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Incredible Tales of Jewish “Survivors”! Presented Here by AHRS
These three articles have been presented here under ‘Fair Use’ Exclusion for educational purposes only.
Harry Potter Cloak Saves Boy from Nazi Hellfire!
by L. Lucero
Sentinel Staff Writer
Captured and imprisoned at the Auschwitz death camp in 1944, Holocaust survivor Zev Kedem focused on just one thing -- staying alive.
The Holocaust describes the killing of more than six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination executed by the National Socialist regime, led by Germany's Adolf Hitler.
The largest number of European Jews were killed at the Nazi concentration camps, in which inmates were used as slave labor until they died of exhaustion or disease.
During a speech sponsored by the McPherson Lighthouse AGLOW Tuesday, Kedem described how he spent more than three years in concentration camps until he was 11. During that time, he constantly pondered what he had to do to stay alive.
“Since I accepted that I wasn't entitled to be alive and I was staying alive, I thought I was beating the Nazi system,” Kedem said. “Therefore, each day was a winning situation.”
Kedem said he was fortunate to have himself and two other family members survive. He, his mother and sister were saved by Oscar Schindler. Kedem said that a family would be lucky to have just one member survive in a concentration camp.
His family lived in Poland and Kedem and his sister were on vacation with the governess in the Carpathian mountains when they were captured by the Nazi army. Kedem's mother was on her way to collect them and that is when the family found themselves in the middle of the war. He was five at the time.
“It was the darkness that would follow me for the next six years,” he said.
Kedem said he put on what was like a Harry Potter invisibility cloak in the camps, because if a German soldier were to find a child under the age of 13, then they would get killed. [Emma: Just incredible!! Where ever did he find it?!]
He remembers seeing his mother and sister on the other side of the barbed wires. It took about 40 years later from the time of the capture to reunite with his mother, because she was in Communist country and he wasn't allowed to visit.
About 95 percent of the families that were Polish-German were killed in the Auschwitz death camp.
Signs and rationality was what gave him guidance to keep from getting killed. He also said that he considers the experience as an alternative education and at the same time he went through as what he considered “Holocaust school.” Kedem said it provided him with useful tools.
After watching hundreds of thousands murdered and tortured by the Nazi soldiers, Kedem said that if he smiled, the chances of survival were greater.
“I couldn't make this leap of faith and say ‘God is going to save me' so it took me another 50 years to search for some answers and this is what has kept me happy and out of mischief,” Kedem said. “It gave me spiritual direction at this point in my life.”
Today, he has much to smile about and he managed to get his sense of humor back late in his life.
He was liberated, moved to England and received an education at the University of Oxford in England. Kedem said that he grew up in a not-so-Jewish family, so he got in touch with his Jewish spirituality in Israel and spends six months of the year in the United States.
He was a soil conservation engineer in the Galilee and spent a year in Mount Sinai looking for the “burning bush.”
“Life has been extremely good and people have always treated me extremely well,” Kedem said. “I am very awed by what I see and what I hear and how kind and generous spirited people are and that is a therapy for me.”
Anne Frank's family gives documents to museum
Monday, June 25, 2007
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands: Anne Frank's cousin gave up custody Monday of thousands of letters, photographs and documents that archivists say will reveal details about the background of the teenage diarist who became a symbol of the Holocaust.
Bernhard "Buddy" Elias, 82, had kept the materials for decades in his Swiss attic before permanently loaning them to the Anne Frank House — the museum incorporating the tiny apartment where the family hid during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands — to mark Monday's 60th anniversary of the first publication of The Diary of Anne Frank.
The donation includes Otto Frank's 1945 letter informing his mother in Switzerland that his daughters Anne and Margo and his wife Edith died in Nazi concentration camps, the letter his mother wrote responding to diary excerpts that Otto sent her, and photographs from the late 1890s of the Frank family in their native Frankfurt, Germany.
Fritz Berg: Anne Frank was among the dead at Bergen-Belsen. She died there from typhus even though she had spent many months in Auschwitz in 1944. She had later been evacuated to Bergen-Belsen and died there just two weeks before the camp was turned over to a British medical team on April 15, 1945 as part of a negotiated truce which had been initiated by the SS. It was the British who had delayed the actual transfer of the camp for several days, perhaps even weeks, because of special security demands they had put upon the SS. See footnote 34 of my essay "Typhus and the Jews."Anne Frank and countless others had “survived” Auschwitz because the Nazis had wanted them to “survive.” If the Nazis had wanted them to die, they certainly would have been able to arrange it–but they, obviously, had no desire to kill her even though Anne Frank's usefulness to the Nazi war effort would have been close to nil. They fed her, and clothed her with clean lice-free clothing, and provided shelter and security and much more as best they could in spite of the war. It was British and American terror bombing and strafing that murdered Anne Frank–NOT the Nazis! Her unburied remains were probably still there when the British entered the camp and may even be identified someday in a picture such as the one above. Of course, the Americans and Brits had not murdered her intentionally–Anne Frank's death was merely the kind of collateral damage that “happens.” If she had merely been any German girl of the same age, there would be nothing to talk about. For example, 140 German girls named "Anne" were murdered in Würzburg on March 16, 1945 by the Allied bombing in which 7,000 people were killed. Shame on America!
During the American Civil War, the Union army lost more than twice as many men to disease alone as from wounds. Near the end of World War 1, the United States lost roughly half-a-million people to the Spanish influenza without even one enemy bomb having been dropped on the USA–and without any serious food shortages either; the death rate from war-related disease alone exceeded the death rate from wounds by a factor of ten. In September 2005 , the entire world witnessed the human disaster following Hurricane Katrina–not in defeated Germany, but in the richest country on the planet in peacetime. New Orleans had become Bergen-Belsen on the Mississippi. Many people die of diseases such as cancer in American hospitals every day; their undressed remains look no better than any of the dead at Bergen-Belsen. Americans should bite their tongues regarding Nazi Germany and the German concentration camps. They should look at themselves in the mirror instead. Shame on America!
More recently, a decade of sanctions upon Iraq killed countless children in order to pressure Saddam Hussein. The sanctions were eventually eased but the new, ongoing Iraq war has killed countless more children and civilians. The madness of the new war is well-known. Shame on America!
With Elias' collection, the Amsterdam museum now holds nearly all known historical material about the family, including the postwar years when Otto Frank — the only survivor — compiled and promoted the diary. "This is a very moving moment for me," Elias said, handing a thick inventory of the archive to the director of the Anne Frank House, Hans Westra.
The 25,000 documents include material Otto gave to the foundation he started in Basel, Switzerland, in his daughter's memory, and letters from Elias' home in that city, long stored in cupboards and the attic. Otto died in 1980.
The archive has little new information about the 25 months the Frank family and four other Jews hid in the annex of the warehouse where Otto Frank had operated a spice business.
It includes a 1942 business letter to the family in Switzerland from Johannes Kleiman, who was helping to hide the Franks, obliquely hinting they were still alive, archivist Peter Toebak said.
But the collection's value is in understanding the family's cultured background in Germany and the background for the teenager's talent in writing.
"They spoke four languages. They were interested in art, in theater. When they went to a concert or a play, they wrote about it. That's all in these letters," Elias told The Associated Press. "My grandmother wrote deep, wonderful poems."
Otto Frank came from a wealthy Frankfurt family. The archive contains an invitation to his father, Michael, a banker who died in 1909, to attend a function for the Kaiser. Otto and his brother served in the German army during World War I, but after the Nazis began persecuting Jews the family scattered to England, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Elias is the son of Otto's younger sister Leni, who lived in Basel with the family matriarch Alice.
"There's a literary tradition in this family," said Toebak, who spent two years putting the papers in order. "They were very close to each other," and remained in close contact.
Toebak said the collection may contain some surprises that historians could discover when they begin to delve into the files.
Anne Frank, her parents and sister were arrested in August 1944. Her writings in notebooks and loose sheets of paper were scooped up hours after the arrest by Miep Gies, an employee of Otto Frank's business, who gave them to Otto when he returned after the war.
Anne died of typhus in March 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15, two weeks before the camp was liberated.
Otto edited the papers and published 3,000 copies of the diary in Dutch on June 25, 1947, as "Het Achterhuis," or "The Annex." It was translated into German, French and then English in 1952 as "The Diary of a Young Girl," which later became "The Diary of Anne Frank" and translated into 65 languages.
2 more of 11 countries endorse accord to open Nazi archive 1:12 p.m. June 19, 2007 AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Two more countries have endorsed opening a Nazi war archive to Holocaust museums, bringing the documents locked away for more than half a century a step closer to release, Red Cross officials said Tuesday. Luxembourg and Greece joined seven other countries on the archive's 11-nation governing commission that have ratified changes to a 1955 treaty that would allow museums in Washington and Jerusalem to receive copies of the 50 million pages of Nazi war records. The two countries still must file ratification papers with the German government to complete the process, said Iris Moeker, a spokeswoman for the German Red Cross. Only Italy and France have yet to pass the treaty amendments through their parliaments for ratification. In France, the process has been delayed by legislative elections, which ended Sunday. The files maintained by the International Tracing Service, part of the International Committee of the Red Cross, were kept confidential to satisfy European privacy requirements, intended to protect survivors and victims from indiscriminate disclosures. But the commission agreed last year to partially lift the secrecy after years of pressure from survivors who wanted to see their own histories. The documents, including death registers, transportation lists, forced labor documents and postwar displaced persons records, are stored in 16 miles of shelf space in the central German town of Bad Arolsen. Indexed by name, they have been used mainly to track the fate of millions of victims. In a separate step Tuesday, archive technicians in Bad Arolsen completed their first trial run of transferring data, and will give the test copies to the United States and Israel later this week, said Michael Hoffmann, head of the archive's technology department. Hoffmann said 13 gigabytes of data were stored on portable hard discs and will be sent to the U.S. and Israeli embassies in Berlin for transfer to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The discs will allow the two institutions to work on integrating the full data into their systems. The first of four transfers – up to 3 terabytes, or 3,000 gigabytes – will be transferred by the end of July, Hoffmann said by telephone from Bad Arolsen. The first batch comprises incarceration records from Auschwitz, Buchenwald and thousands of other camps. The Central Name Index, with the names of 17.5 million victims, will be sent by the end of the year, with forced labor documents following within the next half year, Hoffmann said. The final batch of postwar records will move by mid-2008. Under the agreement, a single national archive from each of the 11 states is entitled to receive a digital copy of the archive, to be made accessible to the public according to that country's own laws. The member states are the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Belgium, Britain, Israel, the United States, Luxembourg, France, Italy and Greece. Emma: Why have the Jews been so reluctant to open these archives? |