On Dec 28, 5:34 am, The Revd <peel...@degenerate.Grik> wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Dec 2011 08:27:38 -0500, Colanth <cola...@pern.invalid>
> wrote:
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> >On Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:02:42 -0800 (PST), SkyEyes <
skyey...@cox.net>
> >wrote:
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> >>On Dec 27, 2:11 pm, The Revd <peel...@degenerate.Grik> wrote:
> >>> What fucking "genocide"? It never happened.
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> >>Funny; I lived in [then West] Germany for four years, and I talked to
> >>plenty of people who participated in it.
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> Funny; plenty of people willing to openly admit to their
> participation in something that never happened.
>
The Holocaust did happen.
The following article explains how it affected one family.
The day the Nazis came for my father's family
by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
April 7, 1994
http://www.jeffjacoby.com/864/the-day-the-nazis-came-for-my-fathers-family
FIFTY YEARS AGO this week, the Nazis came for my father's family.
The Jakubovics -- there were seven of them in the house -- were
awakened before dawn when the SS pounded on their window. Like the
other Jews in Legina, a village on the Czechoslovak-Hungarian border,
they were ordered to gather their belongings and prepare to leave at
once.
Thirty minutes later they were put on horse-drawn wagons and carted
out of Legina. In the nearest large Hungarian town, a place called
Satoraljaujhely, Jews from all over the region were being herded into
a ghetto. The walls were still going up around it as the Jakubovic
family arrived.
It was the day after Passover, the ancient Jewish festival celebrating
freedom and redemption.
For several weeks the ghetto grew increasingly crowded as more and
more Jews were brought in. Then it began to empty, as Jews were taken
out.
About 3,000 at a time, they were marched to the train station. The
waiting boxcars were filled with families. The doors were chained and
locked. There were no seats inside, no windows, no water. The only
toilet was a bucket on the floor.
For three days, the train moved -- three days of suffocation, thirst,
and filth. When it stopped, David and Leah Jakubovic and their five
youngest children, ages 21 to 8 -- Franceska, Markus, Zoltan, Yrvin,
and Alice -- were in Auschwitz.
* * *
A few years ago, I decided to chart a family tree.
I unrolled a great length of blank wrapping paper and began with my
father's four grandparents, the Weisses and the Jakubovics, writing
their names in the center. Those two couples had a total of 12
children, most of them born between 1880 and 1910. I was able to track
down the names of 11 -- two of them being David Jakubovic and Leah
Weiss, who married each other -- and inscribed them on the sheet.
I learned the names of spouses and filled them in. Then the names of
their children, and their children's spouses, and their children. I
traced the genealogy as best as I could through five generations,
handwriting names and dates on my big piece of wrapping paper.
It was more paper than I needed. This family tree has stumps where
branches ought to be. It gets narrower, not wider, as it grows. One
line after another stops abruptly, and all with a similar date
notation.
Alexander Weiss, wife Kati, son Tomasz -- d. 1942.
Regina Jakubovic, husband Herschel, five daughters -- d. 1944.
Gizella Weiss, husband surnamed Kraus -- d. 1944.
Freida Weiss, sons Robert, Laszlo, Mihaly -- d. 1944.
Leopold Weiss, wife Yolana, four children -- d. 1942.
I have no faces to put to these names, no stories to tell about them,
no remarks to attribute to them, no heirlooms to connect to them. All
I know is that they were my father's aunts, uncles, and cousins, and
like two out of every three Jews alive in Europe in 1938, they were
dead before 1946.
If I lose my piece of paper, there will be nothing to prove they ever
existed.
* * *
This is how my father, who with rare exceptions speaks about the
Holocaust only when he is asked, remembers his first day in Auschwitz:
"We arrived in Birkenau" -- part of the Auschwitz complex -- "on
Sunday morning. It was still dark, so it must have been before 5
o'clock. All of a sudden the train stops. The doors open. People
started shouting and dogs were barking. There were guards yelling
'Raus! Raus!' " -- 'Out! Out!'
"I remember going up the platform. We had to line up, men and women
separately, and go in front of Mengele. He had a little crop in his
hands and was waving, left, right, left, right. There were two or
three other guys, and they were pushing you, whichever way he pointed
with his crop.
"So my parents had to go to the right. Also my youngest brother and
sister; they were not much more than babies, small children. What it
meant -- left, right -- I didn't know. You just went where you were
pushed.
"I went in the other direction. I tried to stay together with my
brother Zoli. We had to get undressed, and they gave us the uniforms,
and tattooed us. And that was it. But within a few hours Zoli and I
were separated, and that was the last I ever heard of him.
"I guess they killed off my family that day, but I didn't know it
until later."
* * *
On his first day in the camp, Markus Jakubovic lost his parents and
four siblings. He would survive three more concentration camps before
liberation in May 1945. By the end he was disease-ridden, emaciated
from starvation, and close to death. He still remembers the crematoria
chimneys belching smoke day and night and the pits filled with
corpses.
He endured a forced march from Poland into Austria, when the Nazis
shot on the spot anyone who faltered or paused to rest. He saw Jews
hanged when they were caught trying to escape, their bodies left to
twist on the rope all day. He used to grab and swallow insects when he
saw them on the ground, so intense was his hunger.
But my father is shy about telling his story.
"I feel I had it not so bad as some of the others who suffered in the
camps," he says. "I did not go through hell like the others did. You
hear about infamous Auschwitz, the horrible stories. I did not have
any horrible stories."
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)