A December 2023 poll by Economist/YouGov found 20% of respondents aged 18-29 years believing that the Nazi massacre of six million Jews is a myth.
After untold millions spent to build Holocaust museums and tributes, documentaries, books and school programs, we seem once again at a dark dead end. Our old friend, David Benzion, gave a few speeches to Jewish groups about the ineffectiveness of more Holocaust museums in America and was promptly blacklisted from the local speakers’ list. Not everyone has been blind to the ugly truth.
“The antidote could be reading Jozsef Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium. This haunting memoir of a year as an Auschwitz inmate, first published in Hungarian in 1950, was only last year translated to English and 12 other languages, thus reaching the wider world.
Like Primo Levi, a more famous Auschwitz memoirist, Debreczeni was captured in 1944, as the Nazis, in retreat, inched toward defeat. Otherwise, he may not have survived. As with Levi, Debreczeni’s training – Levi was a chemist, Debreczeni a reporter, editor, and poet – enabled him to write with detachment about the Nazi atrocities, the horrific conditions in the camps, his suffering and that of others, and the dehumanization of guards and inmates alike.”
“Debreczeni is assigned to a team building train tracks. The luckiest, he says, are kitchen workers, who could eat well. Doctors and healthcare workers, too, enjoy privileges, but always in fear of the Nazis’ whims.
What comes across most powerfully, though, is the squalor and filth and how it changes prisoners’ outlook: the human body becomes repulsive, and death, as a prisoner imagines, ‘a sumptuous, refreshing steam bath.’ In Mulhausen, there are 30 persons to a room, two to a bed with wood-chip mattresses. As the camp grows to 3,000 inmates, rations are decreased. Their feet are bare, their rags infested with lice, their sleep interrupted by bouts of scratching. Many have diarrhea, sometimes 20 times per day. Prisoners die daily and are tossed into open pits after gold is extracted from their teeth.”
this further version of Hell,
“Here, the sick inmates are shrieking and raving, soiling the beds and the floors, unable to get up to relieve themselves. Clothes are taken away: ‘the bedridden don’t need any clothing; every last garment is needed by those able to walk.’ Everything is permeated with lice and the stench of excrement, the blankets swarming with silvery-glistening colonies of larvae.’ When someone dies, others prop him up in bed, hoping to get his rations.”
Bright smart, educated Jews today believe all you have to do is tell people the truth and all things will be well. If that were true, why are we in the most of a worldwide firestorm of Jewish hatred not seen in more than 70 years ?
They never, ever seem to learn.
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