposedly poisoning a well or on some other pretext; each time a Jew was forced to live in a ghetto; each of these actions was but one more step toward the ultimate horror of Auschwitz and Birkenau. The butchery of anti-Semitism which had blackened Europe for more than a thousand years had its culmination in the gas chambers and crematoria.
It is a murderous anti-Semitism which still blackens Europe today.
At some point, the mind numbs at Auschwitz and Birkenau. You see Block 10 where Joseph Mengele experimented on twins and eye color, pinning the eyes of hundreds of his victims on his laboratory wall like butterflies. You enter the torture cells where prisoners were beaten or starved until near-death only to then be taken naked outside and shot or hung on hooks for days. You see the mounds of human hair, shaved off Jewish women by the ton–and then sold in Germany to pillow and mattress makers (who knows how many such items are still in Germany today?).
You see walls where Jewish babies were ripped from their mothers and smashed; you see the guard towers from which the guards were empowered to shoot Jews at random–especially if they took a foot toward the dead zone; you see all of this, and you realize that there is no limit to human depravity. Particularly depravity directed against Jews.
And then at Birkenau.
You arrive at the parking lot immediately in front of the archway under which the trains from the Deutsche Reichsbahn national railway came carrying “subhuman” Jews by the hundreds of thousands.
The train tracks leading into Birkenau.
You see one of the cattle cars into which 150 Jews were crammed so tightly that they all had to stand up often for days on end with no food and no water–forced to drink their own urine to survive–many of the elderly and young dying in the car before reaching the extermination camp.
A cattle car that still sits at Birkenau–this one brought 150 Hungarian Jews to their death.
Only to disembark onto a platform where there they were immediately selected–most for immediate death via a short walk to the end of the tracks where they could already see the billowing smoke from the nonstop operation of the crematoria, and smell the stench of burning bodies.
Visitors to the camp walking toward the gas chambers and crematoria–in exactly the same spot where Jews walked to their deaths. On the day we were there, the black cloud hovered directly over the place where one of the crematoria stood.
If they were “lucky enough” to make it off the platform–where numerous Jews were shot and killed (maybe those shot were the lucky ones).
At the end of the tracks: the “undressing room” in the foreground, the gas chamber and crematorium (destroyed) in the background. The building in the far background was a barracks for those who were selected to “live” in order to work–in reality, to be worked to death to support German industries situated at Birkenau.
Back here in Israel, it is difficult to write about Auschwitz and Birkenau without feeling again a wave of nausea. And it is difficult not to feel pride in the fact that Israel now exists to forever make sure what happened in Europe never happens again.
Tomorrow, one last installment. Judenburg.
Addendum: Here is a list of some of those who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau (the graphic is on the wall at Auschwitz).
Remember this is just a list of those who arrived to Auschwitz and Birkenau; millions arrived elsewhere. For example, whereas you see that 300,000 Jews from Poland arrived there, 2.7 million Polish Jews died elsewhere.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.